Five stars. Rated PG-13, for intense war violence and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.21.17
Christopher Nolan doesn’t merely
spin a crackling good yarn; he tells it in a provocative, wildly imaginative
manner.
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| Thousands of Allied soldiers wait anxiously on the "mole" — a narrow, kilometer-long, wood-boarded breakwater that pokes precariously out into the cold waters of the English Channel — while praying they'll be able to board a rescue ship before being strafed by Luftwaffe Messerschmitts. |
His fascination with nonlinear
storytelling began with Following and
Memento — the latter ingeniously
unfolding both forwards and backwards — and ultimately became too much in Inception (a dream within a fantasy
within a head trip within a nod to Orson Welles ... quite overcooked, but
audacious nonetheless).
Dunkirk does not succumb to such excess, although
some viewers may be perplexed by how its three parallel storylines intersect
... until the penny drops, resulting in a richly satisfying — dare I say
exhilarating — A-ha! moment.
This film is a masterpiece: a
compelling, ingeniously conceived and choreographed slice of suspenseful,
nail-biting history transformed into a thoroughly absorbing drama. Everything
connects here, starting with the superlative work turned in by a huge ensemble
cast composed primarily of unfamiliar faces and a few high-profile character
actors.
Nolan both wrote and directed
this stunning slice of edge-of-the-seat cinema, and I wouldn’t be surprised if
he also came up with the attention-grabbing tag line: “When 400,000 men
couldn’t get home ... home came for them.”
Remember being riveted, in 1998’s
Saving Private Ryan, by Steven
Spielberg’s 20-minute handling of the Normandy Beach landing sequence?
Nolan ups that ante. Dunkirk maintains that level of suspense
and peek-between-your-fingers anxiety for its full 106 minutes. You literally
dare not blink during his ticking-clock handling of simultaneous narratives
that come together brilliantly, in time for a climax that’s no less triumphant,
for our prior knowledge of how the story concludes.
The drama comes from the skillfully
sketched, ground-level characters, whose fates we most definitely don’t know, history notwithstanding.
This is a snapshot of a seminal
event during the early days of World War II: an incident that began with a
ghastly military disaster, but concluded with an amazing miracle that
demonstrated anew — here’s a lesson worth repeating — how individual civilians
absolutely can make a massive, heroic
difference.
