He may be one of the modern era’s most lauded directors, but a rare gripe for Christopher Nolan’s films has been that they are a little emotionally cold at times. Perhaps this is due to his grounding in the science fiction and superheroes — too focused on style, not enough substance. But it can be tough to channel emotion in a manufactured reality like those in Batman’s Gotham, Inception’s dreamscapes or Interstellar’s parallel worlds. With Dunkirk he tries history for the first time on the immense scale we’ve come to know him for, a wartime evacuation on a blustery and desolate beach. As opposed to his previous settings, the evacuations from Dunkirk were close to home and all too real – a defining moment for Britain’s home front but by no means a success. This was a disaster made palatable. Yet despite these grim tidings this might be Nolan’s most compassionate film yet – visceral, powerful and definitive of its subject.
While the overwhelming memory of this occasion is one of salvaged triumph, Nolan’s Dunkirk is not a celebration but a condemnation – 400,000 standing prone on a beach, no cover, no sign of rescue, no chance of retreat, this in May 1940 and only at the start of the war. Here we get to experience as close to the horror of what that must have felt like as we are likely to get through IMAX cameras in 70mm, all in the service of immersion. It seems a wonder that a film like Their Finest is based roughly on the same events. Rather Dunkirk’s beach takes on a despairing character, if not style, similar to the stunning seven-minute single take from Joe Wright’s Atonement in 2007.
In typical Nolan fashion, Dunkirk is a battering, rarely letting up from the opening moments as Fionn Whitehead‘s Tommy is set upon a deafening retreat under enemy fire. Thanks to Hoyte Van Hoytema’s stunning camera work, we see the horizon tilt and shudder as Tom Hardy’s bomber tracks its prey, we hear the screaming Wermacht engines and glance up with the haggard faces of each soldier huddled along the pier jutting out in forlorn hope towards home. We see the smoking horizon from the civilian boat as it steers itself into hell. I wouldn’t be surprised if people began feeling woozy as the hulls filled with water and smothered cries. I certainly did, and Hans Zimmer’s score certainly doesn’t help even it is acutely effective. His work, rarely melodic, has a knack for projecting tension and unease, ticking like a clock, hastening like a heartrate, whining like an engine.
If there are accusations of Nolan’s chaotic depiction of this day being cold, that may well be accurate in some ways. But you could equally argue that it is an attentiveness to the human experience that has allowed him to recognise the true cost of the campaign that preceded this rescue’s necessity. And while this whole exercise’s futility is so often apparent – the beach is apocalyptic, the pier a haunting shot of entrapment – the isolated acts of courage here are telling, more so than any words that might punctuate this spectacle, and they are few but well selected.
Nolan both writes and directs, but few will dispute that he is the latter before the former. Few others could command a set so vast as the beaches of Dunkirk here with such confidence, and while the cast is impressive, it is an effect similar to that in Terrence Mallick’s The Thin Red Line to see the ego mostly taken out of the individual in the service of a moving collective experience.
This is partly the result of Nolan’s willingness to use a signature theme of his, time, to separate this narrative into three stretches. The film takes place over the course of a week for those on the sand, a day for those in the sea, and an hour for those in the air, with plot strands gradually knotted and the fates of the many eventually entwined. Everyone is impressive, from Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton and Mark Rylance’s almost unsettlingly calm civilian father Mr Dawson, to Hardy’s bomber pilot and even Harry Styles’s mere soldier among thousands. But none commands the screen, and in these circumstances it wouldn’t seem fair if they did.
Dunkirk is in cinemas from 20th July through Roadshow Films.
