UNMISSABLE
Utterly exhausting, totally absorbing and deeply emotional, this brilliant film of the Dunkirk evacuation is simply...
Dunkirk C ert: 12A 1hr 46mins ★★★★★
By and large, Christopher Nolan doesn’t make short films. His last three – Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises and Inception – average a distinctly heavyweight two hours 40 minutes each. So the first big surprise served up by Dunkirk, Nolan’s first foray into historical film-making, is that it’s barely an hour and three-quarters long. Yes, that great turning point of the Second World War, one of the most remarkable evacuations in military history, is served up in little more than 100 minutes. But it’s quite possibly the best 100 minutes he’s ever made.
It doesn’t hang about. There’s very little dialogue (that’s the second big surprise) and while poor John Mills and his retreating platoon seemed to take most of Leslie Norman’s iconic 1959 film just to get to Dunkirk, here Fionn Whitehead’s panicking young infantryman, Tommy – so named, of course, because he represents any of the tens of thousands of trapped British soldiers – is on the beach in barely a minute.
A deadly blast of machine-gun fire from unseen Germans, a scramble over a garden wall, a blockade of sandbags manned by the defiant French, and he’s there. And so are we: in his unstinting effort to create an ‘immersive reality’, Nolan shot much of the action on the actual Dunkirk beach.
All Tommy and the 400,000 other soldiers marooned with him – a mix of British, French, Belgian and Canadian troops – have to do is find a ship and negotiate 26 miles of the English Channel before the advancing Germans arrive. As we already know – but Nolan is about to do a viscerally brilliant job of reminding us – that was easier said than done. Time and again, hopes are raised only to be cruelly dashed, with many of the soldiers making multiple escape attempts before they reached safety. Many, of course, would never make it home at all.
Initially, it seems Nolan, who supplies his own pared-down screenplay as well as directing, has adopted a very simple structure, dividing his story into three familiar strands: land, sea and air. The latter is a surprise, given the infamous lack of air cover that left the stranded troops as sitting targets for the Luftwaffe dive-bombers. ‘Where’s the bloody RAF?’ asks one of the soldiers queuing on Dunkirk’s famous ‘mole’ – a narrow, rickety pier extending into the sea – a question that armchair historians have been asking ever since.
But in Nolan’s film, and in a conspicuous departure from Norman’s earlier version, the RAF are there; not in great numbers, nor having the biggest impact, but definitely there and doing their heroic best. Indeed, Nolan regular Tom Hardy – who, given the comical audibility problems he had when playing the masked villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, is brave to don the iconic face mask of a Spitfire pilot – provides the stirring climax of this utterly exhausting, totally absorbing but wisely restrained picture.
How clever of Nolan to lay off the graphic ‘war porn’ and deliver that modern rarity – a war film with a 12A certificate. It’s not just suitable for older children, it should be compulsory.
It’s the little suffixes attached to his chapter headings that quietly give the first clue to Nolan’s cinematic ambitions. The ‘land’ story – represented by the beach and the mole – lasts ‘one week’; the sea – its story about one of the many privately owned ‘little ships’ that sailed to the rescue – spans ‘one day’; and the air… just ‘one hour’.
Nolan is famous for his non-linear storytelling and playing with time, but watching him bring those three strands together into a seamless whole is wonderful, albeit in a potentially confusing way until you’ve worked out what he’s doing.
So while Hoyte von Hoytema’s stunning cinematography (he shot Interstellar too), Hans Zimmer’s score, and the sound design (you’ve never heard a dive-bombing Stuka scream like this) deserve both the plaudits and, possibly, nominations coming their way, I do hope the editing of Lee Smith – another regular Nolan collaborator – is not forgotten. It raises the film to another level. Nevertheless, there are a few potential problems.
For British audiences, this is a familiar story and the same could be said of the performances of Nolan’s better-known leading actors, with Kenneth Branagh bringing quiet dignity and courage to his naval commander on the mole, Hardy providing wonderful British understatement and Mark Rylance, playing the small-ship skipper, doing that wonderfully gentle, country-accented English everyman he does so well. It’s hardly reinventing the dramatic wheel but it works beautifully.
Then there’s the fact that the three young dark-haired actors Nolan has chosen to play the main characters – newcomer Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard and One Direction’s Harry Styles (don’t worry, he’s perfectly good) all look quite similar, particularly in the confusing heat of battle.
But in the end, the power of the underlying story and its meticulous re-creation on the big screen completely won me over, as Nolan and his outstanding team deliver scene after scene of heroism, desperation, or that base human instinct for survival, and one scene – and there had to be one – that simply brings a lump to the throat and a tear to the eye.
Quite unmissable.