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2017, d. Christopher Nolan - IMAX
Every time a new Christopher Nolan movie comes out, I feel a twinge of sadness, as I'm reminded of a dear friend, Braz, who passed away in 2013. We use to have rather glorious debates about Nolan's movies. Where I have yet to be truly disappointed by a Nolan film, always enjoying the experience both in scale and technical proficiency, Braz would almost dismiss the technical and look for the heart and the heat. Nolan's films are accomplished puzzles, thrilling and stimulating intellectually, but at the same time Nolan almost has an inability to make a picture where it's the characters or the characters' emotional (or erotic) journeys that take precedent. Interstellar, with its father-daughter connection, is about as close as it came, but even then there's still an overwhelming sense of distance, and it was the space travel and unique robots that drew and dazzled the masses. The closest we get to a love story in any of Nolan's films was perhaps Memento (but that was really a mystery), or Dark Knight Rises (which put Batman and Catwoman together almost by default), or Inception (which was more about loss that love).
Nolan's latest, Dunkirk, is remarkably affecting. You certainly feel a lot watching the film. But it's not an emotional connection to any character, it's all situational. Nolan makes you feel the gutwrenching pain of war, its brutal uncaring nature, its randomness and maliciousness. War is all about throwing bodies at a problem, particularly early in the 20th century. So when 400,000 English soldiers are pinned down on the shore of Dunkirk, France, with only the French army staving off the direct onslaught of German forces, you feel the hopelessness, the desperation, the uncomfortable pain of the inevitable. When you see how desperate dying men are as they get bombed or drowned or picked off you feel, you can't not feel. Nolan knows how to capture a scene.
War is horrific, but unlike Saving Private Ryan which used its opening half hour to show the horrors of war with a visceral Grand Guignol-style bloodbath, Dunkirk is an almost bloodless affair. Nolan, for all his inability to connect emotionally with his characters, here he masters the ability to connect emotionally with moments, with groups and a crowd, to feel the weight of the situations.
Once again, Nolan crafts a film with a fracture timeline, and makes it logical and sensible as a single narrative. It's something he does with seeming ease at this point. The story features three timelines, the one hour flight of a trio of RAF fighters over the straight of Dover, the one day journey of small private fishing and luxury boats to rescue the trapped soldiers, and one week on the mole (a sort of pier or breakway crossing the water) on the beaches of Dunkirk. When the stories start to cross in the third act, it's absolutely awe inspiring. Events you saw earlier in the film present themselves from different perspectives, providing additional context. It's what Nolan does, and it's astounding.
The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema is breathtaking. He captures intimacy with equal adeptness as isolation. Hoytema uses the IMAX scale to maximum effect (roughly 80% of the film is in that scale) composing some absolutely stark and beautiful (yet equally awe inspiring and heavy with meaning) imagery. It's a gorgeous film.
It's hard to say that I enjoyed Dunkirk. It's a remarkable movie, but its effect is overwhelming. It's uncomfortable, unbearably so. It's hard not to empathize, and it's even harder to try and realistically picture one's self in such situations. By stripping away character, by stripping away almost any connection with the actors by giving them very little dialogue (mainly they're just acting or reacting to the situation), there's only the events themselves that we can connect to, and as foreign as they are to our daily life, the reality is they happened to real people, perhaps even a parent or grandparent. Without ever making a single statement, it's as potent an anti-war screed as ever. And yet, with even a nominal understanding of what World War II was about, the necessity of fighting that war is hard to ignore.
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