WAR WINNER
‘Dunkirk’ an inspiring, epic film
Never has the safety of home seemed so close and yet so tantalizingly, agonizingly far. • That’s the dilemma at the center of Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk.” The film tells the story of the massive, unlikely evacuation of British, French, Canadian, Belgian and Dutch troops from a French beach at a crucial point in World War II that turned a defeat into something like victory, inspiring the Allies (and Winston Churchill, whose “we shall fight on the beaches” speech gets its proper due here). • But this being a Nolan film, it does so in its own idiosyncratic way.
Nolan is the best example of the filmmaker who, if you asked him what time it was would tell you how the watch works — and in his case that’s a compliment, because he turns the intricacies and minutiae of time and how it’s used in stories into artistic statements. Certainly he has done that here — “Dunkirk” is a great movie, both an old-time inspirational war epic and at the same time very much a Christopher Nolan movie.
About 400,000 troops were stranded at Dunkirk, sitting ducks for the Germans (never mentioned by name; they’re just “the enemy”) who could strafe them by air at will. They could practically see the safety of the Dover cliffs, but had no way to reach them.
Nolan tells the story from three perspectives: from the men on the beach, desperate to find their way to safety; from the air, where pilots engage in dogfights as the British try to keep some heat off of the stranded soldiers; and the mass of civilians who sailed to Dunkirk to help evacuate soldiers, as unlikely a fleet of saviors as one could imagine.
But it’s not enough to simply alternate perspectives. Nolan also plays with time — perhaps not a surprise from the director of the backward-told “Memento” or the trippy “Inception.” But here it’s supremely effective. As he tells us in cards (there’s little dialogue to speak of in the entire film), the action on the beach takes about a week; in the boats a day; and one hour in the air. He repeatedly shifts back and forth, not just among the stories but among time frames once he’s inside them.
It should be maddening, and in the hands of a lesser director it would be. Instead it’s fascinating, building maximum tension between the stories, and the moments within them.
This is crucial. The outcome of Operation Dynamo, as the mission is called, is available in any history book, so the telling of the story becomes paramount. Nolan’s technique, aided greatly by Hans Zimmer’s incredibly effective score (at one point he incorporates a ticking stopwatch into a scene), ratchets up the tension from the opening and never relents.
The opening, in which a group of soldiers wander empty streets, quickly turns lethal, and the visuals are stunning — a mad sprint down an alley, a desperate climb over a wall, death everywhere.
The action in the air is stunning. Tom Hardy, his face covered by an oxygen mask and his voice garbled by his radio microphone, making his Bane in Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” sound like a master of elocution, is terrific as one of the pilots, using only his eyes to register the concentration, excitement, frustration and terror he’s feeling. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyle Van Hoytema put us in the cockpit (literally; they mounted a camera in a Spitfire), so we see the difficulty of getting the enemy in your sights, or the gamble of guessing how much fuel you have left once your gauge has been cracked.
In the water, Mark Rylance is just as good as a father quietly doing what he believes is right — heading toward a war zone in his recreational boat, his son and son’s friend in tow. They’ll pick up a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) who isn’t thrilled about the idea of going back to the hell from which he’s escaped.
On the ground, yes, Harry Styles can act. The former One Direction singer is quite good as one of three soldiers Nolan concentrates on, as they form an almost wordless bond, brought together by their desire to stay alive but keep running into obstacles that make that more difficult.
There are stories within these stories, and while there’s not a lot of exposition, Kenneth Branagh provides some as a naval officer who knows the numbers — of the 400,000 soldiers on the beach, Churchill hopes maybe 35,000 to 40,000 can be saved.
If Nolan at times has come off as a bit of a clinical technician, then the unironic amount of pure, old-fashioned inspiration he employs here may come as a surprise. It’s a welcome one, and perfectly appropriate. “Dunkirk” is a brilliant movie, Nolan’s best, and that’s saying something.