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.
The men he shows us are, as they were in real life, almost entirely unprotected. They are sitting ducks on the beach, on the piers, and on the rescue boats they board. We watch them get strafed, bombed, shot through boat hulls, crushed and drowned as ships topple into the brine. And we live through their anxiety before, during, and after; the movie is, at times, almost unbearably tense.
And yet oddly, for a movie about the sufferings of ordinary people, we are told nothing about any of the uniformed soldiers and sailors we see—not their names, not where they’re from. They have no recognizable or interesting personality quirks. They are just bodies moving through Nolan’s space, from beach to water to boat or in the air. They are practically interchangeable.
I found myself straining at several points to figure out just who that guy is in the Channel on whom the camera is focusing: Is he the kid from the first scene we see running down a street avoiding German bullets or the kid we see burying a dead man and stealing his boot in the second? Nolan wants us to view the war from the perspective of characters he doesn’t bother to characterize.
By making his dramatis personae so generic, Nolan’s Dunkirk becomes the story of any battle and every battle—or rather, of any and every retreat from battle with the enemy in pursuit. But the real Dunkirk was anything but generic. Walter Lord’s 1982 account, The Miracle of Dunkirk, is loaded from first page to last with colorful anecdotes of ordinary seamen and soldiers improvising to keep themselves alive, often in the most comically British of ways. Every bit of human eccentricity in the face of unimaginable peril Lord recounts in his wonderful book actually occurred. Nolan would have you believe the hundreds of thousands of men on that beach were as silent and well behaved as, well, extras in a war movie.
Indeed, if what happened during those days had been a classic retreat with disastrous consequences, the French placename of Dunkerque would not have been supplanted by its English spelling in the history books, Dunkirk would not have become one of the most written-about moments of the Second World War, and the word Dunkirk would not have been memorable enough to serve as the name of a $150 million major studio release 77 years after the fact.
No, Dunkirk was a singular and strange event. It was at once a horrendous disaster and a breathtaking triumph, a wonder and a tragedy. And the only way to show this to audiences would be to tell it from a more Olympian perspective. Kenneth Branagh plays a British leader on the beach whom the credits name as Commander Bolton. He corresponds to no real-life figure and seems to be in the movie only to provide a few pieces of explanatory detail—so, in the manner of Michael York’s Austin Powers character, Nolan really ought to have called him Commander Exposition. Branagh practically turns and looks into the camera and tells the audience that 400,000 men are trapped defenseless on the beach. But the occasional shots Nolan provides of the beach from above simply do not capture the astounding masses of men that were actually assembled there—which would have given the viewer a powerful sense of the holocaustal slaughter the Germans might have visited upon them.
That wider storytelling lens would have allowed for depictions of the British and French troops nearby desperately holding the line so that the advancing Germans didn’t swamp the beach and massacre the trapped men. It would have taken in the shifting views of the British High Command, which was loath to commit all its resources to save the men at Dunkirk because it needed to preserve the nation’s strength for the coming German assault on England. And it would have devoted some time to the perplexing question of why the Germans didn’t move heaven and earth to destroy the British Army when they had the chance.
To say the stakes could not have been higher is to understate the case. Western civilization arguably hung in the balance on that beach. The decimation of the first British effort to fight the Germans on the European mainland would have made a second effort unlikely if not impossible—and it was that second effort, after D-Day, that ensured the destruction of the Third Reich.
In Their Finest Hour, the 1949 second volume of his war memoir, Churchill recounts the meeting he held in Paris during the Dunkirk crisis with, among others, Marshal Pétain (who would soon surrender France to Germany and serve as Hitler’s political lickspittle). Churchill spoke with total seriousness that day of England being overrun by Germany—of being “prepared to wage war from the New World, if through some disaster England herself were laid waste.” He went on to envision a similar disaster being visited upon America and—in words that reveal the existential desperation of the time—told the French that “it would be better far that the civilization of Western Europe with all its achievements should come to a tragic but splendid end than that the two great democracies should linger on, stripped of all that made life worth living.”
What we cannot fathom today about World War II is that it was a conflict Germany truly could have won. That is why Dunkirk was such a horror. The destruction Germany might have visited upon the British would have knocked them out of the war entirely. In his Periclean speech after the evacuation was completed, Churchill told his nation that it had suffered “a colossal military disaster,” and it had—but in experiencing 40,000 casualties instead of 10 times that many, a nation and a civilization had been spared the hangman’s noose. It was a national humiliation to have to abandon the continent to Nazi rule, but the process of the British Expeditionary Force’s escape demonstrated national reserves of pluck (the “Dunkirk spirit”) that gave heart and strength to the five-year effort ahead. Had the worst happened, the words Churchill spoke that will live as long as our English tongue is spoken—“we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”—could never have been uttered.
It is this, all of this, that Nolan’s Dunkirk leaves entirely to the side. Instead, it concentrates on only one of the many gobsmacking aspects of the week of May 25, 1940: the participation in the evacuation of hundreds of small boats from all over England summoned into service to help ferry men to larger craft that could not make it near the shallow waters and long sand shelf of the beach.
It was a singular glory of the saga of Dunkirk, to be sure. But even here, by zooming in on one boat (skippered by the glorious Mark Rylance in the movie’s only notable performance), Nolan’s epic once again fails to capture the sheer scale of the makeshift armada of deliverance—with some 700 watercraft of every size and shape joining 300 Navy vessels, putt-putting their way across the Channel and into the line of fire and then back again.
We do see Branagh smile delightedly as the civilian craft appear, but that is not enough. Since Nolan doesn’t show us the mass mobilization of these nonmilitary boats back in England and the stalwart response to the call for aid of those who owned and crewed them, the scene depicting their arrival doesn’t have the force it should. In this way, as in others, the intimacy and immediacy Nolan seeks is damaging to his movie’s intentions and purposes.
It is difficult to make a great war movie. The larger context I’m talking about here has all too often been reduced on screen to ludicrous scenes between famous actors playing famous generals using pointers to show army movements on wall maps so that we can follow the battle. I sympathize with Nolan’s effort to do it all differently and in a new way—it is not as if this very thoughtful and literate filmmaker is unaware of the larger geopolitical issues at play. Several snatches of dialogue (often hard to hear, alas) do suggest he has a true understanding of the civilizational stakes that were on the line at Dunkirk. But in his effort to do justice to the suffering and sacrifice of those men on the beach, Christopher Nolan proved himself unable to do justice to the cause for which they suffered so greatly and for which so many were forced to sacrifice all.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
