“Dunkirk” is Christopher Nolan At His Best and Bleakest
Hollywood’s foremost creative mind gives us his most harrowing work yet.
Not a single scene, image, or line of dialogue within Dunkirk reveals virtually any information beyond what matters to its lean, mean story . The only context we are given to explain exactly how 400,000 British soldiers found themselves stranded on the wrong side of the English Channel, waiting for their lives to be decided by one side of the war or the other, is a paragraph of opening text so vague that it simply dubs the enveloping German army as “the enemy”. The conclusion is just as enigmatic; once the miraculous evacuation of the beach is over, so is the movie. The credits begin without us learning what’s to come for any of the main characters, and if we didn’t know any better, we might assume the Allies would eventually go on to lose the war to their nameless, faceless foe.
No knowledge of the biggest, deadliest conflict in human history is granted within the film’s brisk running time, because it isn’t required. Dunkirk has no time for it because the people involved had no time for it. We only have to know what they had to know: the scream of a German fighter plane spiraling toward the beach, the quickest way out of a sinking destroyer, the amount of fuel left in Farrier’s (Tom Hardy) Spitfire, the obligatory motivation of Mr. Dawson’s (Mark Rylance) mission. In the film, these things draw the line between life and death; any wider perspective on World War II would be superfluous to what’s actually going on.
Dunkirk’s indifference toward stronger historical context was a noticeable paradigm shift for writer-director Christopher Nolan, whose preceding films averaged 145 minutes in length (Dunkirk is 106 minutes long) and largely ask more questions about their respective worlds than they answer. Likely the most renowned auteur among today’s blockbuster moviegoers, Nolan is nearly peerless as a force of big-budgeted originality in modern Hollywood. He has full creative control of his movies, which traditionally sell themselves on fantastical concepts and set pieces through which a marginalized story is told. He typically works through his stories a cinematic parkour runner, traveling from Point A to Point B in the most imaginative, memorable and, typically, practical ways he can.
The decision to make Dunkirk, then, was either an unassuming blessing or an ingenious bit of self-consciousness on Nolan’s part. The story is deceptively simple — it’s literally about getting from Point A to Point B — yet through Nolan’s sense of scope and the indomitable craft of his production, the film as a whole becomes an interwoven mosaic of dread on a massive scale. Dunkirk deserves to be described as an epic in a way that too few films made in the 21st century have warranted.
As such, when one thinks of this movie, they probably first associate it with its terrifying set-pieces and grand aerial cinematography. It’s all terrific stuff, the reason why the film, and the memory of seeing it in theaters, stays with me. But for its part, Nolan’s screenwriting is not to be underestimated by its minimal use of dialogue: It wasn’t easy to tell this story the way he decided to tell it, but it works beautifully through a universal, unrelenting sense of tension inherent in its three vacillating segments (land, sea, air). Suspense is built with unnerving sequences that are almost cruel toward the characters in their abundance; there are three scenes devoted to characters trying not to drown, and that’s only one of the hazards the evacuation presents.
All of it is punctuated by Hans Zimmer’s pulsating, relentless musical score, for which the composer was nominated for an Oscar. If the image of dozens of helpless soldiers swim through an oil-soaked patch of ocean surrounded by burning boats and crashing planes wasn’t enough to induce the sense of panic Nolan was after, then Zimmer’s use of shrieking violins, electronic bass thwomps a lá Inception, and even Nolan’s own ticking pocket watch, more than does the trick.
Dunkirk is such a unique entry into Nolan’s filmography, and it is somewhat disappointing to his traditional style that I also consider it to be, far and away, his best movie to date. The talented and visionary director has certainly made films I’ve liked (The Dark Knight, The Prestige, the majority of Inception), but has otherwise run serious risk of delivering fare that I found to be too bloated and convoluted for a blockbuster’s own good (Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises, the rest of Inception). Dunkirk is a sort of amalgamation of what Nolan does best: presenting a cinematic equipment of a roller coaster stripped of most components besides the spectacular experience and an emotional focal point. Perhaps that’s an indictment of his aptitude to tell a good story, but a version of Christopher Nolan who knows his strengths would come pretty close to my idea of a master.