Dunkirk is a Masterpiece
And I really didn’t think it would be

Let the record show, I am often annoyed by the films Christopher Nolan makes. For every amazing thing that Nolan has done, generally with his camera and with his plots, there is some major misstep that keeps his work from making that leap from very good to as good as everyone seems to want them to be. Nolan’s not a hack, far from it, but he’s not this generation’s Kubrick either. Or not yet.
When I first saw the trailers for Dunkirk, I was disinclined to see the film and that was not just because of Christopher Nolan. Hollywood has an incredibly real problem with war movies. Oh, they do propaganda films quite well, where people die onscreen and there are good guys, who basically win, and bad guys, who don’t, and maybe we tear up and a lot of shit got blowed up and all that jazz. The story of Dunkirk is readymade for that kind of rah, rah heroism bullshit as well. The British pulled off a bloody miracle rescuing those stranded soldiers, a massive groundswell supported rescue of the doddering incompetence of the powers that be that feels so appropriate right now as the people struggle to rescue themselves from the political classes. It’s not hard to imagine the Hollywood version of the Operation Dynamo story that lets our hearts swell with the success of this magnificent rescue and lets us off the hook for the hard parts.
Hard parts like the fact that hundreds of thousands of men should not have been on the shallow beaches of Dunkirk for a month, lining up day after day in the long wait for no rescue, just acting like sitting ducks for whatever German planes wanted to make target practice out of them. The colossal failure of the French and the British to plan for the German invasion coupled with a combo platter of German arrogance and strategic stupidity is what makes the miracle of Dunkirk possible. I really didn’t want to see a movie that celebrated an event that should never have bloody well happened in the first place by a filmmaker who drives me bonkers.
So why the hell did I even see Dunkirk? Film critics I trust gushed over the film on Twitter, even critics I knew who were themselves skeptical of Nolan’s work. So I did what any self-respecting cinephile has to do when there’s a movie you want to get into fights about: I went and saw the movie. In 70mm (which you should also do — Dunkirk was shot on film and you owe to yourself to experience it that way). And . . . Dammit, Christopher Nolan has succeeded at making a war movie that honors the people who involved with that brutal activity, without misunderstanding the nature of their heroism.
Dunkirk is a film brimming with empathy for people who face an overwhelming ordeal, many of whom do not bear up under the strain. The film starts with a casual procession of thirsty and desperate soldiers, contextless, untethered from any larger unit. They move slowly through Dunkirk as it rains propaganda posters reminding them of the hopelessness of their tactical situation. It’s dreamlike and almost serene. The crack of a rifle interrupts the soldiers search for liquids and a peaceful place to take a safe shit. We spend much of the film following the sole survivor of this ragtag band searching for any available means to leave this hellish place behind. IMDd tells me this fella’s name is Tommy, not that anyone tells us that during the course of the film. Who has time for introductions when it feels like you’re all just waiting to be slaughtered? Tommy floats (literally, on occasion) from escape plan to escape plan trying to get off the damn beach at Dunkirk, where the British soldiers have lined up to await their . . . rescue? Most of them time, it seems like they are waiting for death.

And this is what struck me, over and over again, while watching Dunkirk: this is a film about trauma. Nolan doesn’t want us to be told how shitty it was to wait for death on those beaches: he wants you to see it and feel it. The score is a hypnotic combination of music and a constant ticking, the clock running down on the Germans’ inevitable victory over these already defeated soldiers. In the 105 or so minutes that follow that first shot, I was always tense, dreading the next bomb or gunshot to cut someone down, a threat of violence that was everpresent in the moments between the actual arrival of those bombs, as though even their absence was a reminder that it was all just a matter of time. Dunkirk strives to bring you to the edge of shell shock and wants us to sympathize with the desperate young men who cling to the slim hope of escape in the face of what feels like inevitable destruction, never more so when the men hunker helplessly in place as the awful scream of the Stuka bombers reaches a crescendo just before the bombs hit (it’s one thing to read about the special noisemaker fitted to these planes — it is quite another to hear it and I haven’t heard it rendered in such terrible fullness probably ever). Tommy doesn’t need to talk to explain why he wants off this beach, he doesn’t have to explain anything at all. His shear fundamental existence as a human being is enough for us to want him to survive even as he seems cursed in all his efforts to escape.
Dunkirk, as it happens, is also one of the most avant-garde movies to find it’s way to a $50 million dollar opening weekend since probably Soderbergh tricked people into mistaking avant-garde for cool in Ocean’s 11. Nolan weaves together three strands of events, Land, Sea, and Air, and they operate at different time scales. The events on Land cover a week, those on Sea a day, and those in the Air just a single hour. The criss-crossing intersections of these timelines is a truly brilliant stroke of inspiration. The complex weft and warp of these timelines gives the film its rhythm, an accelerating hermeneutic circle as the film comes closer and closer to its denouement. There is a shock of recognition at having seen these things before as Nolan reveals new details that completely re-shape our understanding events we thought we understood from a different perspective. The audience that I spent time with found the interwoven timelines difficult to deal with, so #ymmv, but this cinephile absolutely locked into what Nolan was doing. I know. I can’t hardly believe it either.
We haven’t even talked about what Nolan and cinematographer Hotye van Hoytema (Spectre. Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy. Let the Right One In. Yeah, he’s effing good) did on that 65mm film they shot the film in. Dunkirk mixes intimacy with scale in an intoxicating way. The sheer amount of sky surrounding the Spitfires manned so ably by Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden is astonishing, a sky that could rain down machine gun fire or bombs at any moment. The sweep of that sky makes such effective use of the 70mm frame, highlighting the loneliness of the fighters striving to protect the soldiers on the beach, the puny number of fighters out of all proportion to the numbers of boots on the ground, each fighter doing what little it can in the face of a massive task.
Tom Hardy’s Spitfire pilot is the closest we come to a traditional hero in this otherwise utterly non-traditional war movie. Dunkirk does not have, or need, a lot of dialogue; faces and gestures tell the story. Tom Hardy doesn’t even get his entire face — for most of the film he is 1940 era good guy Bane, his face covered by goggles and an oxygen mask. The end of this fighter pilots storyline though is a microcosm of what Dunkirk is really about. The miracle rescue, when home came to these stranded soldiers, was a transitory moment of powerful symbolic resonance. It was a trauma visited on thousands and a triumph of spirit that inspired a nation, and indeed a world, to resistance against evil, but it was neither the beginning or end of the story. It was not an unalloyed success; the mission just erased some of the bitterness of defeat, as it was a retreat nevertheless. The images at the end of Hardy’s story are potent reminders of all of these facts combined into one eloquent moment, which I wouldn’t dare spoil.
In the end, Dunkirk is ambivalent about war and its human cost, ambivalent about heroism and what it can accomplish. It is not suspicious or cynical about the capacity of human beings for empathy in the face of suffering or the need for sacrifice in the service of a larger cause, but it is not blind about the size of that sacrifice and how often the failures of our leaders force us to rise to an occasion that should never have existed. Dunkirk is, against all of my expectations, exactly the film I wanted and needed to tell this story of desperation and triumph and terror and loss. Dunkirk is, without question for me, Christopher Nolan’s best film, the best film (so far) of 2017 and a formidable indication of what Nolan can accomplish going forward. Damn. It. All.
