BRIMFUL OF DUNKIRK SPIRIT
You’ll be moved to tears by the acts of heroism in an epic that shows how defeat turned into deliverance
THERE haven’t been many good films about the mass evacuation of allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in the early summer of 1940. That’s because there haven’t been many films featuring Dunkirk, period.
Strangely, two of the most notable were made in the same year, with World War II still raging. William Wyler’s Oscars-festooned Mrs Miniver, and David lean’s In Which We Serve, both came out in 1942.
later, the 1958 film Dunkirk, directed by Barry Norman’s father leslie, despite much stiffness of upper lip from the likes of John Mills, made a pretty decent fist of showing why Churchill called the events of May 26 to June 4, 1940, ‘ a colossal military disaster’.
and that, of course, is why not too many movies have been made about it. By contrast, D-Day and its aftermath, four years later, has received oodles of cinematic attention. But that was an advance. Dunkirk was just about the definitive retreat.
So writer- director Christopher Nolan deserves great credit for tackling it again now, so unambiguously. His unconventional, but gripping, film might not collect as many academy awards as Wyler’s Mrs Miniver (six), but it is a mighty accomplishment, all the same. Its main achievement, contrary to some over-excited reports, is not to offer proof that the One Direction boyband star Harry Styles, making his screen debut, can really act.
Rather, it is to show, much more vividly than Norman’s 1958 film, why a French place- name that is synonymous with British stoicism (read enough reports of townsfolk battling against rising floodwaters, for example, and it won’t be too long before you come across the evocative phrase ‘ Dunkirk spirit’) more accurately reflects Churchill’s grave assessment.
The new Prime Minister’s famous bulldog exhortation to fight on the beaches, in the fields and in the streets was delivered in response to Dunkirk. But the same speech included the declaration that ‘wars are not won by evacuations’.
NOLAN uses that line as his mantra. From the film’s first frame to its last, there is never any doubt that we are witnessing a catastrophe. after all, some 338,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force got home, but around 68,000 were lost.
The picture begins, dramatically, with a young soldier, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), running from German gunfire through the streets of the small French seaside town.
His arrival on the beach yields a breathtaking sight, for him and us alike. Tens of thousands of men are lined up, almost as far as the eye can see, waiting to climb into boats that have yet to arrive. and there are German bombers overhead.
Tommy hooks up with a French soldier and together they carry a wounded man on a stretcher towards the sea, not so much to save his skin as theirs. Indeed, one of the reasons this film is so moving is not so much its doughty heroism (though there is plenty of it, not least from Mark Rylance as Mr Dawson, one of many civilian skippers who took their boats to help with the evacuation), but more its powerful depiction of an intense will to live, against seemingly insuperable odds.
Of course, survival instincts sometimes look like the very opposite of bravery. Cillian Murphy plays a shellshocked soldier, saved from the sea by Mr Dawson, who cannot bear
to return to Dunkirk. However, we are encouraged not to judge him, even when he does something with terrible consequences.
I was moved to tears twice, once when an elderly blind man, back in Blighty, welcomes home the bedraggled returning soldiers by telling them ‘well done’. But all they did, one of them responds, was survive. ‘That’s enough,’ says the old man.
My tear ducts were also pricked when Kenneth Branagh’s naval commander first spots salvation in the form of all those fishing-boats and pleasure craft. Yet the film does not feel manipulative. Nolan could have made more of his opening shot of the rescuing flotilla. It could have been breathtaking; thousands of boats bobbing all the way to the horizon. But he keeps it real, with a suitably motley , but relatively small, advance fleet.
Astutely, Nolan also offers us a series of small, personal dramas rather than any overall narrative thread, which I suppose is precisely what war is.
So there are no scenes with Churchill and his top brass back in Whitehall trying to orchestrate what was known, somewhat grandiosely for a seat-of-the-pants exercise, as Operation Dynamo. Nolan is far more intent on evoking the frantic chaos of that momentous week.
There is a strong sense, which even the best war films sometimes fail to convey , of nobody quite knowing what’s going to happen next. The director communicates this, rather daringly considering his heavyweight cast, by keeping dialogue to a minimum. Hans Zimmer’s thrillingly thunderous score, and Hoyte van Hoytema ’s rousing cinematography, tell the story just as eloquently as any words. At times, there is an almost documentary realism to proceed - ings, which won’t please everyone, but held me spellbound.
The film is presented from three perspectives — from land, sea and air — each within a different time frame. The fate of T ommy and a few other desperate soldiers unfolds over a week . Another is played, splendidly, by Styles, who reportedly auditioned without Nolan having the slightest idea who he was, but whose presence should tempt youngsters in to see this film. Let ’s hope so. P erhaps they’ll even realise ‘one direction ’ has a much more solemn meaning when applied to Dunkirk.
MEANWHILE, the sea rescue takes place over a day and a night. And the bravery of a Spitfire pilot (T om Hardy, who gets all of about ten lines, nine of them muffled) is condensed to an hour.
The film is not without flaws; for all its period accuracy, some of the buildings in Dunkirk looked suspiciously post-war, and I’m pretty sure I spotted a TV aerial jutting off one of them. I can also imagine some audiences feeling frustrated by the lack of clear narrative momentum.
But, like Nolan ’s last feature, 2014’s Interstellar, this is a dazzling spectacle that demands to be seen on the silver screen. Nolan shot it using IMAX 65mm film, which is rare these days, but gives his picture the visual scope of oldfashioned epics such as Ben-Hur.
Dunkirk, too, is indubitably epic. Don’t miss it.
A VERSION of this review appeared in earlier editions.