Dunkirk
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, James D’Arcy, Harry Styles, Jack Lowden, Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard, Barry Keoghan.
[rating: 5/5]
Reviewed by Michael Dalton
Stupendous, shattering, staggering, brilliant! The critics worldwide will be running out of superlatives over the next few weeks as Christopher Nolan’s stunning new film Dunkirk makes waves in cinemas everywhere. When was the last time an Oscar champion made its presence felt this early in the season? You’ll be hearing a lot about it. Curiously, for a director famous for epics, it runs at just over 100 minutes but as a friend told me, if it were any longer there’d be heart attacks. It is a remarkable film, a one-off in fact. Nolan is a master now, a ringmaster in fact, of transporting his audiences elsewhere. Whether it be the dreamscapes of Inception, the dark, forbidding skyline of Gotham City, or the memory palace of Interstellar, he knows the precise trajectory. Now, for the first time, he delves into history. He’s probably been shunned at large during previous award seasons simply because his films reach for fantasy, be it dark or light. Now he plants us firmly in a horrific episode of World War II when mostly British but also Belgian, Canadian, and French soldiers were surrounded by the German army on the shores of Dunkirk where Operation Dynamo, a major evacuation effort, was set in motion.
Even those who don’t care for war films will be astounded by what they witness here. Its not just what Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema capture, but the way they project it. Characters are secondary, and there are characters of course but their names, none of which I knew until I researched it, are of little importance in the grander scheme of things. They’re all part and parcel of the vessel, as it were. Mark Rylance, as Mr. Dawson, is the only real flesh and blood character. A mariner and father (his son and his eager young friend join him on the voyage), he sets sail, one among a flotilla of boats, to help bring the endangered soldiers home. The seas are treacherous, and such is Rylance’s skill, he brings Dawson alive with little more than quiet dedication. The rest, among them Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton who walks the jetty of the embattled beach, Tom Hardy’s Royal Air Force fighter pilot, and Cillian Murphy’s shattered officer, remain stoic. The fact that these fine actors are given little to do in no way shortchanges the experience. Nolan is too intelligent a director to waste such talent. Rather, he’s more concerned with what happened, and how, and that is what makes Dunkirk fly, and fly high. The film works almost solely on a visual level (and what visuals they are!!!) from land, air, and sea, and with razor editing, Nolan moves us between them for maximum impact. He pitches the action and life-in-peril episodes up, with multiple cliffhangers. In one sequence Jack Lowden as Collins, Hardy’s partner in the sky, crashes into the ocean in his Spitfire and becomes trapped and set to drown while elsewhere a group of soldiers are hiding in a trawler as it starts to sink. Nolan’s talent with intercutting for maximum impact is at full mast here.
Clearly this is a history lesson but an utterly astounding one. This isn’t a film about victory, but about survival, at any cost. The Germans, unseen and zooming above, come off like faceless phantoms, relentlessly firing and bombing and in this approach, Nolan nails the horror of wartime, and the insanity. He keeps us as edgy as his soldiers. From the opening scene where we follow a small group of soldiers down an ominously quiet street to the blazing finale, Nolan is genuine in his approach. As a soldier cheered for coming home says, “All we did was survive”.
