Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is something of a minor miracle (if you can, in fact, call a $100 million tentpole minor). It’s a blistering film that leans hard into realist tendencies but has the gall to use them to formalist aims. You see, Dunkirk is structured in a formalist manner, being told in three different spans of time, sometimes on different days, and sometimes intersecting at moments of nail biting intensity. It’s a whip smart structure, allowing writer/director Nolan to take us through the horrors of the Dunkirk Evacuation by way of setting up traditionally heroic moments and then taking the piss out of those heroic moments. The Dunkirk evacuation was a military disaster, in which the French and British Allied Armies were trapped on the beach of Dunkirk, France, the enemy armies closing in on them. The only way to get off the beach was to evacuate, and soon citizens on their own boats and came to help evacuate, in constant danger from the bombs and gunfire of the German air force. Nolan’s goal with Dunkirk was creating, “virtual reality, without the glasses” and he just about does that, but he does so with the intelligence to structure his film in a way that always reinforces the emotional palette he’s going for, which is to put it lightly, a disarming (sometimes detrimentally) amount of intensity. Dunkirk crushes you consistently and frustrates with ease. Whenever the movie doesn’t show Nolan’s stroke of perfectionism, the film feels startlingly human, flawed, but that is genuinely ok. Dunkirk, is Nolan’s first film paramountly about frustration, about taking the piss out of his own realistic heroism, about the small things and actions that lead to disaster. If there’s one feeling that Dunkirk imbues best, it’s the feeling of the sinking in Titanic, and that’s not just because a lot of the horrifying action takes place on sinking ships. It’s mainly because Nolan’s goal of deconstructing the nobility at the center of the disaster works so well. Where as A Night to Remember created a noble sense of the events of the Titanic, and history itself creates a nobility in the evacuation of Dunkirk (which was most certainly noble), there’s a crazed sense in the dressing down of the evacuation at the center of Dunkirk that mirrors the crazed final hour of James Cameron’s opus. Nolan’s three story structure: one taking place at the beach over the span of a week, the other taking place on the sea within the span of a day and the last taking place in the air over the course of an hour, sets up heroic moments throughout the entire film, which are only deconstructed by a later storyline. A plane landing in the water, obviously representing a moment of relief for our characters is soon revealed to be another terrifying problem for the man inside, a moment of silent mourning near the beginning of the film soon reveals itself to just be another survival tactic, and soon one of the most triumphant victories of the film’s ending turns out to be the calling card of a terrible fate. This does mean that some of the earlier heroic victories of the film seem to be underplayed, mainly because they are about to be subverted in order to create the chaos that the film wallows in, but that’s the point. There’s not supposed to be a satisfying part to this until the ending, where Nolan damn near grandstands the power of a political hero of the time, in his ability to unite the people and give the audience a sense that in all the chaos, there is still hope. The actors here have a perfect amount of physicality. Most of the characters are young men, almost nameless, experiencing the horrors of the evacuations. The biggest stars of the piece, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, Harry Styles, and Tom Hardy, are all overshadowed by the plot and the movements, almost to the point that they seem like little figures in the shape of history, rather than actual players, which of course is something Nolan often does, but because again, that’s the point, it works, even if it does sometimes overshadow the always incredible work from all of those actors. Dunkirk is one of the best war movies of all time (though technically, it finds itself more as a deconstruction), and there’s almost nothing else to say, that I haven’t. Nolan is a great filmmaker and he’s made a film for the ages, much like his others and Dunkirk should not be missed.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |