by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I saw a quite remarkable recent
movie, Dunkirk, one of two films
released in 2017 dealing with the fabled British retreat and evacuation from
the French beach at Dunkirk (or, as the French themselves spell it, Dunkerque)
in 1940 between the fall of France to Nazi Germany and the Battle of Britain,
in which Adolf Hitler and his air minister Hermann Göring attempted to bomb the
people of Britain in general and London in particular into submission with
sustained aerial attacks, only the British fighter planes, the Hurricane and
the Spitfire, existed in large enough numbers (and had enough pilots to fly
them) they were able to shoot down a lot of the German bombers. (They were helped
by a new technology, radar, which enabled the British to figure out where the
German planes were coming from and in what direction they were flying; the
Germans could have reversed the tide of battle by bombing the radar stations,
but after they tried twice, they gave up.) The air attacks were supposed to
soften up Britain prior to a land invasion across the English Channel, but
instead the Nazis never launched the invasion and British prime minister
Winston Churchill got the one thing he knew would make the difference between
whether or not his country survived intact and independent: American entry into
the war on the British side.
The two films about Dunkirk released in 2017 were
Dunkirk, dealing with the actual
evacuation; and Darkest Hour,
dealing with the political machinations in the British government and
particularly the rivalry between Winston Churchill, appointed as interim prime
minister of a national unity government after Neville Chamberlain stepped down
just months before his death of cancer in late 1940; and Lord Halifax, who’d
been Chamberlain’s foreign minister and was inclined to accept Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini’s offer to mediate a peace deal between Britain and Germany.
Churchill’s attitude towards a peace, brokered by Mussolini or anyone else, was
no thanks and get the hell out of here: unlike a lot of others on the British
Right, he knew Hitler and the Nazis posed a huge danger to the peace and
freedom of the world, and though he rallied the British people to a bitter-end
resistance with his rhetoric he was well aware that Britain could not beat the
Nazis on their own and he carried on a secret correspondence with U.S.
President Franklin Roosevelt (both signed their letters “Former Naval Person,”
since Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty and Roosevelt Assistant
Secretary of the Navy in World War I) on ways to get around an isolationist
Congress and get the U.S. into the war. That’s the story told in Darkest
Hour; the story told in Dunkirk is how the British Expeditionary Force, trapped on
the beach as the Nazis swept through France and easily overcame what there was
of any French resistance, were moved off it again in what was by any measure a
military defeat — a hair’s-breadth avoidance of total disaster — but became a huge
political win for the Churchill government and ultimately saved both 300,000
British and 100,000 French troops from either annihilation or capture so they
could take part in later battles of the war.
Dunkirk was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, a
filmmaker best known for the so-called “Dark Knight” trilogy of Batman movies that starred Christian Bale as Batman, and
also for Memento and Inception. Nolan, who’s known for non-linear storytelling and
a dark view of the world, had never before either written or directed a film
based on a true story, and indeed there are parts of Dunkirk in which one starts to wonder not only “Where are
we?” but “When are we?” as he
freely intercuts between parts of the action that take place on land (mostly on
or about “The Mole,” the pier the British were counting on being able to use to
moor their ships and therefore take the men they were rescuing off the beach in
an orderly fashion), at sea (mostly in the middle of the English Channel on the
ships — ranging in size from Navy vessels to yachts and other pleasure craft
that were pressed into service by the British government to get as many men off
as possible), and in the air (mostly from German planes — heavy bombers, the
notorious Stuka dive bombers — equipped with the so-called “Jericho Trumpets,”
sirens attached to the plane that made them even louder than their engines did
and were supposed to intimidate anyone on the ground below where the bombs were
going to go off). I haven’t been a fan of much of Nolan’s previous work — I
found the first two films in his Batman trilogy too somber and negative (though the third one, 2012’s The
Dark Knight Rises, was quite good) and
thought Inception was a movie
weakened severely by its director’s quirks, in particular his unwillingness to
construct plots that make sense. (Yes, I know that Inception was supposed to be about dreams, and in particular a new technology
that allows people in a control room to put someone else through a dream they
have programmed for him or her, but I expect even a dream movie to make some level of sense; to my mind, the best dream movie
ever made is Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. from 1924.)
Well, working within the confines of a true story (though
attentive imdb.com “Goofs” posters still noticed some mistakes, notably sorts
of car interiors, telephone poles, harbor cranes and apartment blocks that
didn’t exist in 1940) proved good discipline for Nolan: though there are still
some odd time displacements in this movie — Charles said this was the most “meanwhile”
movie we’d seen since the 1916 silent version of Jules Verne’s 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea, in which so many
titles began with the word “meanwhile” that at one juncture Charles complained,
“‘meanwhile’ to what?,” and we do
get some typical Nolanesque cutbacks to events that actually occurred before
the ones we were just watching — for the most part it’s a taut, disciplined
modern-day movie whose basic point was that all wars, even the ones fought for the noblest of causes
(and a war designed to stop Hitler’s vile attempt to conquer the world and
exterminate large chunks of the human population is about as “noble” or “just”
as war ever gets), are ultimately pointless wastes of human life and treasure.
When I looked up Dunkirk on
imdb.com I found a review that faulted the film for not creating any heroic
story arcs, not offering much in the way of individualized characterizations of
the evacuees (the most interesting people in the movie are a well-to-do
middle-aged man who sails his yacht across the English Channel to pick up
evacuees, his son — played by an almost ethereally beautiful blond-haired young
man who wears a red sweater that practically becomes a character itself — and
their deckhand, who’s fatally wounded by a flyer who ditched his plane in the
Channel and was suffering from what was then called “shell shock” and is now
named post-traumatic stress disorder; the crazy pilot assaults the deckhand and
inadvertently kills him, and after the evacuation the son places a story with
the local newspaper proclaiming the deckhand a fallen hero of Dunkirk), and for
maintaining an emotionally somber tone throughout. Well, I liked that about this movie!
It did seem odd that we saw only one woman, briefly, during
the movie — a middle-aged woman serving the men aboard a minesweeper that was
one of the craft being used to evacuate the soldiers (until the Germans
dive-bombed it into oblivion) — there weren’t the obligatory flashbacks showing
the soldiers with the girls back home they abandoned to fight there would have
been in a film like this made either in the U.S. or Britain during the war. But
Nolan’s approach worked beautifully in dramatizing the sense of panic that must
have swept across the soldiers waiting on the beach, desperately hoping that
they would be rescued and seeing craft after craft sunk by the Germans until
they inexplicably pulled back from the beach and stopped interfering with the
British retreat (a military boner on par with the one Union Army General George
B. McClellan pulled after beating the Confederates at the Battle of Antietam
Creek, Maryland in September 1862; with the Confederate capital, Richmond, only
15 miles away and left unguarded because Robert E. Lee had pulled its defenders
away to fight at Antietam, McClellan stopped his advance and let the
Confederates regroup and safeguard their capital) for reasons historians are
still arguing about. One imdb.com “Trivia” poster wrote, “The Halt Order was
agreed by Field Marshal Gerd von
Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, and General Günther von Kluge,
commander of the Fourth Army, at the request of the tank unit commander General
Paul von Kleist, who had lost fifty percent of his armored forces and needed
time to regroup. After the war, von Rundstedt tried to blame the Halt Order on Adolf Hitler. Von
Rundstedt’s biographer conceded that this ‘does not represent the whole truth,’
because the original impetus for a pause came from Kleist and von Rundstedt.”
(Later in the war Hitler would anger his commanders by refusing permission for
them to do strategic retreats like the British had done at Dunkirk; “Where the
German soldier stands, there he stays!” Hitler would say, thereby turning
survivable defeats into total routs and hastening Germany’s loss of the war.)
I
was strongly impressed by Dunkirk
and particularly by the somber tone Nolan kept through the entire movie. I was
also especially impressed by the musical score by Hans Zimmer, whom I call the
“room man” because Zimmer is the
German word for “room.” I’ve never liked Zimmer much — his scores usually seem
to me too pat, too superficial, accompanying the film acceptably but adding
little or nothing to its emotional weight — but here he triumphs. He recorded
Christopher Nolan’s watch and had a faint, almost subliminal ticking sound from
it running through the score — an effect that may have been inspired by the
famous ticking clock in the 1952 Western classic High Noon (also about a town threatened with annihilation from
a fearsome, amoral enemy) and which works beautifully here to guy up the
tension and force us to see the Dunkirk story the way Nolan wants us to:
“heroic” only in the sense that any
action in war is heroic, in that it forces people to push themselves to limits
and overcome obstacles in ways they didn’t know they could before they had to.
Otherwise, Nolan is saying, war is a waste, even if it’s being fought for “good”
intentions — a country like 1940 Britain may be forced to fight for its survival, but that still doesn’t
make the fighting itself a good thing. He also does a marvelous job reproducing
the quiet terror of the Dunkirk stand, the emotions the servicemembers must
have gone through wondering whether they would be rescued and pondering what
would be likely to happen to them if they weren’t. In an age way too cynical about war (or just about everything
else) to accept an uncomplicated view of “heroism” in a real-world context
(though part of the problem with Nolan’s Batman movies is he tried to bring the same kind of
cynicism that works for him in Dunkirk to a comic-book superhero legend, where we do expect to see, and indeed we cry out for,
uncomplicated white-white heroes and black-black villains), this is the sort of
movie we’re going to get about Dunkirk, and it’s a real testament to
Christopher Nolan and his great ensemble cast that they give it to us so
powerfully and eloquently.
