Dunkirk
Director - Christopher Nolan
Writer - Christopher Nolan
Starring - Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Tom Glynn-Carney, Harry Styles
The evacuation of the British and French armies from the
beaches of Dunkirk in the spring of 1940 is seen as a major turning point in
World War II with a vast majority of the 400,000 men stranded on the beaches
saved from the approaching German armies. Called a "miracle of
deliverance" by British PM Winston Churchill these events, despite their
historical importance, had not been fully realized in film before now. It is
easy to see why this is. This is as uncinematic as war stories go. There is no
battle. The action is simply a growing sense of dread on the beach with the
climax being hundreds of thousands of men being ferried off to England. To
present the events of Dunkirk Christopher Nolan delved into his bag of
directorial tricks and brought out his old standby, meddling of the
chronological order to craft his newest masterpiece.
Nolan tells this story across three separate, converging
timelines. On the beach Tommy (Whitehead) has just escaped the town of Dunkirk
and stumbles onto the beach where the entirety of the British and French armies
and standing around, hoping and praying for their salvation. He encounters
Gibson (Aneurin Barnard) and together they try and find room on one of the few
ships offering passage. During the course of their week on the beach they are
joined by Alex (Styles) and several others trying to find any sort of way
across the English Channel. On the sea Mr. Dawson (Rylance), his son Peter
(Glynn-Carney) and George (Barry Keoghan) sail across the Channel in their
family sailboat as part of the British effort to save as many soldiers as
possible. On the way they pick up a shivering soldier (Murphy), the sole
survivor of a previous evacuation attempt, suffering from PTSD. This story
takes place over the course of one day. In the air Farrier (Hardy) and Collins
(Jack Lowden) are RAF pilots charges with protecting the ships over the course
of one hour of the evacuation.
As these stories unfold over different time scales they
have completely different feels to them that appropriately match the stories
being told. The hour in the air feels fast, fleeting and energetic with every
action being a race against the clock. The day in the sea has a more languid
flow as it becomes a chamber drama with tensions unfolding on the boat as the
sense of duty clashes with the impending dread and unfathomable odds with the
trip across the sea providing time for this story to tell itself before the
destination is reached. The week on the beach feels like a hopeless eternity.
Scenes begin to feel repetitive as the troops are shelled and boats are sunk
and the Germans get closer. This is a survival story with there being no goal
but preservation. It captures the truly helpless feeling of relying on the
actions of others to escape your certain doom.
Merely telling these three stories as well as Nolan does
would results in a very good movie. What elevates it to its masterful levels is
the interplay between stories. Events are seen from different perspectives at
different times, playing out to match the story they are seen in. The flight of
the fighters over the sailboat is seen as triumphant and fills the characters
with hope on the sea but from the air the boat is barely registered as another
charge they are there to protect. The interplay between these stories is
masterful with editor Lee Smith doing a heroic job separating the feel of every
story while cutting between them completely fluidly. The film reaches
transcendent levels when the stories converge on the beach creating some of the
best war scenes put to film since Saving
Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line
almost 20 years ago.
One of the biggest criticisms of Nolan's previous work is
the weakness of his expositional dialogue. It is often clunky, over-detailed,
and inefficiently told. Dunkirk
contains perhaps 5 lines of exposition, pretty much all delivered by Commander
Bolton (Branagh). Nolan even goes so far as to eliminate dialogue almost
entirely. Very little is spoken between the characters, each one knows the
situation and their place in it. Action tells the story, with more information
being conveyed in a glance than many films convey in multiple lines of
dialogue. Nolan displays the confidence of a master filmmaker, telling his
story in this manner. His boldness pays off with the few lines of dialogue that
remain managing to feel more impactful. Dunkirk
is a masterful piece of filmmaking. Christopher Nolan has been one of the best
directors in the world for almost 20 years and Dunkirk may be his most ambitious masterpiece to date.
Schurmann Score - 9/10*
*I almost expect this to elevate to a 10 after another
viewing.
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