Nolan Succeeds Where Spielberg Failed

Rating: 9/10 (5 September 2017)

Films about the Second World War were a mainstay of the cinema in both Britain and America, not only during the war itself but also throughout the fifties and sixties. The genre started to decline after about 1970, and even more so after 1980, but there have nevertheless been periodic attempts since that date to revive it, using modern film-making techniques. These include David Puttnam's "Memphis Belle", Mallick's "The Thin Red Line", "Enemy at the Gates" (which had the unusual feature, for a Western film, of being told from a Russian perspective) and, perhaps most famously, Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan".
"Dunkirk" is the most recent attempt to revive this tradition. The events of the Dunkirk evacuation are too well-known for me to need to set them out here. The film has a complex structure, involving a non-linear narrative and three interwoven story lines taking place in three different time periods: one week on land, one day at sea, and one hour in the air. The "land" storyline, "The Mole", focuses on some of the British and French servicemen anxiously waiting on the beaches for rescue. The "sea" storyline tells the story of one of the many "little boats" which took part in that rescue. The "air" storyline deals with three Spitfire pilots flying to Dunkirk to provide air cover for the rescuers. Christopher Nolan, who both wrote the script and acted as director, deliberately excluded Churchill and Britain's other political and military leaders from his story, as he wanted his film to concentrate on the human side of war, not its political or strategic aspects.
Unlike something like "Saving Private Ryan", where the action was dominated by its big-name star, Tom Hanks, "Dunkirk" (perhaps inevitably given its division into three stories, each of which is given equal weight) is an example of ensemble acting with no one single star role. The cast, however, includes both well-known names, such as Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance and Tom Hardy, and younger newcomers such as Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Barry Keoghan and Aneurin Barnard. The use of pop star Harry Styles in a prominent part was criticised by some as an example of "celebrity casting", but in fact Styles won the role by going through the normal audition process; Nolan was quite unaware of his fame as a singer. I won't single out any of the cast for special praise, as so many of them were excellent in their roles.
I will, however, point to something I have noticed about Branagh, namely that his gifts as an actor are equalled by a gift for choosing the right films to appear in, a gift which some otherwise talented stars seem to lack. Dismissing the dreadful "Wild Wild West" as an aberration, just about every movie I have seen him in has been of high, and in many cases of the highest, quality.
"Dunkirk" is another example of Branagh's ability to pick only the best, because it is a truly excellent film. Despite the complexity of its narrative structure, it remains perfectly comprehensible and easy to follow. It presents us with a number of well-defined characters with whom we can both identify and sympathise- Branagh's naval Commander overseeing the evacuation, Whitehead's Tommy and Styles's Alex, both young British soldiers, Keoghan's George, a teenaged lad who, on impulse, jumps aboard a friend's boat heading for the Dunkirk beaches, Rylance's Mr Dawson, the owner of that boat, Cillian Murphy's shell-shocked soldier and Hardy's Spitfire pilot.
The fine musical score was provided by the prolific film composer Hans Zimmer; the use of a German composer to score a British war film (in which no Germans actually appear) may have been a deliberate gesture of reconciliation. Zimmer's use of the "Nimrod" variation from Edward Elgar's "Enigma Variations" may also have been symbolic; he would doubtless have been aware that, although "Nimrod" has today become something of an icon of British patriotism, Elgar wrote it as a tribute to a German friend, August Jaeger.
The battle scenes are very well done; one scene of the men waiting on the beaches may have been a deliberate allusion to the famous panning shot in Joe Wright's "Atonement", a film which also deals, among other things, with the Dunkirk evacuation. They may not quite have the gut-wrenching intensity of the opening sequence in "Saving Private Ryan", but I would nevertheless greatly prefer "Dunkirk" to Spielberg's picture. Spielberg creates some great individual scenes, but too often allows our interest to flag and, overall, his film is far too long. "Dunkirk", by contrast, holds our attention from start to finish, both as a picture of war and as a study of the men caught up in it. Nolan has succeeded in achieving the goal which eluded Spielberg, that of creating the great modern war film. 9/10