Dunkirk - Nolan's Memento to Cherish

Rating: 9/10 (30 July 2017)

Christopher Nolan is the blockbuster director with the Midas touch – but it is not all about the money. Behind a powerhouse visual style, lies a writer of substance, a skilled craftsman who knows how to build a film from its beginning, middle and end and stuff it with tortured souls, each on his or her hero's journey, with labyrinthine twists and decoys enough to put an audience of Black Watch renegades through their paces.
He has managed to take dollar-raking staples like Batman, and convince change averse nervous twitching studio heads that the Dark Knight needs to be dark and the fumbling penguin needs to be the tortured soul the subject of all our affections even if he is a mass murdering git. He did it and the coffers inflated like popcorn – who knew that inverting the norm could be attractive? But doing all that with the futuristic effects bloated blockbusters like Man of Steel or Interstellar is one thing - taking on the gritty and emotionally delicate subject of a war event that is as critical to British history and identity as the tower of London is another.
Yet, once again Nolan has proved that no holy grail is holy enough to remain immune from his dismemberment. But, if something has to be torn asunder and reconstructed – then Nolan has quite firmly established himself as the man of the moment and with the visually stunning and narrative hall-marked DUNKIRK, we have another Nolan game changer.
Jettisoning standard linear narrative ritual in favor of the iconic leaping and rebounding story line of his classic Memento, Nolan goes even one further abandoning the venerated three act play. In a most astounding narrative leap Nolan's Dunkirk casts off the 'WHY?'. It is an act of pure cinematic genius whose absence plays startlingly into his denouement of the infamous British forces rescue from the beaches of Northern France in the last week of May 1940. Many recent reviewers and critics have lamented the absence of a historical explanation as to why the events that were taking place were not fully extrapolated. But they have missed the point entirely. Nolan's approach was clearly to use his visual genius to saturate the viewer in the experience – the central character of the film is in fact the event – viscerally portrayed in vibrant immersive 70mm. The why of the event is not developed because the purpose of the exposition is to leave the viewer with a much bigger why they themselves most formulate having being fed into the action – it is not why Dunkirk – but why war?
Nolan has managed to do what few great war films - despite their aspirations - have failed to do – he has succeed in documenting an event that crushes the viewer with the irrationality, the savagery and inhumanity of it all and yet plants the seed of a hope that humanity is moving in the right direction – all without any character for the viewer to cling to. Even "Tommy", a representative "Tommy" played by Fionn Whitehead – is underdeveloped so as to avoid the audience pinning its affections too tightly on any one role – that was never the intention. Where Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, the Thin Red Line, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July all railed against the savagery of war, the hook for the viewer was being dragged into a deep personal emotional attachment to a character whose fate punched the audience. Not so DUNKIRK. It is incidents within the event which hurt and the cumulative emotional response is much broader and much more impactful. For this reason alone it is hard not to begin to consider DUNKIRK as one of the very all-time war films. But there are other reasons.
Recounted through three perspectives, air, land and sea, unfolding across different time perspectives, with each one ultimately narrowing down to a single colliding event, Nolan ties the viewer into an authentic confusion of time, space , event and order – hallmarks of a conflict experience in which the semblance of command structures is subverted by the urgency of the predicament. It is only the representatives of the homeland – personified by the brilliant Mark Rylance in the company of Barry Keoghan and Tom Glynn-Carney – sailing with clear instructions and purpose, who represent the calm of normality – even when hit by tragedy. Outside that small oasis of hope, the desperation and claustrophobia of conflict is most brilliantly exposed through the cockpit firefights between the Spitfire squadrons and the Henkel escorted Luftwaffe attacks – making for some of the best aerial war sequences in decades. And although at times, the visuals are the stuff of small boys war stories – there is nothing trivial or scout in Nolan's treatment. In two very particular sequences he exposes us to the delicacy of heroism and the sometimes heroism in ordinariness. The aerial combat scenes stake on a particular significance when one realises the intensity and precarious nature of those sorties – a microcosm of the tremendous hazards of conflict, where the enemy is not just the enemy but the way circumstance leans.
DUNKIRK inspires a reflection on the immense courage that all those men and women showed, not just in that event – but in the wider war which raged on for years after - at incredible human cost but, in the end, for a prize that many of us have, all too sadly, forgotten. We need to be grateful to great artists like Christopher Nolan for treating this subject with the respect and brilliance it merited. We need to be reminded of the huge victory that was ultimately the prize of Dunkirk and what that means today. We need to be mindful of the men and women who fought that war, those who have passed on - but also those who are with us yet.