Dunkirk (2017)

Whatever the case, Dunkirk plays in a way not only as Nolan’s best film, but as a kind of an antithesis — even an antidote — to all the others. The notion of Dunkirk spirit arose largely because of the celebrated role of amateur sailors risking their lives by serving alongside military forces in a makeshift flotilla of small ships — merchant marine vessels, fishing boats, pleasure craft and more — who sailed between England and Dunkirk to help pull off a seemingly miraculous evacuation of more than 330,000 stranded troops before the Nazis closed in for the kill.

This spirit is embodied in the film above all in the character played by Mark Rylance, a middle-aged civilian named Dawson with a wooden motor yacht called the Moonstone who sets out for Dunkirk with his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and a young friend named George (Barry Keoghan).

Rylance plays Dawson with a low-key, matter-of-fact sense of duty and civic virtue that feels like the film’s most authentic period detail, embodying unlost “Lost Generation” steadiness into a second world war. He’s a man who finds poetry in the sound of a Spitfire engine and prose in turning the bow of a pleasure ship toward ground zero of what’s left of the battle for France. Urged to return home by a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) plucked from the stern of a torpedoed ship, Dawson says simply, “There won’t be any home if we allow a slaughter across the channel.”

But Dawson is only a small part of a portrait of a larger operation in the most widespread and complicated war in history. The scale of the drama, the breadth of the canvas, both restrains Nolan and frees him.

Like his characters, who are barely characters at all, in the sense that who they are is much less important than what they do, Nolan’s talents are in the service of something greater than himself. While he tells the story very much his way, for almost the first time it’s not his own story that he tells.

Dawson is one of a trio of leading figures in three overlapping threads playing out in different time frames or rates of compression, like the layered dreams of Inception. Early titles establish the three settings and time frames: We spend one hour in the air with Royal Air Force Spitfire pilots led by Tom Hardy’s ace Farrier; one day on the sea with Dawson on the Moonstone and other military vessels; and one week at “the Mole,” that jetty on the beach where hundreds of thousands of soldiers wait and hope for rescue — among them a British private named Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) who bands together with two fellow survivors (Aneurin Barnard and Harry Styles).

These three sequences are edited to give each approximately equal weight. You could almost say that every second we spend in the air with Farrier is roughly comparable to a minute of Dawson’s day at sea and about a half-hour of Tommy’s week on the beach.

Within this controlled, artificial triptych structure, Nolan orchestrates a perfect storm of harrowing battle chaos in myriad, if not all, forms. We never see the ring of German tanks and artillery hemming in the Allied forces at Dunkirk, but there are firefights and sandbag blockades in the streets of Dunkirk, fighter planes harrying soldiers on the beach, destroyers crippled by U-boat torpedoes, and dogfighting Spitfires and Messerschmitts peppering each other with machine-gun fire.

At the same time, it’s far from a constant barrage of action and mayhem. Tension, silence and simply waiting are part of all the movie’s narrative threads.

Notably, the story threads unfold in isolation for most of the film; the rattled soldiers on the Mole don’t know about the flotilla of small ships sailing to their rescue, nor do they understand the absence of RAF support on the beach is partly due to the challenge of protecting vessels of soldiers who have already been evacuated. What they do understand is that London had given up hope of rescuing the vast majority of the troops at Dunkirk.

Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar, Spectre), shooting in 65mm (with about 75% of the film shot on IMAX film), creates astonishingly lucid, immersive environments of sky, sea and sand. The dogfighting footage in particular captures such sweeping images of sumptuous clouds in endless blue that each angry burst of gunfire seems like a desecration. (Yes, by all means see it in 70mm IMAX film projection if you possibly can.)

Hardy, again creating a compelling character largely without the lower half of his face or much intelligible dialogue, gives a controlled performance that’s all businesslike grace under fire. His character is the most traditionally heroic, and his aerial gallantry builds to one of the most stunning feats in any war movie I’ve seen — and it’s not even his last great moment.

Other than the images, my favorite bits of Dunkirk are some of the more dated character moments. Startled by the shell-shocked soldier’s insistence on returning home, Dawson’s son Peter asks his father if the man is a coward, and Dawson explains that he’s not himself and may never be again. Later comes a tragic moment in which Peter tells the shattered soldier a merciful lie, but an inconsequential one, not a Nolanesque necessary lie.

If Dunkirk transcends some of Nolan’s obsessions, it doesn’t escape all his blind spots. Religion is basically nonexistent in Nolan’s films, but it shouldn’t have been left out of this story.

Unwonted religious inflections color the opening titles: Anticipating the language of Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, which is given a strikingly muted reading at the denouement, we’re told from the outset that the soldiers at Dunkirk are waiting for “deliverance” and even for “a miracle.”

Nolan is often considered a materialist, and might see nothing miraculous in the remarkably favorable maritime conditions favoring the evacuation operation (including unusually prolonged cloud cover hampering aerial operations and oddly moderate seas in the typically choppy English Channel — unusual enough that for some scenes the filmmakers had to mix up their location shooting at Dunkirk with footage shot at a lake in the Netherlands).

People at the time, though, saw Providence at work in the weather. At any rate, where there are desperate men in large numbers, there is prayer, and more so in World War II than today. (Dunkirk, or Dunkerque, means “church of the dunes,” for what it’s worth.)

I wouldn’t go so far as to call Dunkirk a miracle, but like the event it chronicles, it’s certainly an improbable wonder: an unfashionable sort of war film, largely starring unknowns, with an entirely European (almost all U.K.) cast and no American presence, no strongly developed characters or typical character arcs, about an operation that was a success, but not a victory. The film is a victory: a celebration of a spirit of solidarity that seems at a particularly low ebb today.