War movies can overwhelm us with excitement,
shock us with violence, rouse us with heroism. There is plenty of excitement In Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, and
shock and heroism, but as the context is different it needs to be portrayed
differently. This is not. film about a battle, but about the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from France in 1940. The British politicians an military has under-estimated their enemies power and their defeat could have ended with the annihilation of 300,000 British and French troops on the beaches. Instead the British civilians rose to the occasion and saved the vats majority them.
The first scene shows us a ‘Tommy’ under
fire running for his life through the village of Dunkirk. Tommy is his name, and also the generic for
British foot soldiers. He shows no
heroics here, just the determination to escape, to survive. On
the beach he sees a young Frenchman dressing himself in a British casualty’s uniform
and taking his dog tag. The dead man
was called Gibson. He also wants to survive. Wordlessly, Tommy wordlessly. Then we see thousands of soldiers on the
beach also waiting to be saved. They stands in orderly lines. They maintain their discipline. This stoicism is a kind of heroism. For our Tommy it is day One.
We see Mr. Dawson and his son about to sail
their ‘little boat’ across the Channel from the south coast ofEngland to help save them. Why do they need to go? Because the British Military know that the
Expeditionary Force has lost its battle and to commit the Navy’s ships to save
them would mean losing more fighting boats,
and then a Nazi invasion of Britain
would not, could not, be stopped. Plus the fact that only shallow draft boats could ferry the troops from the beach. These
little boats were their only hope. Mr.
Dawson tells his son that ‘as old men started this war they should do something
to save the young men from dying in it’. The Dawsons are joined by 17 year old
George, an ‘under-achiever’ who simply wants
to achieve something, to be useful. None of them know what they will face. This is another kind of heroism. For them it is a day-long voyage.
In the air three Spitfire pilots take on the German Stukas and Heinkels that
intend to strafe and bomb the soldiers on the beach and the boats trying to
rescue them. This is old fashioned
fighting, jousting in the air, the kind
we are accustomed too. But these pilots
are not filmed the way we are used to.
They have no names, we hardly see their faces. We get no back-stories, no personal contexts
for them. They are simply men fighting
in the air. Two of them are shot
down. We know that one of them
survives, just. The third is soon faced
with a problem. He is running out of
fuel but the enemy planes are still there. Should he cut and run, go back, refuel and
then engage the enemy once more? Of
should he stick to his task, bring down the remaining Heinkel to save the lives
its bombs would have taken – and put his own life at even greater risk. There are no radio conversation here, he does not
discuss his options with his ground base.
We simply see his decision in his
eyes and in his actions. His story is
less than an hour long, and it too is heroic.
On the ground, and in the past (each
element of earth, sea and air is in its own time frame; a week, a day and an hour, eventually coming
together in the film’s final scenes) Tommy cannot find his own regiment and is
doing whatever he can to get off the deadly beach. A party of stretcher carriers has been wiped
out by a bomb, but a casualty on a
stretcher is still alive. Tommy picks
up the stretcher, aided by ‘Gibson’ and
run they for the Mole, the jetty where the only naval ship is taking on the wounded
- and their bearers. Day after day,
night after night Tommy and the
Frenchman do what they have to in order to survive – but they do not do so at
the cost of others. They do not succumb
to paranoia or xenophobia – unlike some of their companions. Our Tommy never fights anyone. He never sacrifices himself, he just gets on
with the job of staying alive. He will
live to fight another day.
Back on the beach the Naval Commander overseeing the evacuation is trying to make
the best out of bad job. He knows the harsh
realities of the situation and simply
gets on with his task too. Later, when some think he has discharged his duty he
knows there is still more to do. He does
not leave the beachhead. Another quiet,
undemonstrative hero.
The enemy soldiers are never seen. There is no jingoism, and even Churchill’s
famous Parliamentary speech (we will fight them on the beaches) is
simply read aloud by a soldier from a newspaper.
In one shot we see a
crowd of soldiers on the beach with their eyes downcast – only ‘our’ Tommy is
looking up, only his face is clear. These heroes are
emblematic; the ‘Tommy’; the Civilian
sailor; the Fighter Pilot; the Naval
Officer. They are not
personalized. We know nothing about them
apart from what they do on screen.
Many of these parts are not played by well known actors. Fionn Whitehead as Tommy is a
newcomer. So are most of his fellows.
Harry Styles is a pop singer but he has not acted before. It is true that Mr. Dawson is played by Mark
Rylance, well known to theatre goers and those who followed him as Thomas Cromwell
in the BBC’s Wolf Hall. He was given an Oscar for his part in The Bridge of Spies, and was the motion
capture BFG, but his 'film' star is
still rising. Tom Hardy
is Farrier, one of the pilots, and
he is a big star, but here he has no opportunity for grandstand acting, his
face is largely hidden and voice distorted
by his flying helmet’s mask. Kenneth
Branagh is the Beach Commander, but his main
role is to be still and make unvoiced decisions. Cillian Murphy plays a shell-shocked Lieutenant picked up by Dawson mid-channel from
the hull of a stricken ship. He also has
very little to say. Nobody chews the scenery. There may not be any acting Oscars up for
grabs here, but these characters are not
cyphers. They may be pawns, knights,
bishops and kings on the strategic and dramatic chess board, as Matthew Lickona of the San Diego Reader has observed, but they all earn our sympathy. It is
as if Nolan has taken a number of different
but representational microscope slides of this truly epic event and
offered them too us. (I
liked the way that the ‘secondary actors name came up first in the credits,
followed by those of the ‘stars’,)
So was I underwhelmed? Yes, but properly so. This is a different kind of war film,
neither epic – despite its scope – nor
personal. It is not bloody – it
is certainly not Saving Private Ryan
- but the deaths count. It puts an epic event under a microscope to
let us see the human details, but with no melodrama.
It inhabits three elements, land,
sea and air, each with its own tempo and timescale, and blends them together - with the aid of
Hans Zimmer’s pulsating score and Hoygte van Hoytema’s amazing
cinemaphotography – into a symphony. Zimmer’s music often ratchets up the
tension, but are also times for
appropriate quietness. How Hoytema managed to get footage shot on bulky IMAX 70mm
film cameras into a cockpit and under water as if they were hand help is
amazing. I have
not (yet) seen the film on IMAX, but I will,
it was made for that format and as the telling of the tale is so
immersive it deserves to be seen on the largest possible screen.
Is it perfect? Of course not.
No work of art can be. Even though there is no ‘mansplaining’ some of
the script may be avoidably expositional.
Some of the sentiments are a little platitudinous, even if given authenticity in Mark Rylance mouth. The three time scales can lead to confusion
(it took me a while to see that they are not presented simultaneously, so
daylight scenes are interleaved with night-time events, which confused me). I
was surprised when Tommy, who lost his rifle in the first scene, did not pick
up a weapon abandoned by the dead on the beach. A soldier without a weapon is an oxymoron,
and I am sure any squaddie is his
position would have collected one, even if a few minutes later he passed
himself off as an unarmed stretcher bearer.
The score, which is mainly brilliant, does not need to reference the
Nimrod Variation in the final scene. Should Nolan have made room for a little
humour – even the dark humour fighting men use to defend themselves from the
horror? Yes, he could. The nearest we get is when one of the pilots
is rescued and greets his rescuer with a curt ‘afternoon’, and I don’t think
the mood would have been punctured by the odd laugh.
The 1958 movie Dunkirk, directed by Leslie Norman
(Barry Norman’s father) and starring John Mills and Dickie Attenborough also
followed a few characters, but has a much more complex plot. I was
surprised by how lean Nolan’s film was, and how short. At 107 minutes it is the shortest since his
first, and maybe his most humane. It
ends with an individuals surrender, but
that is simply the cost of him doing his duty.
Nolan has done his duty, honouring this epic defeat and making it a
human victory. It was a retreat that allowed
the Allies to eventually win the war.
