Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” is, undeniably, about the famed World War II evacuation. But it’s also very much about how Christopher Nolan makes movies, and how he wants us to watch them.
Like other adventurous Nolan projects such as “Memento” and “Inception,” the new film is a weirdly structured but tantalizing jigsaw puzzle, its pieces assembled with the ingenuity of a maniacally complicated cuckoo clock.
It’s not enough for Nolan that his three storylines unfold side by side — they must track along different timeframes, too. The movie is like D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance,” but focused down to a single military event and with characters who eventually overlap.
In 1940, Dunkirk was both a humiliating defeat for the Allied forces — the German army having routed the British and French to the sea — and an unlikely morale boost.
The hundreds of thousands of soldiers stranded on the beach at Dunkirk relied on a withdrawal “navy” partly made up of countless small boats and ferries, many of them piloted by brave civilians crossing the English Channel. The story became the very model of victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.
Nolan’s complicated way to tell the tale is announced immediately. One narrative strand is titled “The Mole,” named for the Dunkirk sea wall that served as the only docking point for large ships. That story takes a week to unfold. Here we meet the closest thing the movie has to a focal point, a soldier (Fionn Whitehead) who will try anything to latch onto a departing vessel.
We also have the reassuring presence of a Navy commander played by Kenneth Branagh, whose performance consists almost entirely of standing on the pier and staring determinedly at the sea. Branagh does this stirringly.
The second is “The Sea,” a daylong push across the channel in one private boat. The plucky boat owner, nimbly played by the masterly Mark Rylance, takes his teenage son (Tom Glynn-Carney) and a young pal (Barry Keoghan) on the voyage. They pick up a shell-shocked survivor (Cillian Murphy) and steer toward France.
The third strand is “The Air,” which takes place over a single hour and rides along with two RAF pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) as they attempt to provide air cover for the retreat.
This section wouldn’t stand on its own, as it consists of a series of air battles; it seems to exist as an excuse for Nolan to show us IMAX-sized you-are-there views of what it would be like to dogfight above the English Channel. Reviewers who’ve seen the film in IMAX have raved about the effect. (The film was not screened that way at the press screening I attended.)
Nolan allows Hans Zimmer’s inventive score and Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech to provide the finishing touches.
For all the state-of-the-art technology and tricky structure, Nolan is basically flexing one of the oldest movie axioms: When you cut between two escalating situations — for instance, people trying to escape a burning house as firefighters across town scramble toward the blaze — you build suspense.
He proves the point repeatedly in “Dunkirk,” making the pulse pound even with three escalating situations and even when our brains tell us the events aren’t actually happening at the same time. Given the complicated time-shifting, when the storylines do finally coincide, it’s a thrill — although it’s possible you’re more impressed with the filmmaker’s bravado than with anything the characters are doing on screen.
Those characters are stock types caught up in the large sweep of events. Nolan is so sparing with dialogue and backstories that I found myself wondering whether he cast three escaping soldiers with nearly-indistinguishable actors precisely because he wanted them to remain anonymous (newcomer Whitehead is joined by Aneurin Barnard and One Direction star Harry Styles).
The whole apparatus is impressive, if sometimes hollow. Why do it this way? Does the time gimmick say something about how people experience trauma in different ways, or about how certain events are fated to intersect? I’m skeptical.
Maybe Nolan simply wants us to see the war film differently. On that level, mission certainly accomplished.
“Dunkirk” (3 stars)
The massive Allied evacuation from the beach at Dunkirk in 1940 is the occasion for Christopher Nolan’s tricky film, which tells three different stories unfolding across different timelines. The technical achievement is impressive, even if the movie’s a little hollow at its core. With Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance.
Rating: PG-13, for violence
Opening Friday: Alderwood, Alderwood Mall, Cinebarre Mountlake Terrace, Edmonds Theater, Everett Stadium, Galaxy Monroe, Marysville, Stanwood Cinemas, Meridian, Oak Tree, Pacific Place, Sundance Cinemas, Thornton Place Stadium, Woodinville, Cascade Mall
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