Ever get that “something’s
missing” feeling? You’re in a situation where everything appears in place but you
still sense there’s a missing piece. That was me watching Dunkirk, the just-released World War II epic about the evacuation
of Allied troops from that French city during the Nazi invasion of France. At
some point during the film, I flashed briefly to a memory of my mother tasting
her delicious spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove – manipulating a spoonful
as if testing a fine wine but with a perplexed expression – “did I forget the
oregano?” That’s what I was feeling. I was watching a fine film, an extremely
well-built recreation – but if felt somehow incomplete.
Notwithstanding my vague sense of a gap, there
is certainly no denying the significant craftsmanship in Dunkirk, the movie. Christopher Nolan (writing and directing) has
created and aligned an array of amazing images and brilliant set pieces to
re-enact this critical event from the early stages of the war. He tells the
story from three perspectives - the Ground, the Sea, and the Air. On the ground
waits over 300,000 British, French, and Dutch soldiers having retreated from
the Nazi invading offensive to the beaches of Dunkirk, a site well suited for
evacuation across the English Channel. Their situation is desperate. German
battalions are pressing hard – held back, precariously, by what remains of the
French army. The evacuation must happen soon or, as Churchill described, "the
whole root and core and brain of the British Army” will perish or be captured. On
the sea sail pieces of the British Navy, ships too large to reach the men
waiting in shallow water. They are trailed by hundreds of conscripted citizen
craft – fishing boats, pleasure craft and yachts - scrambling to reach the
beach and ferry men to the larger ships or back home. In the air, sparse teams
of RAF fighter planes attempt to fend off German bombers and strafing Stukas working
to prevent the evacuation.
Nolan, creator of some my
favorite films – Momento, The Prestige, Batman Begins, Interstellar
– seems to be using Dunkirk to stretch
his considerable movie making talents into the large-scale action film arena. He
goes old school in his detailed reenactment, employing thousands of extras to
create a massive war landscape instead of relying on CGI; assembling boats that
had participated in the real Dunkirk evacuation, and using genuine
era-appropriate planes for aerial scenes. This all pays off in giving Dunkirk an amazingly authentic feel.
Nolan is at his best in the air where a battle is waged between three spitfires
and several sets of Luftwaffe bombers and fighter escorts. You are almost in
the cockpit as the rat-tat-tat of the Spitfire’s guns is answered by the hard
bangs ahead from the German bombers’ rear cannons. Combining these detailed images
and sounds of battle with Hans Zimmer’s meager and haunting score, Nolan has
created a rare and effective dark realism.
Dunkirk will
certainly get high grades from the paid critics for its minimalistic approach –
as Nolan leans heavily on his detailed images in place of dialog and sentiment.
But that minimalism, including the film’s limited-scope focus on small chunks
of the crisis, also kept me from feeling the gravity and grandness of the
event. The intensity and desperation of those pinned down, the urgency of the
rescuing naval force, the skill and the bravery of the air-borne warriors – are
all adroitly illustrated; but the story was light on the humanity of it… the complete
drama of the miracle rescue is somehow lacking. Nolan gives brief and
late-coming glimpses of the heart in the event – the calling out of the places
the tiny rescue ships had come from as they approached the peer to take on
soldiers, the remembering of lost young heroes in home towns. But it seemed too
little to harmonize Nolan’s minimalism with the massiveness of the event. Dunkirk has all the pieces – so well
assembled and with such fine detail - the story is real and important. But for all
its fine attributes Dunkirk lacks the
emotional power to move it from good to great. 7 out of 10.
