Commander Bolton: The tide's turning now.
Captain Winnant: How can you tell?
Commander Bolton: The bodies are coming back.
Dunkirk doesn’t
obey any of the rules of modern commercial moviemaking. It doesn’t bother with
backstory for its characters, it doesn’t linger on explosions or the human
wreckage they cause, there is no “romantic interest” – there are barely even
any women.
What it does instead is concentrate on the seemingly random. We follow a group of soldiers fleeing gunfire
along French streets, picked off one by one until a single man is left. We see
a mute survivor recycle the uniform from a corpse he happens upon, before
burying it in the sand. We watch a shellshocked officer, rescued from wreckage
by chance, cower in the belly of a boat. We see interminable lines of men standing
on the piers, in the shallows, strafed by Stukas as they wait for deliverance. Some
survive; others don’t. This is what was real.
Chrisptopher Nolan has been criticised for overwhelming his
characters with artifice. I think that’s
a misunderstanding of his method.
Although it deals with history rather than speculative fantasy or magic
realism, the film’s three nested timeframes work in essentially the same way as
the layered dreamscapes of Inception,
or the variable timeframes wrought by relativity in Interstellar. We see events
from the space of a week on the beach, containing a single day on a rescue boat
at sea and finally one desperate hour in the air. The procession is not linear, and events are
sometimes repeated from different viewpoints. What seems at first to be random
is in fact connected at every level.
There are no star turns: Mark Rylance’s sober boat captain
is as understated as Tom Hardy’s pragmatic Spitfire pilot, his face half-hidden
under his oxygen mask. Cillian Murphy’s nameless, context-less “shivering
soldier” displays the raw emotion of a man who has seen too much and can take
no more. Even pop star Harry Styles subverts his charisma to the demands of a not entirely sympathetic role. And relative newcomer Fionn Whitehead fulfills the role of viewpoint character - his name is "Tommy" - with a workmanlike credibility.
If there is one single voice to
unify the action and draw all these experiences together, it’s not an actor's; it's that of Hans Zimmer,
whose score moves from the urgently atonal to an evisceration of Elgar’s Nimrod
theme from the Enigma Variations. It’s as much sound design as music, yet it’s
an aural environment which stays in the head for many hours after the film has
ended.
