Review: Dunkirk (2017)

Directed: Christopher Nolan

Nolan’s clever use of his ambitious structure is the most interesting thing in his film and the reason to see it but it also proves to be the film’s dramatic undoing

Christopher Nolan commands our attention for better or for worse. Every few years it seems, Nolan brings forth a massive new film, styled in his preferred stylings of a summer entertainment to be enjoyed theatrically as a communal experience. And invariably a new film by Nolan is greeted as a cinematic event and for the most part it invariably is – box office numbers are robust, the critics greet it with copious interest and attention and it sparks a major dialog among the movie-going public. Such will again be the case with his impressive new World War II film, Dunkirk – a suspenseful re-telling of Operation Dynamo, the Allied Forces' strategic defeat in the face of a Nazi siege on the beaches of northern France. It is his most grounded work in over a decade.

Dunkirk, in many respects, might represent a major departure for Nolan, who in the recent past, has primarily made ‘concept’ films or (looking at them a bit unkindly) ‘gimmick’ films – films predicated on such narrative devices as travel through black holes, dreams within dreams and superhero vigilante elements – films with twist endings and loopy narratives and temporal hijinks. Dunkirk might appear to be a break from that, a straight drama at long last, but it is anything but. You could place Dunkirk squarely among his ‘concept’ films because Dunkirk at its most fundamental, is a film primarily about its ingenious and unusual structure.

Nolan unveils his structure early on – 3 concurrent narratives, taking place almost simultaneously, but each starting at a different point in time and proceeding at a different pace, until the film purportedly achieves confluence somewhere around the middle of the running time. In such manner proceed the week long story of Tommy, Gibson and Alex (Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard and Harry Styles respectively) - 3 young soldiers on Dunkirk beach awaiting evacuation; the day long story of Dawson (Mark Rylance), a British civilian taking his private boat out to Dunkirk to rescue British soldiers and the hour long story of Farrier (Tom Hardy), a Spitfire pilot providing air support to the Dunkirk evacuation from the air with his squadron.

The structure is ambitious and perhaps more easily found (and pulled off successfully) in literary fiction than in cinema and Nolan executes it coherently for the most part but the effect of the relentless cross-cutting between the three narratives creates the anticipatory effect of audiences trying to locate the seams and trying to put the pieces together as if it were a puzzle movie. Nolan then through his own doing shifts the primary audience interest from his individual tales and the fates of the characters to the question of how do the stories fit together temporally. This undermines the individual characters and stories which are quite humble to begin with – stripped as they are of any psychological detail or expository set-up. Nolan’s approach to story-telling here as in his other films remains strictly diagrammatic as opposed to dramatic or empathetic.  

And that is unfortunate because there are fleeting moments of humanity to be found in the individual stories. As when Tommy and Gibson volunteer to lead a wounded man on a stretcher to a ship not out of compassion but to secure their own passage off the beach. Or the way Dawson’s young son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) reacts manfully to a tragic incident on their boat.

The clever structure and the interplay of the concurrent timelines does yield some narrative pleasures. When Collins (Jack Lowden), one of Farrier’s Squadron members is shot down in the hour long ‘air’ story, we discover his fate only later when he surfaces in the day long ‘sea’ story (which is chronologically at an earlier point at that time) and is rescued by Dawson’s boat. Or when Dawson’s boat picks up a stranded soldier in the sea (Cillian Murphy), Nolan cuts to the week-long ‘beach’ story which is at an earlier point chronologically essentially functioning like a flashback when we see Murphy’s character  in that story.

All these experiments with time amply indicate Nolan’s preoccupation with chronology and the order of things in his various films. If there is an overarching auteurial concern manifest in his work, it is exactly that – how events occurring in various temporal frames fit together and what does it all mean. Previously he would use the cross-cutting technique to display the simultaneity of action only in the finales of his films, this is the first time he has constructed an entire film around it – to the exclusion of, on paper, anything else. It almost seems like Nolan is straining with the notion that disparate stories can mean more than the sum of their parts when they are cross-cut together - that cross-cutting adds something that wasn’t previously there. More often than not, it subtracts as the drama is diffused and the individual stories begin to shrink in interest compared to the whole.

Another rather common malaise of modern blockbuster film-making also seems to afflict Nolan’s film-making choices. The cross-cutting employed by Nolan gets increasingly frenetic in certain climatic sections, wildly cutting mid-scene between his three stories to a soundtrack of deafening proportions. It seeks to artificially escalate the sense of drama with a visual and aural assault. It is perhaps the cinematic equivalent of the Agatha Christie technique of writing her thrillers. As her narratives reached their climaxes, Christie would employ ever shorter sentences to lend the sense of speed to her hungry and curious readers. Similarly, the length of shots here gets shorter and shorter for climatic scenes but the effect is not nearly the same and audiences are more likely to come away with a headache than feeling sated.

All in all, Nolan has produced a competent and imminently watchable war picture. It does subscribe to the utterly reductive notion than the most persuasive form of engagement and entertainment for modern audiences is heightened suspense but beyond that it offers an admirably stripped down narrative experience unburdened with smothering exposition and very short on dialog and speechifying. The film is also well-acted by its cast of largely unknown young actors and much of the action is well staged, in the screen-filling splendid IMAX cinematography of Hoyte van Hoytema no less. The ticking clock score by Hans Zimmer is serviceable but indistinctive and seems to have but two gears, louder and softer.

Credit to Nolan that the film feels as intimate and ‘small’ as it does despite carrying a monstrous 150 million dollar price tag though that could also point to a budget ill-spent. Nolan’s clever use of his ambitious structure is the most interesting thing in his film and the reason to see it but it also proves to be the film’s dramatic undoing.

3/5