A&E

Christopher Nolan puts audiences in the middle of ‘Dunkirk’

Image
Dunkirk puts you on the beach.
Photo: Warner Bros. / Courtesy

Four stars

Dunkirk Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday citywide.

Against all odds, Christopher Nolan has forged a wildly successful Hollywood career, using the capital he earned from the Dark Knight trilogy to make big-budget movies every bit as challenging as Following or Memento. Audiences that normally clamor for reheated leftovers willingly give themselves over to mind-bending narrative structures: the Russian-doll dreams of Inception, the gravitationally induced time dilation of Interstellar.

Those films are science fiction, though. Are people willing to wrestle with an old-fashioned yet newfangled war movie that combines the visceral impact of Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach landing—sustained for nearly two hours—with Nolan’s signature chronological experimentation? Dunkirk is perhaps the boldest gamble yet made by this ambitious director, injecting a potentially alienating degree of abstraction into the sheer intensity of pitched battle. Once again, he somehow makes it work.

The film’s subject is better known to the British than to Americans, having taken place well before the U.S. entered World War II. Between May 26 and June 4, 1940, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers pinned down on the beaches of France by the German army were successfully evacuated across the English Channel—a seemingly impossible undertaking, declared a “miracle of deliverance” by Winston Churchill. Nolan depicts the event using three overlapping time lines that gradually converge (and occasionally abut one another en route in disarming ways).

One of them unfolds over the entire week of the evacuation, following a British soldier (Fionn Whitehead) desperately trying to find an escape route. Another takes place during just one day, during which a civilian (Mark Rylance) sets out in his yacht to help the effort, picking up a deeply terrified soldier (Cillian Murphy) on the way. And the third strand covers just an hour, as two Spitfire pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) struggle to provide air cover for their fleeing comrades.

This unusual structure—the elegance of which only becomes apparent toward the end of the film—offers just enough narrative interest to obscure how little Dunkirk otherwise bothers with conventional drama. The actors aren’t playing characters so much as they’re embodying impulsive strategies (there’s almost no dialogue throughout); Nolan’s emphasis remains defiantly experiential, proliferating Steven Spielberg’s harrowing you-are-there approach from Private Ryan into something more along the lines of you-are-there-and-also-there-and-also-over-there-and-it’s-all-happening-both-separately-and-at-once.

Indeed, the film’s only real flaw is that it’s downright exhausting, in the same way that Inception’s parallel climaxes could wear you out with their expertly orchestrated multi-layered mayhem. But that’s like complaining about having pulled a muscle during great sex. With the lingering exception of Martin Scorsese (who struggles to get financing for films that frequently tank, despite superb reviews), nobody but Nolan demands so much from a mass audience. May we keep rewarding his inexplicable faith in us.

Tags: Film
Share
Top of Story