In the Flesh: Dunkirk

Shooting emptiness is something at which Christopher Nolan excels. The trackless expanses of sea and sky stretching to the far horizon where they smear together, the endless gray beaches of Dunkirk, purgatorial and grim, where men queue in terrified silence, waiting for a chance at escape. There is a real sense of humanity forced to the breaking point and beyond it by forces far vaster and more alien than they can comprehend, of men removed from all context and thrown into a void of senseless, arbitrary violence. His dogfights are a thing of beauty, totally unromanticized depictions of aerial combat shot at tremendous remove so that the planes involved look like motes crossing the eye of God. His crowd shots are overwhelming and suffocating, trading the impersonal emptiness of infinite space for the cloying emptiness of being one of numberless thousands fighting to survive. In short, there’s strong material here, and Nolan leans into it, letting his images speak for him, and much to Dunkirk’s advantage. Unfortunately, sometimes his characters talk.

The film’s script, blessedly minimal, wavers between childish jingoism and cheesy, forced profundity. Its performances are uniformly strong but there’s no salvaging lines like “it’s fear and greed. Fate, squeezed through the bowels of men” from a kid of maybe seventeen. The incredible self-seriousness of it deflates all the tension and chaos Nolan manages to conjure in front of the camera. The unironic wonder with which Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) reads Churchill’s famous “fight them on the beaches” address, including its lines about Britain’s empire overseas coming to its aid in the event of its defeat on home soil is especially sickening. There’s no reason a film couldn’t invoke that line to great effect, but the scope of Nolan’s is uninterested in reckoning with Britain’s own history of greed and evil, unable to perceive the irony in casting the English as heroic underdogs when they’ve already succeeded at their own imperialist ambitions and now face competition from a younger imperial force.

Dunkirk has the visual language to talk about war. It has the performances to sell its images, the tight and meticulous editing to leave viewers white-knuckled and shaking, but it’s an empty spectacle. It has no understanding of war’s horrors, not really, not beyond their most mundane and obvious manifestations. It’s myopic and incurious as only the English can be. That it’s such a technical feat renders that essential dullness a sharp lesson on the limits of skill in the absence of vision. Nolan can compose a shot. He can get a good performance out of an established great or a green newcomer. He can make us frightened and relieved, and even wring a few tears out of us as we watch men and boys fight for another day, another hour, another minute of desperate and terrifying life, but so can a documentary about penguins, you know? It’s what you do once you have the reins that counts, and Nolan is content to let the movie drive itself. What a shame.