There are few events in the history of war comparable to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French beach at Dunkirk in the late spring of 1940. It is an episode that repays close attention to its every aspect—the terrifying Nazi triumphs in combat that led to it, the halting and contradictory behavior of both the Allies and the Nazis during the week when 400,000 British and French soldiers had retreated to the sands by the English Channel, and the awe-inspiring improvisatory response by the British both on the beach and on the home front that turned the tide.
You would know none of this from Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, which is both an astonishing filmmaking achievement and an epic narrative failure. Nolan, who wrote and directed Dunkirk, made a deliberate choice to tell the story almost exclusively from the close-up perspective of individual sailors, soldiers, and pilots. This relatively short, blindingly sharp, and painfully vivid feat of impressionistic moviemaking gives one a rare sense of the horrors of war as experienced by those whose country is losing the fight. Nolan is a great director. What he is not, in this picture, is a great storyteller. His view of the events at Dunkirk is nearsighted. He misses the forest for the trees.
