War is supposed to be hell, but when filmmakers take it as their subject, they often make it look like a kind of heaven, one where men emerge from the muck as biblical angels, rising above their circumstances to fill us with terror and awe. It’s one of those subjects that present both artists and audiences with a sharply strung tightrope over a cavernous space. Many excellent moviemakers have tumbled off the edge as they try to depict the grand nature of conflict without allowing visual spectacle to blunt their insights about the horrors of war.
“Dunkirk,” Christopher Nolan’s film about a daring British effort to evacuate hundreds of thousands of troops stranded on a French beach in the early stages of World War II, is a significant accomplishment by any measure. And it is particularly notable for the way Nolan and his collaborators manage to make the violence of the war work to reinforce their ideas about the nature of conflict, rather than allow their stunning images to undercut their arguments.
War does have an aesthetic quality, of course. I’m working on a long-term project about the Vietnam War, which has meant watching hours of footage of napalm exploding in Vietnamese hamlets and rows of helicopters streaming across the sky. The weird blossoms of flame look like tropical flowers; the helicopters project a sense of order that is, of course, more illusion than reality.
It can be dangerously easy to detach those images from their results, to forget a little girl running down a road covered in burns, or to ignore the muck and blood into which those war machines deposited American soldiers. And Hollywood has often done that. Our action movies are full of luminous but oddly inconsequential explosions. They bristle with the machinery of war. Our heroes always win, and the civilians we see on the ground during fight scenes are intended to stoke our emotions, even though danger generally misses them by a carefully calibrated hair.
The beauty that Nolan and his cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema, capture in “Dunkirk” works to very different purposes. Rather than taking us out of the desperate conflict raging on and near the beach, the film’s gorgeous images heighten the sense of strangeness, dislocation and fear that dominates the movie.
The opening sequence takes place in the streets of a pretty little city that at first appears unmarked by war, save for its silence and emptiness; a city doesn’t feel like a city without people to occupy it. You shouldn’t be able to take a break to relieve yourself in the open without someone to yell at you, or to race through your neighbor’s back yards without cries of surprise or the barks of excited dogs.
At certain moments, Dunkirk looks like a fabulous destination for a pleasure trip. Nolan and Van Hoytema film the beach where the British forces wait for rescue and the skies where British and German pilots stalk each other in brilliant, at times almost tropical, color. At one point in the movie, I began trying to write all the shades of blue I could spot in my notes. The water seems unusually clear.
But as the planes tilt and whirl through the air, and bombed ships begin to list and sink, these spectacles become menacing. The horizon between sky and sea goes vertical. Inside a doomed ship, water advances from left to right along the screen like an unstoppable wall. The elements that normally tell us to expect sybaritic tropical bliss have become the agents of inexorable doom.
“Dunkirk” even reverses the polarity on the glamour of victory and defeat. Some of that is inherent to the story, which is about little pleasure boats doing what big, sexy military hardware could not. But the film leans into that idea rather than minimize it. It’s life preservers that are precious in this movie, not big guns.
Victory looks like pulling cold, shivering men into little boats and giving them tea. Defeat has a luminous quality to it. We see the jet trails that follow downed planes as they head toward the sea, or the pyre a pilot (Tom Hardy) makes of his plane to avoid giving it over to the enemy. That blaze illuminates his stoicism, but also his capture. Defiance may be a partial victory, but its companion is suffering.
“Dunkirk” even manages to make Winston Churchill’s June 4, 1940, speech to the House of Commons, by now a hoary cliche, seem fresh. We encounter it when Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), the soldier whose attempts to escape from the beach are a stand-in for the efforts of so many other desperate souls, makes it to safety and reads Churchill’s text on board a military train. Churchill’s words seem like a rallying cry to those of us who hear them from a safe civilian perch.
The expression on Tommy’s face when he glances up after “We shall never surrender” tells another story. Tommy’s surprise reminds us what Churchill’s speech really means: that Tommy and other young men like him are being asked to go into that same hell all over again.
“Dunkirk” almost could have been a silent movie, and at times, I wish it had been. The film is full of actors with wonderfully expressive faces: Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh can mine infinite reserves of emotion with just a few muscle movements; Hardy proves yet again that he can spend most of a movie with his face covered and still hold your attention; and Whitehead and Cillian Murphy’s faces beautifully convey the blankness of exhaustion and the strain of exertion.
The dialogue, by contrast, often lingers in a zone between clunkiness and exposition. I suppose some of it is necessary simply to move things along. But Nolan already took one step in the direction of silence by using text early in the movie to establish the larger circumstances of the film and its three parallel timelines. Just as he showed that using beauty can enhance the terror of a war film rather than minimize it, I wish he’d taken a step further and challenged us to remember that silence can sometimes be more expressive than any spoken words.