If you are doing a period piece and are looking for inspiration, look to William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth, not Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Nolan is a good director, but the praise that he receives is disproportionate to the product that he puts out. Nolan has an elementary school understanding of history and science, which probably explains his broad appeal because most people only know so much and challenging or changing their assumptions creates an unpleasant dissonance that most people can’t handle and will react negatively.
Before reading about Dunkirk, I decided that I was no longer going to see Nolan’s movies in theaters. I adored Memento and the villain portions of the last two installments of his Batman trilogy, but Inception (seriously, Ariadne) and Interstellar, aka Contact, made me want to flip tables because the plot was so simple and obvious fairly early in the film that it was excruciating to have to sit there for so long to wait for confirmation and annoying to hear people praise these unremarkable and derivative movies. The nail in the coffin was when I realized that he was purposely using the soundtrack to obscure what his characters are saying, which does reflect real life when you can’t hear everything that everyone is saying, but I’m not paying to see a documentary, and even documentaries are stylized and not real. Even though his films are usually visually stunning, I would prefer to see them at home where I can turn on the closed captioning and rewind if necessary.
I decided to specifically not see Dunkirk after reading an article by Sunny Singh in The Guardian, “Why the lack of Indian and African faces in Dunkirk matters.” There is a fictional concept that British equals white. No one would deny that it was at one point, but it hasn’t been for a very long time because of colonialism. At one point, the British wanted other people’s resources and *ahem* their people, so here we are, and unless you can build a time machine to convince people to do better, we are not going anywhere. 90 days have passed a long time ago, and you don’t have a receipt so no returns, no store credit. Shakespeare knew about black people. This concept should not be revolutionary, and anything less is willfully ahistorical, i.e. fiction. My maternal family are from the Caribbean or Canada, and let’s just say that we didn’t always live there.
To some of you, this type of criticism is exhausting, and art should not be treated like a quota system. If 13% of American population is African American, then forcing the director to make 13% of the characters African American is SO HARD because reasons (artistic vision, lack of talent or availability, story integrity). In a movie like Dunkirk where there are masses of people without lines, it is not only the easiest thing to do, but not doing it is a choice. Where are the people that whine that it is not realistic to cast a black actor as James Bond, a fictional character? Crickets! So there is anger when it is unrealistic, but none when it is unrealistic in your favor. I don’t think that the problem is realism, but being forced to see someone who is not like you in a role that you relate to even if it is for a brief moment in one movie. If you don’t want my colonialist ass in your film, then you don’t want my colonialist dollars.
After seeing Dunkirk, I was spectacularly disappointed to read confirmation of Singh’s suspicions about production. They wanted it to look like a documentary and shot at Dunkirk. They took great pains to be aesthetically accurate by making the costumes in Pakistan and Mexico. They had historical advisers. Nolan insisted that only British people be cast although two of the actors in Dunkirk are Irish. You can have Pakistan labor, but not Pakistan’s men! When your movie has a narrower definition of the British than Victoria & Abdul, you may be racist. You have all this imagination, but can’t imagine what actually happened or rather your imagination strives to create a world where British, European or American equals white.
You can’t defeat the Nazis by thinking like them, and Nolan’s Dunkirk creates a mental image that if applied in the real world, would result in defeat. Without the Royal Indian Army Services Corp, the Nazis win. Without the 25% of crewmen from South Asia and East Africa on British merchant vessels, the Nazis win. Without French forces from African colonies, the Nazis win. Without brown and black bodies, a lot of white bodies die and are subject to occupation. If audiences do not learn these lessons in the theater, they will forget them in times of conflict in the real world. It is very difficult to imagine a world that you have not experienced even if it exists.
I wanted to see Dunkirk in theaters based on the previews alone. We need films like Dunkirk now more than ever because it reminds us of a bleak time when all hope was lost, death was certain and evil, i.e. the Nazis, were winning, a time like now, but every little action counted and could save lives. Ideals fly out the window when faced with death like fish in a barrel, and yet an ideal of charity and indomitable spirit did. Movies like Dunkirk redefine victory as survival and provide an unblinking look at the horrors and desperation of war, the lack of comfort, safety or rest. It gives us perspective—they had it worse, and they turned it around so we can still do it. We can be plunged into feeling as if we are experiencing war without being harmed by it. It is WWII as horror movie complete with soundtrack cues like Jaws or John Carpenter’s work to signal that the killer is coming. (Side note: actual veterans who survived Dunkirk said the soundtrack was louder than war so I’m not exaggerating.) Dunkirk is a slasher film with the veneer of history to give it respectability. If there is a rule to this horror film, it is don’t skip your place on line.
Dunkirk may be effective as a viewing experience to expose us to the horrors of war and make facing evil seem plausible despite overwhelming odds, but Nolan could have done better. Nolan explained, “The empathy for the characters has nothing to do with their story. I did not want to go through the dialogue, tell the story of my characters…The problem is not who they are, who they pretend to be or where they come from. The only question I was interested in was: Will they get out of it?” Nolan was sending a message about how war does not care about the individual, but is impersonal in delivering death; however, he could have accomplished it by not following anyone for longer than a few moments and not having a narrative, which he considered and discarded.
By Nolan’s criteria, he failed because he ultimately did decide to get invested in a handful of characters. The lady doth protest too much because he decides to follow the plight of the crew of a single boat, which was disproportionately sentimental and conventional in comparison to the focus on the beach and the air. With a more diverse and historically accurate cast, perhaps I would have figured out earlier that the movie was following the same two to three guys throughout the majority of the film. Nolan wants chaos, but defaults to control and consciously fails to find a rhythm when shifting or strike a balance between the two. Nolan failed to convey the time difference depending on the location. He leans on individual sentiment while simultaneously denying character development beyond two dimensions.
Please note that I don’t have a problem with his original concept. If applied rigorously, I would have liked the random, impersonal scope. I also don’t have a problem with the boat sequence other than its dissonance with respect to how it fits into the rest of the movie. I was deeply invested in each of the boat’s inhabitants and how they connected to the broader survival narrative. For the viewer and the characters, the civilians function like a life vest to cling to in the narrative. We need Kenneth Branagh and James D’Arcy, whom I pretended was part of an unaired prequel for Edwin Jarvis of Agent Carter, to act as exposition fairies to figure out what was happening. I liked the schmaltzy reveal at the end. I loved the sentimental greeting when they come home. As a cohesive film, it does not necessarily gel.
Once you realize who the main characters are, you can cobble together the trajectory of the narrative. Theoretically I plan to rewatch it so I can judge whether or not Dunkirk may be a movie that benefits from repeat viewings. I think that Nolan makes a curious choice to not show Germans as the inflictors of death, but he does show the British killing each other. One incident is seen as an accidental PTSD side effect, and the other is framed as cruel and desperate. Survival is Nolan’s central focus, but I’m not sure if he is saying that this is who they really are when the trappings of security fall and/or this is how war twists people. In this case, I think that a bunch of Scottish guys attacking a white ally from a different country was a good choice so the viewer could eliminate racism as a factor, but how do Scottish people feel about this scene? Nolan is from London so was that English shade against the Scottish? I don’t know. I know that the French aren’t happy.
Dunkirk works because of spectacle, not its narrative or in terms of historical accuracy, but Nolan could and should do better. I will continue to relegate him to the DVD pile until he lives up to his potential. No money for him.