July 25: Dunkirk (2017 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★★★

Some of Christopher Nolan’s best movies happen when he has a plot gimmick to work with.  Memento, Inception and Interstellar all proceed like a game with specific rules, and all rank among his most tightly-focused, successful films.  Dunkirk fits into this category.  In its opening minutes, the film gives us three perspectives and the period they occur over, and then the movie tells us the story of the Dunkirk evacuation from the three points of view, culminating in the film’s showing us the last parts of the story by stopping actions and repeating them from the differing perspectives.

This technique is a source of huge pleasure.  Unlike the story mechanism that can become predictable in some of Nolan’s earlier work, the shifting perspectives here engage us strongly.  Dunkirk doesn’t use a predictable pattern when it shifts from one perspective to the other, so we don’t find ourselves expecting a particular order to the shifts.  The changing perspectives also keep us off balance because Nolan doesn’t use all three of them for every event or action. We have to pay attention to understand whether we’re watching a new action or the same action from a different perspective. And there’s the simple pleasure of watching events that we already know in one perspective and seeing them from a different perspective, mentally comparing the information from our first exposure with the information from the new perspective.  Even the meaning of a simple gesture like a pilot waving from the cockpit of a downed plane changes depending on the perspective we’re seeing it from.

And there’s more to Dunkirk that the plot device.  Throughout, the film uses little dialog – especially in the opening minutes – but relies instead on visuals to give us the information we need to follow the story and the characters.  And these visuals are riveting.  The space in much of the film is packed and claustrophobic, whether we’re inside ship chambers, manning the cockpit of a plane or looking in close-up among soldiers squeezed tightly together in a much more open space we don’t see.  Nolan even lenses a crowded ship sinking beside a wharf so it looks like the commander standing on the Mole could reach out and touch the vessel.  The sound design reinforces the claustrophobic tension, whether by having a faint reverb to suggest a tight interior or by creating space outside the frame, space we can hear but not see in the tight confines of the frame.  Likewise, Hans Zimmer's score seems to endlessly add to the tension without finding resolution.

In contrast to the claustrophobia, Dunkirk occasionally yields itself its moments of visual poetry.  For example, a fixed camera gives us a disorienting angle on one ship as it capsizes.  And some images seem driven by a poetic impulse at least as much as a narrative.  In one shot, we watch a band of soldiers rush toward a beached trawler, an image of the desperation and futility of the situation that the soldiers at Dunkirk face.  From that point, their situation becomes even more dire.  Another poetic image shows us the beach landing of a plane that has run out of fuel, a image of beauty that expresses aspiration, struggle, loss, and victory all in the same moment.  For images like these, the film pauses briefly to let us weigh what we’ve seen in a short moment of beauty.

For all its strengths, Dunkirk isn't without drawbacks.  Despite the deaths of a couple of the characters we follow, the film is mostly an Apollonian paean to virtue, heroism and character, even to the point of creating legends from the fallen.  There is little sense of futility or waste in the story we’re told here, and there’s no irony whatsoever.  As we follow the three perspectives though the film, it’s never hard for us to know who the good guys are and who, the bad; to know who acted well and who, badly.  Despite the obstacles that Dawson faces, he still manages to be a steady father to his son and the unerringly righteous captain of his vessel.  Farrier opts for self-sacrifice in the service of the cause, and Commander Bolton has no thought but for the welfare of his men.  And towards the end of the movie when a Churchill speech suggests that the evacuation of Dunkirk was a defeat, the film presents us with images of people feting the evacuees on a British train in celebration.   As visually thrilling and compelling as it is, Dunkirk isn’t a film of nuance or compromise.  It’s a straight up celebration of righteousness.

Dunkirk is a wonderful cinematic experience.  It does little shading and even less investigation, but Nolan's technical control of the medium makes it a worthwhile time at the movies.