Dunkirk (2017)

Stranded on the Beach
or
"This Was Our Finest Hour/Day/Week"

The events of the evacuation of Dunkirk are well known (at least they SHOULD be, whether or not you're a student of History). In May of 1940, the Nazi's had pushed British and French troops to the continent's edge with nowhere else to go but the ocean. And across that channel was home...and safety. Unless you're a member of The Channel Swimming Association, there is no way out. You have literally been "pushed to the sea." 

The Tribal Wisdom is what the imagination produces and what propaganda encourages without attention to detail—thousands of troops stuck on the beach that are rescued by the efforts of the maritime industry and common Brits with boats who saw the need and took to the sea to do their part and bring "the boys" home. Very dramatic. Very inspiring. 

And quite false...to a degree. There's less drama if you know that the evacuation took over a week (unless you're on the beach waiting, of course). There's less inspiration if you find out that the "little ships" of the rescue were mostly commandeered by the British Navy and piloted by sailors to Dunkirk with or without the help of the owners. But, not all of them; civilians did take part. Just not in the numbers the wisdom of the tribe can accommodate and be pleased and amazed and proud of itself and have the story go from happenstance to legend. Inspiration for a war that still had a long way to go.

So, how does writer-director Christopher Nolan handle this? He has it both ways. Quite ingeniously.

We start by following a small patrol of British troops walking down a Dunkirk street in the rain. A rain of leaflets. Dropped by German Messerschmitt's strafing the area, they are propaganda fliers telling the Brit's to give up because their position is untenable. They are surrounded. There's just enough time to take in this message when truth is given to the threat—bullets start flying sporadically and the patrol changes their pace from a casual march to a disorganized run.

We will never see the advancing Nazi army throughout the movie—their presence will only be noted by bullets, bullet-holes and the presence of Messerschmitt's in the air.* Despite sprinting to the sides of the streets, climbing over fences, taking the cover provided by the back-alleys behind the brownstones, one by one, the patrol is cut down leaving only Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), to dart for the French lines crouched behind sand-bag enforcements defending the sea and makes it towards the beach.

The Mole/ a Week

Talk about a beachhead: acres of beach stretch between the open sea and the sea-wall, expanding and contracting with the tides, enticingly narrowing the gap between entrapment and home by mere yards. That beach is covered by meandering soldiers, the transports they came in, beached boats uselessly stranded, and bodies, waiting for a burial that might occur by the shifting sands if they cannot be transported to an internment at home. Even that represents a evocation of time, a slow race of forces that will be decided one way or another...given time. Time is a major player in Dunkirk.

The time on the Dunkirk beach is taken up with two activities—waiting for the ships to dock by the mole (the long pier that juts out into the channel at high tide) and trying to survive, as the area is strafed by German planes that make periodic runs trying to inflict as much damage on the soldiers on the mole and the beach, with an arsenal much more damaging than leaflets. For the soldiers, the time is spent just trying to survive until rescue arrives. But time and tide wait for no man and one has to work to increase one's chances, given the opportunity.

On the beach, Tommy connects with another soldier who he encounters burying one of the soldiers on the beach. Gibson (Aneurin Barnard), is one of the thousands waiting for the transports that seem to take forever to cross the Channel. Together, they conspire about how to get on the next ship at the earliest possible opportunity. It doesn't take long for them to see that the wounded, for whom time is the shortest, are given priority on the mole. They "volunteer" themselves and one of the many wounded left unattended to "cut the lines" and get on the next ship. They are dismayed to find that even though the wounded are given priority, their attendants are not.

Their next step is to hide in the cross-beams under the mole to try to smuggle themselves on the next ship. While doing that, they are shocked to see the ship they had planned to take destroyed in a bombing attack. They manage to help another soldier named Alex (Harry Styles of "One Direction"). With Alex, their next attempt is more successful, managing to scramble onto the next ship, but once in the channel, the ship is struck by a torpedo and sunk. A number of skiffs, one commanded by a soldier played by Cillian Murphy, start the journey back to the beach...and more waiting.

And at this point, things may get a bit confusing for the audience. We have already seen Cillian Murphy's unnamed soldier, but earlier, in another section of the film, plucked from the sea and suffering from a debilitating shell-shock. This will take some explaining (even though Nolan announces his intentions with a mathematical economy).

Dunkirk is Nolan's shortest feature, save only for his first, Following. That economy of time is split up by three points of interest: The Mole/One Week (which we've been talking about), The Sea/One Day, which takes place over a single day (fudging history a bit), and The Air/One Hour. All sequences are spread evenly throughout the film's 106 minute running time, creating a juxtaposition of events that doesn't match a linear timeline. Nolan plays with the sequence of events, cutting across the ones that took a week to play out, the ones that took a day, and that only take an hour of time, warping the chronology in a consciously planned jumble to create the biggest pay-off for the film, a strategy he used in Following, Memento, Inception, and—thanks to the time-warping abilities of black holes—Interstellar. And so that 106 minutes contains the week of the stranded soldiers on the beach, the day of one particular mariner, Mr. Dawson (the ever-reliable Mark Rylance), who, with his son (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his friend (Barry Keoghan), takes on the rescue journey himself rather than have his boat conscripted by the military, and an hour of time for two RAF pilots, Collins (Jack Lowden) and Farrier (Tom Hardy, who continues to show why he's amazing), who are attempting to knock out the stuka's from making their withering attacks before their own fuel runs out.

The Sea/ a Day

The Air/ an Hour

Even though Nolan puts a title to the beginning of each sequence, that strategy might not sink in—or will be long forgotten by the time linear discrepancies start popping up, leaving some in the audience, like the soldiers in the film, feeling stranded on the beach. With an awful lot of actors of limited fame on-screen, the audience might have long given up trying to follow the details of who's who/what's what/ and when's when and find themselves not caring, or even thinking that the careful film-making has gotten terribly sloppy. That's not true, but in its conception, Nolan might have over-estimated his audience. But, the studios said the same thing about Inception and no one had a problem with that (and if they did, the visuals made people go back for a second viewing).

That may happen with Dunkirk, too, although the material is far more bitter and tragic, even if sometimes you have to shake yourself to realize what it is you're seeing. The set-pieces and episodes of each time-line are of a piece, although of the three, the one that has to do the continuity heavy-lifting is The Mole sequences—Nolan plays each one to its logical conclusion of where it is safe to cut away, usually once one of the beached trio achieves some sort of safety. The other sequences—The Sea and The Air—being much shorter through-stories afford to have hanging themes that are interrupted by The Mole sequences without doing much damage.

If The Mole is a survival story, The Sea is drama, with conflicts between the participants as Rylance's Mr. Dawson forges ahead with his part, despite arguments and set-backs, especially once Murphy's shell-shocked soldier is dragged aboard. Rylance is a versatile and cunning actor and his devotion to the enterprise is communicated with an unwavering tone to his voice and a purpose behind the eyes, the source of which is only explained eventually. Such is Rylance's skill that never once does one suspect him of being crazy, although he is clearly setting off on a channel-crossing that may prove suicidal.

And the shortest of the film-length sequences—but the busiest—is the very compact one in The Air, which is pure action, and unrelenting action at that. Three RAF planes attempt to take out the clutch of German planes interfering with the evacuation. Before long, the squadron leader is taken out, leaving two pilots to take on the Germans. If Nolan's work in the other sequences is stately (in the Mole) and shaky-cam personal (in the Sea), The Air is a tour de force of aerial acrobatics and keeping a tight reign on camera positions to keep the audience focused on who has whom in one's sights. It is also testament to how good an actor Tom Hardy is, as, for the most part, he does most of his acting with his eyes, his face hidden behind an air-mask (not unlike his Bane character in The Dark Knight Rises).

Nolan manages to make it all mesh and come together for a final fifteen minutes that makes it feel like a love-letter to the British Isles, warts and all, certainly to the souls who came together, conscripted or not, to actually "bring the soldiers home" rather than just paying lip-service to it. At that point, civilian and military become one, an idea that seems almost unimaginable today with lengthy adventures half-a-world away. It displays an unselfish, even heroic, payback from the protected to the protectors that our global conflicts make practically impossible. These are the things one thinks about during Dunkirk, with its long stretches that go without dialog or exposition, but just let events play out visually, without having some chatty by-stander keeping the audience informed about what's at stake.

At the same time that Nolan is messing with the filmic space-time continuum, he's also saying something about the dichotomy of truth and the greater good. In more than a few occasions in the film a character will come to a conclusion that just isn't born out in fact, or withhold a truth because it is the right—the decent or most practical thing—thing to do. It's like with so much sacrificing going on, the actuality of things becomes just another casualty, even if it's to keep a person without hope to keep going, to provide solace to the wounded, or to shore up a country in desperate need of solidarity, when truths are anything but self-evident.

Dunkirk takes chances, sometimes in thrilling ways. It's good to see Nolan find a bit more footing and discipline—a discipline that involves experimentation—that marks his work at its best. But, one becomes weary of the film around the half-way mark. Perhaps it's Hans Zimmer's concretish, thudding score, which seems to have as its major instrument a metronome—in case anyone hadn't figured out the whole time-motif thing—that more often interferes with the story-telling than it supports. It creates a disconnect that fights against Nolan's immersive experience, creating irritation more than something that pulls the movie together.

* Not precisely true: we do see them at the end out of focus and mere presences, but despite their constant threat and actions, to reveal anything else would be a spoiler. Another Nolan dichotomy.