‘Dunkirk’: Christopher Nolan’s war thriller is history brought to vivid life
Christopher Nolan is the only director working in Hollywood today for whom every film is a passion project. Whether it’s his complex adaptations of comic books, or a deeply personal father/daughter relationship embedded in a sci-fi narrative, Nolan’s every film bears a strength of personality, singularity of vision and the sense that This Guy really, really knows what he’s doing. Dunkirk is Nolan’s war movie, an almost mandatory step in the road to becoming “One Of The Greats” (a title he may have already achieved). Kubrick, Coppola, Malick, Spielberg: the men who make ‘big movies’ have always tried their hand at capturing the horrors of the battlefield to generally rapturous reception, and Nolan is no different. But Dunkirk has more in common with another era of large-scale filmmaking: the era of David Lean and Michael Powell; the time when the rules of blockbuster cinema still adhered to today were first established. Dunkirk is incredibly old-fashioned on a basic level (a lot of handsome young Englishmen struggling against malevolent German forces during WW2) but in most other areas employs contemporary tricks to achieve its goal of Total Audience Immersion.
Nolan’s films consistently explore the flexibility of time: Inception’s Russian-doll dreamscapes, Memento’s converging timelines, Interstellar’s existential time travel. The biggest surprise about the otherwise more conventional format of Dunkirk is that it, too, finds a way to experiment, with three intersecting sequences unfolding at different paces, cut to resemble simultaneity. We follow Fionn Whitehead and his fellow soldiers on The Mole, Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy on a yacht and Tom Hardy in a Spitfire, the three strands concluding (semi) explosively at the end of the film. It’s an astounding feat of editing and further demonstration of Nolan’s ingenuity in structuring big-screen drama. In terms of visual composition, Dunkirk sits with the best of his work: intended for viewing in 70mm IMAX (I got the 70mm, though not in IMAX), the film’s use of wide vistas is second only to the exceptional vibrancy of more intimate scenes: Mark Rylance’s weary face belongs on a screen this big, as do the crashing waves of the Dunkirk beach. Dunkirk is a rich depiction of real-time terror — despite there being not a single Nazi in sight — but where it struggles in comparison to Nolan’s more emotionally-winsome work is in the dimensionality of its characters.
The figures at and around Dunkirk are more symbolic than anything, serving a purpose but unrewarded in the script with any backstory or investable material. The nominal lead, Fionn Whitehead, is quite unremarkable in his role — this isn’t his fault, the film merely didn’t need him for anything beyond a point-of-view to the action. Hardy’s performance is totally hindered by inaudibility: did we not learn from The Dark Knight Rises that Tom Hardy Doing Accent + Wearing Mask + Talking Over Hans Zimmer Score = nobody knowing what he’s saying. This caused genuine problems for me when watching Dunkirk; I legitimately missed crucial plot-points because of Hardy’s speech. Elsewhere, Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh are reliably sympathetic, but the performer with the most surprising (and admirably-executed) arc is Harry Styles. Though the One Direction singer’s loud face occasionally distracts from its surroundings in a shot, he occupies the role of a struggling soldier extremely well, and would plausibly have made a more interesting lead than Whitehead.
Nonetheless, he too is given little room to develop any sort of personality, so it’s only based on on-screen behaviour than we can judge the character. Dunkirk’s 106-minute running time is something of a miracle (and a sign of stunning restraint from Nolan), but one wonders if a more traditional war movie length would have given the actors some much-needed space, at risk of spoiling the film’s relentless tension. Dunkirk isn’t quite as non-stop thrilling as I’d been led to expect — it’s no Mad Max: Fury Road — but Hans Zimmer’s strong (though not exactly seminal) score propels the beats at a fair pace. This feels at times like a feature-length trailer: lean and thunderous. Perhaps, had I not watched the actual trailers for Dunkirk, I would’ve found myself far more stunned and amazed by its clever trickery than, in reality, I was. But Nolan’s films have often before been flawed, and it’s without any doubt that he has masterpieces on the level of Inception and The Prestige yet to bring us. Originality is the key to his genius, and Dunkirk is disadvantaged in my estimation for its lack of a central ‘twist’. Yet he remains, by almost any standard, the finest big-budget filmmaker in the world.
