For a while there, Dunkirk
ruined more than a few movies for me. The trailer for this movie, particularly
the seven-minute IMAX preview, is so good that every time I saw it, I thought
to myself, “Well, forget this movie. I want to see more of Dunkirk!” Thank heavens it’s finally here, so I can get back to my
regularly scheduled programming, and thank heavens it was worth the wait
because it shall come as no surprise that this Christopher Nolan disciple found
much to love in the master’s latest work.Dunkirk is the true story of the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk, France, in the midst of World War II, told across three intersecting narratives – the land evacuation (starring Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, and Kenneth Branagh), the civilian boats recruited to aid the effort (starring Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy), and the air cover provided by British fighter pilots (starring Tom Hardy).
With Interstellar in 2014, Nolan drew more than his fair share of comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – including from myself when I said that Interstellar “combin[ed] Kubrick’s science-fictional aesthetics with Nolan’s knack for tight and highly personal storytelling.” Surprisingly, though, Dunkirk also feels a bit like 2001, with its trio of timelines looking at what it means – and takes – to be human in a time of crisis, but Nolan out-Kubricks Kubrick by intermingling the timelines (one week, one day, and one hour) and playing them off against each other in a cerebral way that takes for granted an audience’s ability to keep up. For those of us who didn’t need navigational charts for Inception and Interstellar, Dunkirk is similarly smart, though it is less self-reflexively clever than past Nolan ventures; where Inception had occasional bouts of exposition and Interstellar made the MacGuffin of time travel a function of the plot, Dunkirk proceeds with its narrative play as a matter of course, again cycling back to the classic Nolan theme of the subjective experience of the time and the way we form communities around common goals.
Nolan veterans like Tom Hardy (playing to type as an unintelligible masked man) and Cillian Murphy (playing against type as a shell-shocked soldier) turn up and do the good work we expect of them, while Nolan newcomers like Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance – the closest we get to expositional figures – appear as sobering reminders of the moral challenge presented by Dunkirk, gifted actors prepared for the subtle challenges of their sophisticated roles. Dunkirk is largely, however, fleshed out by fresh and nameless faces who don’t have long and recognizable filmic pedigrees like their named counterparts, but there is something even more humanizing about a nameless sea of evacuees, and these actors are remarkable for their abilities, like Keaton or Chaplin, to evoke a range of emotions in largely silent stretches of the film.
In this way, too, Dunkirk evokes 2001 with its extended, silent, balletic scenes of aerial combat, of divebombing and running along the beach. 2001 began and ended sans dialogue, and there are similarly few conversations in Dunkirk, opportunities for Nolan and his performers to show off their command of the visual language of film. And again Dunkirk steps beyond 2001 with a dynamite score by Hans Zimmer; 2001 included the “Blue Danube Waltz” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” but by and large didn’t carry the auditory weight that Dunkirk does. Like Inception before it, Dunkirk succeeds largely on the shoulders of Zimmer’s score, which is masterfully, unrelentingly, elegiacally tense.
“Unrelenting” is probably the best word for Dunkirk. From its first scene, the film grabs the audience by the shoulders and demands attention until the film is over. There are moments when that ending seems to come sooner than expected – even without noting that the film is, at 1:46, much shorter than most Nolan fare – doubtless mirroring the false hopes given throughout the Dunkirk evacuation, but Nolan’s actual finale grounds the film in a surprising way, a kind of echo of Inception’s last-frame fakeout but with more heart than Nolan is often acknowledged as having. It is an affirmation of Nolan’s continued status as a master filmmaker and – and I do not throw this word around lightly – a true genius.
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