“Dunkirk” recreates of an early event in World War II when the
German blitzkrieg flanked and encircled the entire British army at
the beaches of Dunkirk while the German Luftwaffe bombed them from
above and German U-Boats terrorized the British channel.
It is entirely possible that the large majority of the British army,
around 400,000 men, may have died on that beach. The British navy was
not sending the bulk of their destroyers to evacuate the men because
of the superiority of the German air force and submarine fleet. The
last and only hope was to draft all the “little ships” of the
England, civilian boats, to cross the channel and pick up the boys.
As a retreat it was so successful it became the stuff of legend. Only
40,000 men were expected to live. The British with the help of the
civilian effort rescued ten times that amount and a good amount of
the French army too.
Writer and Director Christopher Nolan treats the subject matter with
solemnity and reverence. Individual stories are sacrificed to the
events as a whole. (In fact, I can’t remember most of the names of
the characters.) There is no back-story and no locations that are not
on Dunkirk, therefore no characters that aren’t on-the-ground
soldiers. This minimalism suits the sense of isolation and the
impending doom felt by the men on the beach.
What is innovative is the structure of the story. Here, again,
Director Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar)
engages his forte. The movie is divided into three parts and
seamlessly switches between the three. The first is the Mole
(french word for pier thing on the beach) and takes place over a week
and covers the entire week
that the evacuation took place in.
The second is the Sea and
takes place over a single day that the little ships were involved in
the evacuation. The third is the Air and takes place over a single
hour that the British Air Force provided a cover mission for the
evacuation. The Air’s hour takes place during the Sea’s day which
takes place during the Mole’s week. It is not necessarily intuitive
that these stories could seamlessly move back and forth between each
other, but Nolan once again proves that he knows how to clearly tell
a seemingly convoluted story. I was not particularly confused as to
what was happening when.
And it makes sense story-wise. If
Nolan had told the story straight chronologically, the second and
especially the third story-line would have been sandwiched unfairly
near the end, thereby reducing the historical importance of the sea
and air efforts. This way, they are all given equal time (even though
the their times are unequal) and the movie has this interesting
relativistic effect. The faster the characters move, the slower time
seems to move for them, and an hour in a British Spitfire roaring
across the channel equals the
time spent by a man walking on the ground.
Most of the actors, though talented like Tom Hardy (airplane) and
Cillian Murphy (ground), could have been replaced because of the
deliberate motive of the movie to have the scenario overpower any one
individual story. There is one exception and that is the civilian
captain of one of the little ships, played by Mark Rylance (Bridge
of Spies). The nobility of the
man shines through and gives incarnate form to the humble and
collective spirit of Dunkirk that became the stuff of legend. His
interactions with a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) provide
the heart of the movie. “There’s no turning back from this, son,”
he states and there is a power in the understated yet unwavering
purpose behind his intonations. Keep Calm and Carry On indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment