海角大神

Christopher Nolan started out making enigmatic little indie films but quickly found his calling with the pitch-black 鈥淒ark Knight鈥� trilogy and such grand-scale metaphysical behemoths as 鈥淚nception鈥� and 鈥淚nterstellar.鈥� (Nolan never met a black hole he didn鈥檛 like.) And so his latest film, 鈥淒unkirk,鈥� comes as something of a surprise. With a brisk running time of 106 minutes, it鈥檚 about the rescue of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in northern France beginning in May of 1940 after they were hemmed in by German enemy fire. Except for its scale and tricky narrative structure, it鈥檚 almost nothing like his other movies.聽

It鈥檚 also not much like other war movies. Nolan, who both wrote and directed, has stripped away most of the usual genre clich茅s and focused instead, with highly variable results, on the minute-to-minute struggles for survival.聽

The action, segmented into episodes variously drawn from a day, a week, and an hour of the battle, is registered primarily through the experiences of Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), a raw recruit who teams up with two other soldiers (played by Aneurin Barnard and pop star Harry Styles) to flee the beach; a civilian sailor, Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), and his teenage son, Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney); and a Royal Air Force ace, played by Tom Hardy, who, as in Nolan鈥檚 鈥淭he Dark Knight Rises,鈥� is once again masked for virtually the entire movie. (Is it too late for him to play the Phantom of the Opera?)

Nolan filmed mostly in IMAX and 65mm, and from the first scene, with Tommy fleeing on foot from German fire, the experience is totally immersive. (It鈥檚 like 3-D but without the glasses.) The visuals may be scaled big, but the narrative is very much human-sized 鈥� except that Nolan doesn鈥檛 provide much back story for anybody. We know that Tommy is green and very scared; Dawson is low-key and stalwart; the aviator is relentless. We don鈥檛 learn about their families, their sweethearts, their politics, their prejudices. These people have a generic gloss, as if they were stand-ins for all the others like them.聽

Nolan intends this lack of specificity to scour the film of cant and clich茅, but in some ways, it has the opposite effect: We can鈥檛 help but see these protagonists as the iconic standard-bearers of the famous 鈥淒unkirk Spirit.鈥� It was that spirit, on full display here, that probably saved England from capitulation to Germany. The military disaster that was Dunkirk has been mythologized, rightly so, as a triumph: The shallow waters made it impossible for British destroyers to land on the beach, so hundreds of private small boat owners across the English Channel came to the rescue, in constant danger from Luftwaffe bombardments. The military was hoping to evacuate around 40,000 troops. The final total was more than 338,000.

The fact that the Dunkirk saga, momentous as it is, remains relatively unknown to movie audiences outside England gives the film a cachet. But Nolan isn鈥檛 interested in the dynamics of the battle itself. There are few scenes with officers plotting strategy, no discussion of Hitler鈥檚 decision, still debated among historians, to purposely withhold the final blow to the Allied forces. Amazingly, there鈥檚 very little blood, and we never even see the enemy up close.

What Nolan may not recognize is that all those war movie clich茅s he disdains about family and sweethearts and the life back home actually contribute to why we care about the warriors. I鈥檓 not arguing for a lot of corn in 鈥淒unkirk,鈥� but maybe just a little bit?

Nolan has never been a deep diver into the human psyche, and it鈥檚 possible that his antipathy for the usual war movie tropes is based on nothing more than his inability to pull them off. When he does make the attempt, as in the scenes with the boat skipper, or with Kenneth Branagh as a naval commander tearing up at thoughts of 鈥渉ome,鈥� the results are as bland as in any conventional war movie.聽

鈥淒unkirk,鈥� with its scaled-to-be-a-masterpiece visual grandiosity, aims to be an epic of the spirit, but there is something weirdly underpowered about it. It鈥檚 a series of riveting tableaux, but the human center is lacking. When 鈥淒unkirk鈥� was over, I felt as if I had been through something, but it wasn鈥檛 a war, exactly. For all its painstaking realism, the movie resembles a great big impressionist abstraction. Maybe it鈥檚 not so different from Nolan鈥檚 other movies after all.聽Grade: B- (Rated PG-13 for intense war experience and some language.)