‘Dunkirk’ (2017) ****/*****
A very bad day to visit France makes for a very good movie
Things weren’t going well for the Allied Forces in the Spring of 1940. A series of blunders combined with a series of shrewd German maneuvers to end with them flanked on every side and pushed back all the way to the French port town of Dunkirk, which put drowny water on one side of them and the shooty German army on the other. That made evacuation necessary, but necessary was made very difficult thanks to Luftwaffe planes picking off soldiers on the beach with machine gun fire and destroying docks with bombing runs, as well as German U-boats that were loaded up with torpedoes and just waiting to sink any ships that tried to get out. The term “death trap” springs to mind. Christopher Nolan’s new war epic, Dunkirk, throws us right into the middle of the chaos of all this suffering, telling us stories from the perspective of troops on the ground, pilots in the air, and even civilian sailors who answered the call to come on their personal yachts from England in order to help get out whoever they could. It’s a very harrowing movie.
The cast of characters is too expansive and the list of actors put together to play them too long to get into all of those particulars here. I can say that everyone is pretty good though. There aren’t really any standout performances or hugely memorable acting moments, but neither are there any weak links in the cast who sink the film or ill-advised characters who get in the way of the storytelling. Who all shows up? People like Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Fionn Whitehead, Damien Bonnard, Aneurin Barnard, Harry Styles, and about a million other handsome British boys who I didn’t recognize but who all did fine jobs with what they were given. They were believable when they were running for their lives during the loud moments, they were believable when they were sipping tea during the rare quiet moments, and they were able to tell you a little something about their characters, even though the script they were working with was fairly sparse and dialogue-light.
The storytelling is really simple here. Really, we’re just being shown a handful of very basic, very visceral survival scenarios, which work as little vignettes that get edited together to give you a big picture idea of all the terrible things that happened during the battle. That might sound like a questionable approach to feature filmmaking, but each little subplot is edited together well enough that they color and comment on each other as they cut back and forth. The stories hit their emotional peaks at the same time, there are dueling suspense scenes where different people are in danger of drowning at the same time, and there’s even a time or two where the events of one of the ongoing stories affects what’s happening in another. Too often in movies like this that follow completely different plotlines the tone of one story will be at odds with the other, or there are one or two that work much better than the others, so it becomes a bummer whenever your favorite gets cut away from and you’ve got to spend the next few minutes watching the lame one, but here Nolan has done a great job of making a handful of concurrently occurring stories come together as a coherent whole that feels like a real feature film and not just a series of shorts.
What’s maybe most impressive about this epic in scope war tale is that, despite the multiple plotlines, and despite the sprawling ensemble cast, this is still the most focused and simple movie that Nolan has made in quite a while. We’re dealing with life and death. Men staring their ultimate fates in the face and trying to find a miracle way out of them. It’s just that and no fat — no wasted moments. Even the character work is built so well into the action and is so subtle that you adequately care about the characters and their fates without having to sit through a bunch of dialogue that clues you in on the particulars of exactly everything that’s happening. As far as the storytelling of Dunkirk goes, Nolan is all business, and that makes for a movie with a 107 minute run time that looks very refreshing when compared with the long in the tooth durations of his last few films.
The crafting of the film is where he gets showy. Dunkirk was shot with IMAX cameras, so it’s vast and rich and lush with visual information. If you can see it projected in one of the larger formats it’s being presented in, the immersive experience of getting thrown into this chaotic battle is definitely worth the extra couple of bucks. What’s maybe even more impressive than the work that went into Dunkirk’s awe-filled IMAX cinematography is the work that clearly went into its sound design though. Nolan makes sure that the sounds of war are jarring enough to always keep you at the edge of your seat. Any time a gunshot rings out it plays so sudden and loud over everything else that’s on the soundtrack, you jump. Any time a bomb is dropped you can hear the vibration of the entire landscape around you shaking. Bombers shriek into the film sounding more like terrifying wraiths than they do any plane you’ve heard in a movie before, and even better is that by the time the third act is going strong you can clearly identify the different sounds of the engines of approaching English planes and approaching German planes, which becomes an important tool Nolan uses to keep you engaged in the development of his plot. The little details got paid attention to when this movie was being put together, for sure. Hans Zimmer’s score should probably be mentioned as well. Not only is it memorable, it’s absolutely dripping with tension and dread, so much so that it can make a scene where a couple of young boys load a bunch of life vests onto a boat seem like a life and death situation. It’s the best work I’ve heard from Zimmer in quite a long time.
Does Dunkirk reinvent the war movie or do anything that’s going to see it get remembered as an important work going forward? No. It performs all of the essentials of the genre well enough that it’s still really engaging and emotionally rewarding though. Without ever getting dumbed down enough to create a villain out of the Germans, it’s still able to instill a pride in you for the stiff upper lip stoicism of British culture, which makes you want to immediately go out and buy a fine suit. It’s able to provide for you a moment of empathic clarity where you fully understand and appreciate how awful it is to be a pawn in a giant war between nations that has no regard for individual human life. There’s a despair in that, for sure, but there’s also something really uplifting in the moments where men are able to look certain doom in the face and still refuse to give into that despair. Dunkirk is a thrilling movie watching experience that will have you coming out of the theater craving a cup of tea, craving jam and toast, and dreaming about another life where you became a hero fighter pilot as handsome as Tom Hardy. I can see why they released it during the summer.
