Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Harry Styles, Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy
Rated PG-13, 106 minutes
As the saying goes, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Well, assuming our current leaders aren’t the history-reading types, we must be repeating something, but what? In the face of so many unprecedented events currently circulating in the news, we would do well to find historical analogues where we can and draw from them whatever wisdom we can, and soon.
Inevitably, the movie theater is a good place to study. Where else can we consume our history lessons with such efficiency? Granted, it’s nothing new for movies to illustrate the parallels between the past and the present, but it’s an exercise that doesn’t get old. I’d rather see repetitive films than repetitive wars.
With “Dunkirk,” Christopher Nolan’s (“Interstellar”) first film based on true events, the British director acknowledges this ever-present need to learn from the past. In focusing on the more hopeful and inspiring byproducts of one of Britain’s most trying moments, Nolan delivers a powerful treatise on human tenacity, but while this lesson about the good that can come out of our darkest moments is beautifully assembled, it’s also dangerously nearsighted. For all his earnestness, Nolan seems to have forgotten that other saying about where good intentions often lead.
The film centers on the evacuation of British soldiers stranded on the French beaches of Dunkirk in World War II. To portray this pivotal moment of the war, Nolan takes to the air, the sea, and the land, showing the evacuation from the perspectives of a naval commander, Royal Air Force pilots, civilian boaters aiding the rescue, and a few bedraggled infantrymen scrambling through the chaos to find any possible way back home. At first the operation sees many tactics thwarted by the Germans, but as time goes on and the various stories converge and diverge, the Britons manage to get the upper hand on their predicament and eventually pull off a successful rescue. Even though it counts as a military loss, the moral victory that comes out of the evacuation energizes the British for the fight ahead.
“Dunkirk” is rife with tension from the opening moments, and that tension ebbs and flows throughout like a relentless tide, continuing to pulse even after the evacuation is over. With a clear and single-minded focus on the evacuation effort, Nolan forces himself to mine the details for drama, and he does so admirably. He also affords himself very little room for digression; at 106 minutes, this is the shortest film he’s made in nearly two decades, and undoubtedly the most straightforward entry in his filmography.
This is also Nolan’s most technically satisfying film to date, featuring haunting camerawork and a harrowing score. With minimal dialogue carrying along stories or characters (Tom Hardy, one of the film’s leads, has few enough lines that you can count them on two hands), the film has a stark, claustrophobic feel, which the sound design amplifies throughout. To depict war as Hell may be unoriginal, but Nolan’s execution of the truism is immaculate.
Less compelling, however, is Nolan’s moral stance. On the one hand, “Dunkirk” undeniably bears a message of hope: Humankind has shown its grit and bravery in the face of disaster before, and it will do so again. On the other hand, the film offers no substantive commentary on war itself, no exploration of the forces that lead humanity to these catastrophic boiling points. War is a part of life, “Dunkirk” meekly offers. Consequently, there are good guys and bad guys, people who deserve to live and people who deserve to die. Either Nolan doesn’t trust his viewers to comprehend the nuance of compassion, or he doesn’t believe in it.
In our current moment, with leaders who seem to be careening toward a new war (on top of the wars we’ve already been fighting for too long), what purpose does a film about the upside of war serve, except to lead us a little closer to the abyss? What is this piece of us-against-them machismo if not propaganda? I worry that, rather than the history lesson we desperately need to avoid repeating the horrors of Dunkirk and beyond, “Dunkirk” is itself a piece of our repeated history, yet another subtle dose of that reckless bloodlust that has never done anything but damage.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 8/11/17.