AndrewBloom
7/10 6 years ago
[7.4/10] There’s an old cliché that goes something along the lines of “One death is a tragedy. Ten-thousand deaths is a statistic.” Generals, strategists, and even prime ministers have to think in statistics. They have to peel back and look at the bigger picture, to not only win today’s fight, but tomorrow’s fight, and the fighter after that, in the hopes of winning the war, even if it means sacrificing the few so that the many can go on.
*Dunkirk* is uniquely focused on those moral calculations, and the differences they make as checkmarks on a ledger versus boots on the ground. It contrasts the 10,000 view of the British and French soldiers stranded at Dunkirk in need of rescue, where Churchill and his brain trust aim to bring home only 30,000 out of 300,000 men lined up on those beaches, in the name of the greater goods, with the view from those in and around those perilous environs, doing everything to can, up to and including giving their own lives, in order that more may see home again.
To accomplish this, writer-director Christopher Nolan divides his story up into three different, interwoven parts. One concerns a group of pilots in the Royal Air Force, there to take out the German warplanes taking out British soldiers standing on the beaches of Dunkirks like sitting ducks while they wait to evacuate. A second concerns a trio of civilians – a father and son, and a young friend who joins them – in their endeavor to heed the call for help and head to Dunkirk to help save their countrymen. And the third and meatiest story centers on a young soldier, doing everything in his power to escape that hostile environment, and enduring setback after setback along the way.
In addition to that overall moral dilemma – the question of expending the resources to save enough soldiers to fight the war at home vs. to rescue all souls at Dunkirk and risk losing the resources and manpower to stave off Hitler’s advance – Nolan bakes in other smaller, but no less potent ethical questions throughout the film.
The main airman balances his dwindling fuel supply and with it, his ability to go back home, with his sense of duty to taking out the Luftwaffe that are terrorizing his countrymen on those beaches and giving his fellow soldiers a chance to make it home. The assisting civilians have to consider how to deal with a shell-shocked, dangerous soldier they rescue on the way, how to handle getting as many evacuees into the boat as possible without endangering more, and how to respond when they too are forced to face the dangers, expected and avoidable, that come with entering a war zone. And the escaping soldier has to contend with the morality of pretending to be part of a medical evac crew in order to leave, of how what flag a person is flying affects how they’re treated and valued, and who’s chosen to face the bullet fire and death that lays outside a safe hiding place in order that more may live. These moral choices are in the bones of *Dunkirk*, in ways big and small, and force the film’s characters and its audience to confront the way that ethical calculus changes and is brought to the fore at a time of war.
Despite that, *Dunkirk* is, in many ways, a surprisingly conventional film. A creative like Christopher Nolan, whose bread and butter has been reimagining and reinterpreting everything from genre films to superhero flicks, defies expectation by largely playing this one straight. There’s some of the usual “war is hell” beats, the complexity of decent and desperate men getting by in a hopeless situation, and a sense of ultimate triumph from our heroes coupled with some measured, if important, sacrifices. There are few twists or reveals in *Dunkirk*, a notable departure from a director who’s deployed some version of the mystery box, or the unexpected turn, in almost all of his prior films. This is a modern war film, but one that follows in the footsteps of its predecessors rather than charting a novel or truly inventive path.
It also leans into a presentation steeped in realism, with a style that is polished, but unglamorous. *Dunkirk* does anything but glorify war, or the people who fight it (save for a conspicuously noble Kenneth Branagh). Instead, it doesn’t revel in, but also doesn’t shy away from, people dying without fanfare, without mercy, and without kindness, in that sort of detached, unblinking way that war fosters. If you squint hard, you can see the seams and the way Nolan telegraphs how these disparate events will tie into his overall theme and each other, but you could be forgiven for viewing much of the film as a survey, jumping from place to place and person to person, and merely glancing at them as an observer, a compiler of moments, without judgment or approval.
In that, *Dunkirk* can occasionally be opaque or hard to follow. It’s laudable that, outside of a few noteworthy exceptions, the film’s characters don’t speak in the grand oratories or perfect patter that other prestige pictures present. Instead, they mumble and fumfer and mutter under their breaths, which adds to the realism of the film, while often making the dialogue hard to discern. At the same time, the movie includes scores of young men who all have roughly the same clothes, the same look, and even the same haircut. That too feels true-to-life, but also makes it hard to pick out who Nolan’s camera is focusing on or whose story we’re following at the moment.
But that appearance of undifferentiated hordes of men helps create the sense that the conflict at Dunkirk, viewed from such a wide perspective, is a clash between two grand organisms rather than individuals. In the film, the antagonists are not the Germans, and to a lesser extent, the heroes are not the British, or at least, the British are not the heroes. Instead, the antagonist is Dunkirk itself, a treacherous place where however man-made the threats may be, the challenges and obstacles feel more like parts of the same big natural disaster than a conflict of man-against-man. And yet, Nolan is committed to showing those lives in miniature, the individual people caught up in that larger-than-life struggles, chewed up in the machine that views them as numbers on a casualty report rather than human beings to be saved.
Nolan accomplishes this visually by framing his lead characters in relation to the unpredictable events around them, juxtaposing the near individuals with the distant war machines and locales before flipping that perspective. Civilian ships see dogfighters in the sky. Airmen see their fellow soldiers stranded on the Dunkirk sands. And young combatants gaze out at the horizon hoping to see ships to come in rescue them. With dusky grays and greens and other dark hues, Nolan unites them as cells within the same organism, shifting and moving and reaction to one another, pulled by the same invisible strings, however far apart they may seem.
And when his film ties these various threads together, Nolan creates a sense of glory, of triumph, in the way that those civilians fill in the missing fractions of those moral equations. *Dunkirk* is never more laudatory, nor more straightforwardly celebratory, than when it show that ramshackle fleet of civilian ships breaching the horizon and emerging to save their fellow men. Alongside numerous other individuals, including those with uniforms and those without them, *Dunkirk* champions the triumph of empathy and bravery that results in everyday people risking their lives to save yet more souls, while those who have to look larger maps and troop movements cannot countenance such individual calculations. As much as the film embraces the horrors of war, it also embraces the sense of altruism and courage that allows warriors and regular folk alike to overcome it.
Which is why *Dunkirk*’s most stirring passage is its final one where, breaking from the faux verite approach that served the film through most of its runtime, Nolan embraces narrative collision and montage. The music swells; heroes are bathed in amber light, and the most famous lines to emerge from that conflict are spoken with the voice of one who saw its hardships and horrors firsthand.
It’s hard to say that *Dunkirk* is meant to inspire. It’s too committed to making the audience hold its breath and wince at the realities of the harsh and indifferent deaths that awaited so many on those beaches. But it is, at least, meant to comfort, meant to instill gratitude and appreciation, for those individuals who see the moral dilemmas that men in war rooms don’t have time for, and aims to stop tragedies, rather than compare statistics.
