Dunkirk
Directed by Christopher Nolan (2017) ***1/2
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is experimental filmmaking on a gargantuan scale. Shot using various kinds of 65mm film stock, sixty reconditioned ships and an unfathomably large cast, Dunkirk is also willfully intimate, 
homing in on details and events to the exclusion of the bigger narrative, while at the same time playing with time and continuity in order to tell a larger story. If Dunkirk isn’t the masterpiece it strives to be, it comes startlingly close and is unlike any previous WWII movie.
In May of 1940, nearly 340,000 French, Polish, Belgian and Dutch troops were routed by the Germans to the beaches of Dunkirk. A “halt order” from German Field Marshalls gave the Allies time to rescue most of the troops, though the German Air Force killed off many soldiers from above and sank ships via planes and submarines. Nolan wisely refrains from showing Nazis. His Dunkirk is an immersive journey for survival, largely unconcerned with the larger strategies of the situation (it’s possible the “halt order” isn’t even mentioned in the film).
Nolan tells three concurrent stories, cutting between them with an urgency not unlike D.W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance (1916): The Mole, covering one week, The Sea, covering one day, and The Air, covering one hour.
The Mole tells the episodic and chaotic story of two young British privates (Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles) and another young soldier (Aneurin Barnard) who haphazardly make their way from ship to ship, hoping to find one that can safely escape to Britain. The meandering way this tale unfolds evokes the work of Visconti and Truffaut.
In The Sea, Mark Rylance (always excellent) plays Mr. Dawson, a private citizen who leaves for Dunkirk in a small boat with two young boys, his son and a neighbor, in an effort to rescue soldiers from the beach (many troops were rescued by private boats that The Royal Navy commandeered). Along the way, he picks up a shell-shocked shipwreck survivor.
The Air features Tom Hardy as one of three Spitfire pilots who fly from the English Channel, with limited gas supplies, to ward off the Luftwaffe killing Allied troops below. Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography and precision of detail create what is probably the most realistic aerial footage of any war film.
Overseeing the carnage and rescue is Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton, resplendent in his Naval uniform. Branagh has little to do in Dunkirk but looks impressive doing it.
Undergirding the increasingly interrelated plots and increasing tension is Hans Zimmer’s relentlessly ticking and throbbing musical score, a tonal landscape pushing the events along.
Nolan’s emphasis is not on characterization; there are no character arcs here and little drama of a conventional sort. Those anticipating it will be frustrated. In fact, I frequently found it difficult to tell the younger characters apart. This difficulty was worsened by Nolan’s tendency to drown dialogue in the mix; I wasn’t the only one who found much of the dialogue in his The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Interstellar (2014) indiscernible. Nolan has stated that he intended Dunkirk to have minimal dialogue, and the drowned dialogue in Interstellar may have been a deliberate decision.
Nolan has said that Dunkirk was influenced in part by Intolerance, as well as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and Sunrise (1926), and also the films of Alfred Hitchcock (who directed many silent films). Indeed, several shots in the film could have come from a classic pre-sound film, especially the eerie shot of a British soldier’s hand reaching through murky water for a metal stair-step to safety, never grasped.
—Michael R. Neno, 2017 July 26
