Land, sea, and air

After the evacuation of over 300,000 Allied troops from the French beach of Dunkirk in 1940, Winston Churchill announced to the House of Commons, “A miracle of deliverance, achieved by valor, by perseverance, by perfect discipline, by faultless service, by resource, by skill, by unconquerable fidelity, is manifest to us all.”

In Dunkirk, a shattering and stirring retelling of that rescue, writer/director Christopher Nolan undercuts Churchill’s lofty eloquence to some degree, demonstrating that no human service or discipline this side of heaven is ever perfect or faultless. Yet within his clear-eyed realism, Nolan manifests the miracle all the same.

Always the master time manipulator, he divides the story into three parts—land, sea, and air—each with separate chronologies. Land, which occurs over the course of a week, opens on a sequence that is more of an execution than a gunfight. Within seconds the lone survivor (Fionn Whitehead), a boy in a man’s uniform, finds himself yet another fish in a different barrel. His wide, traumatized eyes take in hundreds of thousands of soldiers waiting futilely, like lines of sheep to be slaughtered, on the sun-bleached sand for rescue. He joins a scrabble of other terrified lads making various attempts to get to safety. Few are noble; all are understandable.

Sea, transpiring over the course of a day, centers on a middle-aged father (Mark Rylance) who volunteers to sail across the English Channel under heavy fire to rescue as many of his countrymen as his little pleasure cruiser can carry. This craft, and hundreds of ferries, fishing boats, and yachts like it, must act as humble replacements for the destroyers and hospital ships that have been bombed by the Germans.

Air occurs over the course of an hour as a trio of RAF pilots do battle with the German Luftwaffe to provide cover to the civilian vessels.

As the film progresses, the three stories intercut with greater and greater immediacy until they merge during the final brilliant moments. In his past movies like Memento and Inception, Nolan’s nonlinear framing has come close to gimmickry. Here, this occasionally disorienting approach is absolutely worthwhile. As the separate narratives do their individual work, it becomes clear, in a quiet closing scene, how each contributes to the greater story of Nazi defeat.

In an unusual move, Nolan never bothers to lay out the historical background. But why should he? Nearly every viewer will already understand the stakes and the terrible tyranny Europe might have fallen under had the Allied forces failed. More surprising is that he doesn’t provide any backstory for the characters either.

We don’t know anything about them beyond their names. Not where they came from, what their families are like, or what plans they might have if they make it home alive. Nolan’s entire point seems to be we don’t need to. Helped immensely by Hans Zimmer’s screeching, ticking, pounding score that gives voice to abstract notions like anxiety and dread, Nolan brings us so intimately into the men’s experiences, our common humanity alone creates empathy for their choices—both the heroic and the cowardly.

It bears mentioning that Nolan brings us viscerally into the hell of war without turning to the gore now common to films in this genre. Dunkirk is rated PG-13 almost solely for the intensity of the scenes, not for their bloodiness. Blurred images of men burning, drowning, and blowing up wound not so much the eyes as the soul. The MPAA also cites brief bad language. It must have been very brief. I don’t doubt it’s there, but I didn’t notice it.

What we’re left with at the end of the horror, panic, and grim determination is a dawning sense of grace. We at last hear Churchill’s rousing “We shall fight on the beaches” speech not from the British bulldog but from a young soldier feeling crushed under a weight of guilt and failure, convinced his nation is more likely to spit on him than cheer him. As he reads the words from the newspaper, a wider, truer perspective dawns—whatever his deficiencies, he too has been used by the hand of Providence.