Dunkin' Doughboys
Dunkirk / directed by Christopher Nolan
For a big budget war movie, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk runs against the expected grain in ways large and small. It’s perhaps obsessively interested in communicating the scale of a world war, in terms of distance, multitudes, and time, but it accomplishes this through spareness rather than any piling on. Two great armies face each other: the conquering Germans and the defeated English, 400,000 of whom have been driven to European continent’s edge at the beginning of World War II, gathered in a small defensive pocket around the French city of Dunkirk. Through the course of the film, though, we only ever see the faces and bodies of Allied soldiers, never their German enemies, except indirectly, as marauding aircraft or through the explosion of artillery shells. And we see the vast numbers of Allied troops as much in the empty and exposed spaces of their positions as in their actual presence; they are many, yet they are utterly vulnerable at the French shore, literally standing in lines to the sea in one of the film’s memorable early scenes.
The short distance to England across the Channel is rendered impossibly vast by Dunkirk’s many panoramic shots of sea and sky, with humans and their vessels often appearing motionless and insignificant in their midst. And so the film is also very consciously about pespective; where you stand makes all the difference, but perspective also lets you put together the whole.
It’s spare, too, in its storytelling. Depicting an operation in which mostly civilian vessels eventually recovered more than 300,000 of the trapped soldiers, it employs three interrelated stories of small, discrete groups: a few soldiers trapped on the beach; a father and two young men manning one of the thousands of boats that would rescue the army; and a trio of Spitfire pilots flying cover for their comrades below. We are also treated to the occasional dialogue between a pair of Naval and Army officers (Kenneth Branagh and James D’Arcy) trying to coordinate rescues on the beach waiting on the beach, who, like a Limey Greek chorus, fill in the details of what is happening and how dire the soldiers’ situation has become.
Our first introduction to this world on fire is Tommy (whose name, not-so-coincidentally, is slang for a British soldier), played by Fionn Whitehead. In a neat and chilling synecdoche of the entire army’s situation, Tommy’s fellow squad members are shot down by unseen adversaries in a deserted village street, with only Tommy escaping and stumbling onto the evacuation beach. He seems ridiculously young and understandably frightened, and his desperate wish to get off the beach — which leads him to various attempts at subterfuge and ultimately — makes him the heart of the overall story. It’s through Tommy and the other young soldiers he links up with that Dunkirk gives us the most direct depictions of a reality turned hellish and inescapable. German dive-bombers screech down upon exposed men on the sand (it is clearly only due to sheer luck that Tommy doesn’t perish in the first attack he experiences); artillery fires at them from unseen positions. Every route to freedom seems to turn to ash: ships that promise freedom are bombed, torpedoed, shot at, and then bombed again.
It’s not simply that Nazis are trying to drive the British troops into the sea; we are also made acutely aware of the elemental power of the ocean itself. It’s almost as if water has been weaponized, or at least fully activated as an substance inimical to man: it capsizes ships, drowns unlucky soldiers who thought they’d just been saved, threatens a downed pilot who only a minute before was able to defy gravity. Yet it’s also the means of the army’s escape, a vast surface on which sure navigation and bravery will see them through to the white cliffs of Dover, and protect England in turn from a Nazi invasion, at least for the moment (ultimately, England’s salvation early in the war from German landing craft can be seen as a team effort between the Royal Air Force beating back the Luftwaffe and the English Channel providing too large a barrier).
As ships founder and perspectives shift to improbable angles, Nolan revisits stylized visuals we’ve seen in his films before — of cities turned sideways and alien tidal waves towering over planet surfaces. In Dunkirk, though, they feel far less show-offy and more bent to human purpose. As a whole, in fact, Dunkirk feels apart from most of Nolan’s other films. Grounded and engaged with an historical event, Dunkirk transcends the abstraction that often drains Nolan’s films of power for me; I am thinking particularly of Inception, which with its Russian doll structure of dreams within dreams finally left me feeling like I’d been the victim of some sort of The Spanish Prisoner-like long con. There are limitations to his approach here, but an undeniable reverence floats through the film. It’s an honoring of what happened at Dunkirk, and an assertion that the rescue says something positive about England, or at least as England existed back in 1940, even as it seemed on the brink of defeat and disaster.
Tommy’s desperation lends urgency to the missions and determination of boat captain Dawson (Mark Rylance) and fighter pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy), who will eventually help to rescue him, and who must make their way through their own arduous stories. In this, Dunkirk is a paean to the power of collective effort, and of stepping up when others are in need of assistance. Dawson is a study in steadiness, keeping his boat headed where it’s needed despite various unexpected challenges, and with a late-breaking backstory that puts his sangfroid in striking perspective. Farrier is similarly cool, flying and shooting down Germans with the calm and precision of a surgeon performing a routine appendectomy; but you get the sense that he’s able to do so because he’s left all hope of home behind (frequent references to his fuel gauge cue us to the fact that this is going to be a one-way trip, no matter what).
Dunkirk’s other major technique of scale and perspective is the separation of its three tales into separate but overlapping timelines. Tommy’s story takes place over the course of a week; Dawson’s, over a day; and Farrier’s, over only an hour. This keeps the flow of the movie both appropriately fragmented (the fog of war and all that) yet also synchronized in a way that conveys the collective effort that was Dunkirk. As they begin to converge, these separate temporal tracks add tension as you see just how they might or might not come together. And if you’re so inclined, you might also say they infuse the film with an element of fate or even mysticism.
But the clockwork operation of plot, as smooth as it is, can’t help but draw attention to itself; it’s impossible to not get bumped out of the film to some degree as your mind works to fit it all together, even as you admire the handiwork. I have similar reservations about the admirable spareness of Dunkirk, which gives it power but also makes what it depicts feel both not quite real and also vividly meaningful: perhaps another way of putting it is that all its action may feel a little overly symbolic. Where another war movie might take pains to exactly replicate the look of a battle, Dunkirk chooses to replicate the feel of a battle, even at the expense of making its sets feel somewhat abstract and surreal.
But I’m not even convinced myself that these are entirely valid criticisms. One of the challenges of a war movie (i.e., a movie about a real, historical war, not just an action flick) is to walk the line between the inherent thrill of cinematic violence and exploring the meaning of the events. Maybe this is more of a moral point than an aesthetic one, but it seems to me that film depictions of war, and the death and destruction it entails, should never be exploitative or mindlessly valorizing. Dunkirk is arguably deeply interested in the meaning and larger context of its violence, and what the Dunkirk evacuation says about heroism, about manhood, about nationhood, about hope and our common humanity.
