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Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard and Fionn Whitehead are three ordinary soldiers trying to get home in Christopher Nolan's epic Dunkirk |
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Fionn Whitehead (Tommy), Tom Glynn-Carney (Peter
Dawson), Jack Lowden (Collins), Harry Styles (Alex), Aneurin Barnard (Gibson),
James D’Arcy (Colonel Winnant), Barry Keoghan (George Mills), Kenneth Branagh
(Commander Bolton), Cillian Murphy (Shivering Soldier), Mark Rylance (Mr
Dawson), Tom Hardy (Farrier)

The evacuation of Dunkirk is a very British triumph. Beaten
and encircled by the Germans, British forces were stranded in a small pocket
around Dunkirk. The country looked certain to lose almost 400,000 men to death
or imprisonment – the core of its professional army. The fact that almost
340,000 soldiers were evacuated was more than a triumph: it was almost a
miracle. Christopher Nolan’s epic new film brings the triumph and adversity of
this campaign to the big screen.
The action unfolds over a week around the evacuation of
Dunkirk. On the beach Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), Gibson (Aneurin Barnard) and
Alex (Harry Styles) are desperate to escape the chaos on the beach, where the
evacuation is being managed from the one standing pier by Commander Bolton
(Kenneth Branagh). On the sea, Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance) and his son Tom (Peter
Dawson) head to Dunkirk in their small pleasure boat to help with the
evacuation, picking up a traumatised soldier on the way (Cillian Murphy). In
the air, Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden) fly a one-hour mission
over Dunkirk to provide air support to the stranded soldiers.
As a director, Nolan’s calling cards are playing with
narrative forms and timelines, while allowing personal stories play out on extremely
grand canvases. Dunkirk feels like a
summation of some kind of his career: its multi-layered timelines are
gracefully and intelligently threaded together, and while the canvas is enormous,
the human stories don’t get lost. The human interest running through the film
is particularly impressive, as there is so little dialogue. It’s pretty close
to “experience cinema” – it throws the audience into an immersive explosion of
events, giving as much of an impression as it’s possible to give of the
claustrophobia, tension and terror of being trapped on that beach.
The film-making is impeccable in creating this overbearing
feeling. Hans Zimmer’s score thunders over the film, bearing down with a
constant pressure and making excellent use of metronome ticking to keep
hammering home the time pressure. Nolan brilliantly inverts scale in his
filming to create a sense of claustrophobia – we constantly see sweeping shots
of but the scale of our surroundings only forces home the seeming impossibility
of what the British are trying to do. Individual soldiers seem tiny – how can
one man possibly have a chance of escaping? It’s a brilliant mixture of sound
and imagery to make the large seem small, the epic seem entrapping.
What Nolan does really well in this grand scale is to create
a series of “ordinary soldier” characters. Despite the fact that we learn
virtually nothing about them, these characters feel human and desperate. Again,
they are such small, ordinary Everyman cogs in the giant machine of the army,
that they become hugely relatable. It’s a hugely neat trick by Nolan, another
brilliant inversion – just as he turns epic to claustrophobic, he turns ciphers
into characters.
Recognising the need for balance between the overbearing
impact of the Dunkirk beach sequences, the film allows a mix of story-telling
and character types in its other two plotlines. So Mark Rylance’s boat captain
voices much of the film’s humanitarianism, in a sequence that plays like a chamber
piece – four people discussing duty and the impact of war in a confined space.
Meanwhile Tom Hardy’s Spitfire pilot carries more of the traditional “war film”
man-on-a-mission dynamics, engaging in a series of dog fights in the sky.
Interweaving these stories offers not only relief to the audience, but also narrative
contrast.
The interwoven storylines are also brilliantly done since
they all take place in very different timespans. The plot at “the Mole” takes
place over a week, “the sea” in one day, and “the sky” in one hour. Each of
these timelines interlocks and unfolds in the film simultaneously, and
characters move at points from one timeline to another.
Okay, writing it down, it sounds impossibly confusing and
difficult to follow right? Who could keep track of all that? But the film is so
brilliantly assembled that it always make perfect sense. Nolan uses several key
markers – a boat, the fate of certain characters – to constantly allow us to
see where we are in the story’s timeline. So we understand when we have moved
from one timeline to another when we see a ship still on the beach that we’ve
seen sinking elsewhere. This also increases the tension – we know at points
what will happen before the characters do, because we’ve already seen the after-effects.
Again, put it into words it sounds wanky and difficult to follow, but it really
isn’t – and the film is put together with such confidence that it never feels
the need to show off its narrative gymnastics. Nolan is confident enough to be
clever without drawing our attention to it – a very difficult trick to pull
off.
All this forceful story telling never prevents the story
from also being at many points immensely moving and stirring. The arrival of
the boats at Dunkirk is a genuine “lump in the throat” moment. The simple
decency of Rylance’s boat captain gives a low-key impression of a very British
sort of heroism, of quietly doing one’s duty while valuing every life and
wearing your own grief lightly.
The film’s more action-based sequences are equally stirring and
moving, because Nolan brilliantly establishes character with only a few brief
notes. It’s made clear early on that Hardy’s pilot has only a limited fuel
supply: every second he stays above Dunkirk protecting the men and ships below,
he reduces his chances of getting home. It’s another sort of heroic
self-sacrifice, and in a film that generally doesn’t shy away from showing the
deadly consequences of war, Nolan is happy to give us some more traditional, fist-pumping
heroics.
Nolan gets the maximum emotion from the more dialogue-heavy
parts by hiring some terrific actors: Rylance, as mentioned is superb, and
Cillian Murphy is very good as a shell shocked captain. Kenneth Branagh is
perfect for conveying the weight of responsibility on the shoulders of the
naval commander in charge of the evacuation. And elsewhere, Whitehead, Bernard
and Styles all invest their ordinary Tommies with a great deal of emotion and
empathy.
Dunkirk is a marvel
of cinematic technique and accomplishment, which brings enough moral and
emotional force to the drama to keep you engaged in the plights of its
characters. You can marvel at the film making tour-de-force of its executions,
but you never feel disengaged from it. It’s a marvellous film.
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