Christopher Nolan (2017)

The Dunkirk evacuation and Christopher Nolan sound like a mismatch:  the little ships and Nolan’s penchant for technical grandiosity don’t go together.  Evidently aware of such prejudiced expectations, Nolan has come up with what seems, on paper at least, a neat solution.  His screenplay for Dunkirk, as well as allowing him plenty of scope for spectacular land and sky warfare, includes a human interest story aboard one of the flotilla of private boats.  Nolan’s description of the ordeal of a handful of soldiers and airmen aims for in-the-thick-of-it immediacy and intensity; the happenings on the representative little ship are dramatically conventional and separate.  This is an unsatisfying combination, though it’s proving a highly successful one, critically and commercially.

The film begins in the streets of Dunkirk, where a British private, Tommy [sic], walks under a rain of German propaganda leaflets; within a few screen seconds, he and other Tommies are trying desperately to dodge a hail of German machine-gun bullets.  The opening is Nolanesque all right:  the pieces of paper falling through the air are a self-conscious image – so too is the screenful of fleeing soldiers, shot down one by one until Tommy alone escapes to progress into the action proper.  This comprises a threefold structure, reflecting the different timeframes of the evacuation for land, sea and air forces – one week, one day and one hour respectively – in late May and early June 1940.  Each of the three narrative components is introduced by an explanatory note on screen.  The viewer is meant to commit the notes to heart, in order both to make sense of what follows and to appreciate the structural ingenuity.  At the same time, Nolan wants to convey a sense of the awful physical realities – to make audiences feel they’re in the cockpit with Spitfire pilots and hiding with soldiers in a grounded trawler.  He uses his formidable hi-tech skills to create startling sequences of planes crash-landing in the sea and the terrifying claustrophobia of being trapped underwater.  These highlights occasionally make an emotional impression but more often merely confirm the director’s film-making knowhow.  The complicated timeline doesn’t amount to much in dramatic terms.  The army personnel barely register as individuals.  If we do keep a handle on what’s going on, it’s thanks to not being fully involved.

Things are very different on the boat en route from Weymouth to Dunkirk, which isn’t typical of the little ships.  Rather than being requisitioned by the Royal Navy, the craft is crewed by its owner, Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance), his teenage son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and, at the last minute, Peter’s friend George (Barry Keoghan), eager for adventure and to get his name in the papers.  They rescue and take on board a soldier (Cillian Murphy), the traumatised survivor of a U-boat attack.  When he learns that Dawson is heading for the French coast rather than back to England, the soldier goes crazy and tries to take control of the boat.  In the scuffle that follows, George falls downstairs, sustaining what proves to be a fatal head injury.  Later on, the boat rescues Spitfire pilot Collins (Jack Lowden) and soldiers including Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) and Alex (Harry Styles), whose life Tommy saved on the pier at Dunkirk.  Collins learns from Peter Dawson that his elder brother was a Hurricane pilot, lost in action in the early weeks of the war.  When they eventually return to Weymouth, Peter goes along to the local newspaper to make his ill-fated friend’s dream come true.  Christopher Nolan must mean for there to be synergy between the neatly packaged story (and backstory) of the Dawson crew and the high-octane hyper-realism of the major action sequences.  But they connect in only the most basic way – the succession of men rescued by Mr Dawson are switching from one half of the film to the other.

The concentration on a single little ship makes it hard for the uninitiated to understand how the Dunkirk evacuation delivered 300,000 men to (at least temporary) safety.  That said, Nolan is sometimes impatient to indulge his natural pomposity and the most flagrant instance of this occurs when he cuts to a shot of the little ships flotilla approaching the French coast, well before the tale of Dawson’s boat is complete.  The score by Hans Zimmer (the ideal musical collaborator for Nolan) suddenly goes all Elgar’s Nimrod, as it also does in later, supposedly heart-swelling moments.  Some of the last bits of Dunkirk, however, are understated and more genuinely affecting.  It’s corny and predictable that George is posthumously a front-page hero; but, when Mr Dawson reads the story, Mark Rylance’s silent, contained pride in what Peter has done, is eloquent.  Back in England, Tommy, in a train compartment, also reads a newspaper and the text of Churchill’s ‘We will fight on the beaches’ speech aloud to Alex.  The final, brief shot of Fionn Whitehead’s face is, for Nolan, unusually complex and humanly imaginative.  Tommy looks puzzled.  Almost foreseeing the Dunkirk mythology that was to develop subsequently, his face seems to ask, ‘Is Churchill talking about me?’  There are repeated elegant compositions of tiny figures arranged, in various configurations, in a vast beachscape.  The film’s palette is wearyingly tasteful, though.  The cinematographer is Hoyte van Hoytema but sand and sea in Dunkirk often suggest a Farrow and Ball colour chart.  Though it’s an appalling sight, it’s also a chromatic relief when a sinking ship spills oil that ignites and the water is suddenly aflame.

As suggested above, Mark Rylance again does fine work:  it’s remarkable how substantial a personality he creates from the material he’s given.  Kenneth Branagh has a good steely authority as the senior officer in charge on the Dunkirk pier.  The two Spitfire pilots are Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden.  With most of his face obscured by his pilot’s mask, Hardy is admirably expressive:  it’s almost anti-climactic when, after making an emergency landing, he removes the disguise (‘Yes, it was me all along …’)  Lowden makes by some way the best impression of the newer actors.  I don’t like to sound even older than I am but I often struggled to hear what the other youngsters were saying.  I got every word of Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance.

31 July 2017