Dunkirk is a triumph of storytelling
With Dunkirk, director Christopher Nolan delivers a mostly bloodless, but intense, take on the British retreat from France
The “miracle of deliverance” at Dunkirk, as characterized by newly appointed British prime minister Winston Churchill in 1940, was so called because “only” 68,000 British soldiers were killed or captured during the battle and subsequent retreat from France. Another 338,000 were rescued over nine days, by a combination of military and civilian craft — from the 450-foot cruiser HMS Calcutta to the 14-foot Tamzine, a fishing dory built of Canadian spruce.
For writer-director Christopher Nolan to pack this historical event into a mere hour and three quarters of screen time is impressive. That the narrative not only holds water but creates tension thick enough to cut with a bayonet — well, that must count as a filmmaking miracle itself.
Dunkirk the movie is notable for what it doesn’t contain. Nolan jettisons all but the bare bones of a backstory, and never offers the spectacle of Churchill in his war room (coming soon in Darkest Hour), worried wives on the home front, or even a glimpse of the Nazi foe. Such things must be taken as read.
Instead, he plunges viewers headlong into confusion and death. Tommy (a remarkable turn by big-screen newcomer Fionn Whitehead) is in the French seaside town when German snipers take out most of his mates. He makes it to the crowded beach, and meets a remarkably quiet fellow soldier, played by Damien Bonnard. Together they pose as stretcher-bearers, hoping to skip the queue and make it back to England.
Their story comprises one chapter, titled The Mole: One Week. (A mole is not, as I first thought, a spy; it’s another name for the breakwater from which many of the rescue ships departed.) Chapter 2, The Sea: One Day, focuses on one of the “little ships of Dunkirk,” captained by the stalwart Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance, master of empathy) and accompanied by his son and a young friend. The final chapter, and the most thrilling, is The Air: One Hour, in which a trio of Spitfires, one of them piloted by Tom Hardy, does battle with German aircraft over the Channel.
The chapter titles suggest a fractured timeline, and as the director expertly cuts from one to another you’ll notice events repeat from different perspectives. (Keep an eye on the names and silhouettes of the ships for chronological clues.) This is hardly surprising; Nolan gave us time running at different speeds in his dream thriller Inception, and played with time dilation and cause-effect in Interstellar. In Dunkirk it’s as if time, like light, moves differently through water and air. It’s not overly confusing, however. Each setting features its own editing rhythm, characters and score; in the early going, in fact, there’s more music than dialogue. Far from being a Memento-like puzzle to piece together, Dunkirk is a series of tense standoffs whose resolutions all funnel into the same prerequisite; get the soldiers home.
Secondary characters feed the narrative flames. There’s Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton, a British naval officer who delivers the brief exposition we need to understand the numbers involved. Though fictional, he’s probably based on Capt. William Tennant. Cillian Murphy plays a shell-shocked survivor of a U-boat attack, whose desperate desire not to return to Dunkirk triggers a tragedy. And Harry Styles of One Direction fame has a small but important role when a group of soldiers decides to commandeer their own ride home.
It works wonderfully; I’m pretty sure I developed some new wrinkles as I scowled at the screen, willing things to turn out for the best. The aerial footage of the Spitfire fighters in flight was gorgeous. And the dialogue, while sparse, was evocative. “The tide’s turning now,” says one soldier on the French beach, eyeing the waves. A second asks: “How can you tell?” The first: “The bodies come back.”
Those bodies are mostly bloodless, though the bombardment is intense and nerve-racking. Nolan hasn’t tried to outdo Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (or Gibson’s more recent Hacksaw Ridge), and chooses to hammer us with anxiety rather than gore; a mature 12-year-old could handle the tale.
And an important tale it is. The retreat in May of 1940 gave fighting spirit and a new-found purpose to the British. The next time they took to the Channel in such numbers, June 6, 1944, they’d be headed the other way.