Dunkirk – written and directed by Christopher Nolan. WWII Docudrama. 106 minutes Color 2017.
★★★★★
The Story: The Germans surround Allied armies of 400,000 on a beach in Belgium with no escape, while a flotilla of smacks, little yachts, and pleasure boats strike out on the high seas to rescue them.
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I lived through The Depression, Hitler’s rise, World War II, Hiroshima. When the war ended, I tied tin cans on the back of my bike and raced up and down the boulevard hollering with joy like everyone else. I was twelve. I lived in an English household. I remember The Blitz; we had a handsome British soldier lodged my bedroom, Captain Byatt. And I remember Dunkirk.
Oh, the surge of heart we all felt for fellow Britains for courage and nautical skill and resolve! Wow! It was hard to believe they’d brought it off, but they had! It seemed each boat had taken upon itself to sail over. As though those Sunday fishermen all had a mind of their own and it was the same mind. It was the largest armada of small boats ever to set sail on the sea.
The film showing this crazy escapade is wonderful in that before special effects production, the film we see could never have been made. I am thankful for seeing scenes otherwise too complicated to stage and too expensive and too dangerous.
The film is told in three narratives.
The first is the spectacle of the army trapped and holding off the enemy, and lined up on the beach, waiting for rescue ships which do not come, and when they come make big fat targets for submarines and Luftwaffe.
The second story is that of Royal Airforce pilots in three Spitfires who fly over to supply air cover.
The third is the story of a father and son and local boy who set out on their pleasure craft and head for Dunkirk to rescue the soldiers.
All of this is wonderful and beautifully done.
Kenneth Branagh plays the naval Commander leading embarkation from an exposed wharf and Mark Rylance plays the father at the wheel of his boat. These two anchor the film with known faces and known energies. All the rest of the large cast is played by actors one does not know, and they therefore become the anonymous soldiers and citizens who actually lived it all out.
What I miss is the sense of a communal effort. For the first of these stories tells the through-story of a single young soldier and his adventures harrowing and heroic to get on a boat to England. So much time and attention is given to these complex miracles that the greater miracle, that a hundred little vessels set out to save him is lost. Did save him. Brought him and 400,000 others by the skin of their teeth and the seat of their pants back to the sceptered isle, in a hundred bobbing boats.
This error is so elaborate and interesting and spectacular in its chapters that we do not tear our eyes from it, but the fact is that it eats up film time from the real story which is that the English people gathered their resolve under the national resolve of Churchill to collectively save this soldier, and we only see one strand of it, Mark Rylance’s in his old pleasure cruiser.
Rylance is wonderful, so is everything seen, taught, told. I hope never to forget the sight of the Spitfire seen from above as it wings its way silently over the beaches across which the Armies queue on their way to the water.
I saw it at an Imax on recommendation, and, while I don’t know therefore what Dunkirk would feel like in a lesser projection, I enjoyed it. I had never seen Imax before. The world had never seen a Dunkirk before and might never see such a thing again. If I were you, I would not miss the chance.