KEEP CALM AND FERRY ON
Nolan’s ‘Dunkirk’ captures drama of epic rescue of Allied troops
The most immersive war movie ever made, Christopher Nolan's “Dunkirk” is both a display of the writer-director's dark, wizard-like filmmaking powers and his regrettable storytelling habits. No one can topple a destroyer like “Inception”-maker Nolan. But where are the film's characters?
Set in 1940, “Dunkirk” retells an epic event in British history, the evacuation of 348,000-plus soldiers, mostly British but many French, from the beaches of the French coastal town of Dunkirk (the word means “brown church”). Dunkirk is equal in historical significance to the battle of Agincourt (so it's apt that Kenneth Branagh, a great screen Henry V, is here as a heroic British naval officer).
The story opens with Nazi leaflets raining down upon young British soldiers, letting them know that they are surrounded. Before you know it, someone starts shooting, and the terrifying pounding and impact of the bullets rattle you. Most of the fleeing young men drop bloodlessly. One, aptly named Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), the film's supposed protagonist, reaches the beaches where thousands of men are lined up to be picked up by naval vessels that are either sunk by bombers or do not arrive.
War is hell. What's even more hellish is trying to keep track of who these young soldiers are, given that they look alike. I have been told Harry Styles, of the boy band One Direction, is in the film. Really. The great tradition in American war films is to distinguish between soldiers in ways that accentuate our diverse, immigrant heritage. World War II-era Brits were much more homogenous, but come on.
Among the story lines is one about Mr. Dawson (a great Mark Rylance). Stoical Dawson, his young adult son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and a 17-year-old boy named George (Barry Keoghan) fire up the old man's motor launch and, without naval supervision, embark with the intention of rescuing their country's soldiers from the beaches 47.2 miles away. Dawson is this film's ideal British man: an expert sailor, a soldier if necessary, but most of all a benevolent father to the younger men. At about the same time (and I say this knowing this is the guy who directed “Memento”), Farrier (Nolan's incomprehensible Bane Tom Hardy), a British pilot at the controls of a Rolls-Royce-powered Spitfire, and fellow pilot Collins (Jack Lowden) check their fuel levels, kicking off a suspenseful countdown.
The film, which was shot in France, the Netherlands and Britain and scored by brutalist Hans Zimmer, features real airplanes in exciting dogfight sequences far more pulse-pounding and realistic than anything in Michael Bay's incoherent “Pearl Harbor.” Irishman Cillian Murphy is another plus as a shell-shocked soldier. But Nolan's deliberate mix of past and present and day and night in the same sequences is a neurotic affectation. Hardy is a shining knight of the Royal Air Force, even with an empty fuel tank, and the film ends with Churchill's rousing “We will never surrender” speech.
In addition to his wizardry with the IMAX camera, something that makes “Dunkirk” a must-see in that format, Nolan has an outdated fondness for shaky-cam, extreme close-up filmmaking you'd expect in one of those awful “Hunger Games” movies. Thank God, the almost great “Dunkirk” is not in 3-D.
(“Dunkirk” contains language and war-movie violence meeting the PG-13 standard.)