Review: ‘Dunkirk’ Is a Tour de Force War Movie, Both Sweeping and Intimate

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/movies/dunkirk-review-christopher-nolan.html

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One of the most indelible images in “Dunkirk,” Christopher Nolan’s brilliant new film, is of a British plane in flames. The movie recounts an early, harrowing campaign in World War II that took place months after Germany invaded Poland and weeks after Hitler’s forces started rolling into the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The plane, having glided to a stop, has been defiantly set ablaze by the pilot to avoid its being captured. It’s an image of unambiguous defeat but also an emblem of resistance and a portent of the ghastly conflagrations still to come.

It’s a characteristically complex and condensed vision of war in a movie that is insistently humanizing despite its monumentality, a balance that is as much a political choice as an aesthetic one. And “Dunkirk” is big — in subject, reach, emotion and image. Mr. Nolan shot and mostly finished it on large-format film (unusual in our digital era), which allows details to emerge in great scale. Overhead shots of soldiers scattered across a beach convey an unnerving isolation — as if these were the last souls on earth, terminally alone, deserted. (Seen on a television, they would look like ants.) Film also enriches the texture of the image; it draws you to it, which is crucial given the minimalist dialogue.

The movie is based on a campaign that began in late May 1940 in the French port city of Dunkirk, where some 400,000 Allied soldiers — including more than 200,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force, the British army in Western Europe — were penned in by the Germans. The British, faced with the capture or possible annihilation of their troops, initiated a seemingly impossible rescue. Named Operation Dynamo, this mission has assumed near-mythic status in British history and been revisited in books and onscreen; it shows up in “Mrs. Miniver,” a 1942 Hollywood weepie about British pain and perseverance in the war meant to encourage American support for the Allies.

War movies tend to play out along familiar lines, including lump-in-the throat home-front tales like “Mrs. Miniver.” “Dunkirk” takes place in battle, but it, too, is a story of suffering and survival. Mr. Nolan largely avoids the bigger historical picture (among other things, the reason these men are fighting is a given) as well as the strategizing on the front and in London, where the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, was facing the horrifying possibility of diminished military muscle. Churchill is heard from, in a fashion, but never seen. Mr. Nolan instead narrows in on a handful of men who are scrambling and white-knuckling their way into history on the sea, in the air and on the ground.

By turns intimate and sweeping, the film opens with six soldiers walking away from the camera down a spookily deserted street. Their bodies are shown in full, head to toe, and they are flanked by low buildings, the sort that now look so charming in touristic photographs. Slips of paper swirl around the men like autumn leaves. A few grab at the papers. One tries slurping water from a nearby garden hose; another pokes a hand through an open window, searching for a smoke. Still another reads one of the papers, which shows a map of the surrounding area encircled by arrows and ominous words of warning in English. He then crumples it, unbuckles his belt and begins to squat.

It’s a somewhat perplexing, awkwardly funny moment — this is a manifestly serious situation, and you’re about to watch a man defecate. You don’t know whether to laugh, but before you decide, shots ring out and the soldiers start running, the camera quickly following. The haunted emptiness is suddenly filled with the sounds of frantic escape and whizzing bullets. And then the men begin falling, one, two, three, until just the unbuckling one remains, scrambling first over a gate and soon onto a beach where thousands of other soldiers are massed and waiting. He silently takes in the extraordinary scene and then hustles over to a dune to begin undoing his belt again.

Scarcely a word has been uttered up to this point, yet much has been expressed: isolation; danger; desperation; fear; relief; and sheer, extreme bodily need and effort. Throughout this de facto prologue, Mr. Nolan emphasizes the concrete details, making you acutely aware of the fine-grained textures — the sores and embedded dirt on a man’s hands — and every resonant sound: the dribbling of water, the fluttering of paper, and the sharp crack and mechanical buzzing of rifle fire that turns into muffled thuds when bullets enter bodies. By the time the surviving soldier reaches the beach, you are already closely acquainted with his heavy breathing, wild fumbling and clumsy, chaotic running.

Soon, the scene switches to another port, where a British teenager, George (Barry Keoghan), is helping a father and son (Mark Rylance and Tom Glynn-Carney) unload a small yacht that’s been requisitioned for the Dunkirk mission. The three men instead set sail on their own, joining a civilian fleet — a rousing, motley armada of tugs, steamers, ferries and so on — that’s racing across the Channel. A third, astounding narrative section soon opens in the air, where three British Spitfire planes are quickly engaged in battle against German planes headed for Dunkirk, racing through the vast canopy and bobbing under clouds as the sun flashes, temporarily blinding them.

Mr. Nolan’s elastic approach to narrative works beautifully in “Dunkirk,” which oscillates among its three sections, each largely taking place in distinct locations in different time frames. The events on the beach — called the Mole for the breakwater that’s used as a dock — unfold during one week. The events on the sea occur in one day, while the air scenes transpire in an hour. The locations and the time periods are announced onscreen. At first the dividing lines aren’t always obvious as Mr. Nolan cuts from daytime scenes on the ground to those in the sea and in the air, a slight merging of space and especially of time that underlines the enormity of a fight seemingly without end.

Once Mr. Nolan begins switching between day and night, the lines dividing the three narrative segments mostly sharpen. Even as each section — with its individual dramas and perils — comes closer into view, Mr. Nolan keeps them all in dynamic play with one another. Some of this he achieves with stark visual echoes, as when water rushing into a downed Spitfire engulfs the pilot and elsewhere a soldier nearly drowns. (Tom Hardy plays the most critically important pilot, while a sympathetic Jack Lowden takes on a critical support role.) At one point, Mr. Nolan pulls the three narrative strands tightly together, creating a tremendous, enveloping sense of bone-deep dread.

“Dunkirk” is a World War II movie, one told through soldiers, their lived and near-death experiences and their bodies under siege. Names are generally irrelevant here; on the beach — and in the sea and air — what counts are rank, unit, skill and the operation, although more important is survival, making it through another attack and somehow avoiding exploding bombs. Mr. Nolan’s emphasis on the visceral reality of Dunkirk leaves much unsaid; even in some opening explanatory text, the enemy isn’t identified as Nazi Germany. The soldiers, of course, know exactly who they are fighting and perhaps even why, but in the field the enemy is finally the unnamed stranger trying to kill them.

The soldier who scrambles over the gate and onto the beach is called Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) in the credits, but I don’t remember hearing or reading his name. Mostly, I just thought of him as Our Boy, less because of his youth than because of the vulnerability communicated through Mr. Whitehead’s slight figure and tangible physical performance, his small and large gestures and moves: the darting, panicked eyes; the nervous, abrupt gestures; the hunched shoulders. In time, Tommy is joined by other soldiers waiting and running and ducking on the beach, the most important played by the equally fine Aneurin Barnard and the singer Harry Styles.

Mr. Nolan’s unyielding emphasis on the soldiers — and on war as it is experienced rather than on how it is strategized — blurs history even as it brings the present and its wars startlingly into view. “Dunkirk” is a tour de force of cinematic craft and technique, but one that is unambiguously in the service of a sober, sincere, profoundly moral story that closes the distance between yesterday’s fights and today’s. Mr. Nolan closes that distance cinematically with visual sweep and emotional intimacy, with images of warfare and huddled, frightened survivors that together with Hans Zimmer’s score reverberate through your body. By the time that plane is burning — and a young man is looking searchingly into the future — you are reminded that the fight against fascism continues.