The Beach Front: DUNKIRK

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a logistical triumph about a logistical nightmare. The film tells the story of one of World War II’s nerve-wracking retreats. It’s 1940. British and French forces are repelled from the mainland, trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk with nothing but the water behind them. Off in the distance, perhaps, they can almost convince themselves England can be seen. Alas, it’s so close, yet so far away, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers sitting ducks for the Nazi bombers thundering overhead and the encroaching Axis ground forces held back by Allied gunners behind makeshift sandbag perimeters. As the film unspools, the desperate stranded men look for ways to help speed up their rescue, while we know that help is on the way agonizingly slowly. Nolan’s film has something of a Hemingway spirit about it. Dialogue is terse, to the point. The narrative is in the details, the soft surf of the tides and sea foam, the oil and explosions, the eerie quiet in the air and the dirt under fingernails, the wet hair and panicked expressions betraying stiff-upper-lip duty-bound effort. Nolan, operating at the height of his filmmaking powers, marshals his resources to not so much tell any single man’s story, but to orchestrate an experience that’ll do the real stressful cacophony justice.

He shows us this war story by land, by sea, and by air. With a deft structural trick, he weaves together three distinct speeds and perspectives with which to pass through this historical moment. By land, the soldiers (like those played by Fionn Whitehead, Cillian Murphy, and Harry Styles) and their commander (Kenneth Branagh) fret and plan and hope while under constant threat of enemy fire as they await evacuation, a story taking place over a week. By sea, we find British citizen sailors called in to help speed up the transporting of the troops (an event tenderly memorialized from the homefront’s point of view in William Wyler’s 1942 classic Mrs. Miniver) because the Navy’s destroyers can’t approach the shallows near the beach. We follow one of the boats (captained by Mark Rylance) as its crew makes its way into battle with a sense of dutiful patriotism and a solemn desire to help, a journey there and (hopefully) back again that takes a day. By air, we find the air force, strategically sending a small squadron (led by Tom Hardy) to provide cover in the final stretch of the rescue effort, a crucial dogfight taking place over the course of an hour. Nolan, with his usual crisp, precise, and confident cross-cutting (think Inception’s dream layers, Interstellar’s time change, or Memento’s backwards-and-forwards design), tells these three actions simultaneously, cutting between them to heighten suspense and danger, often in clever matches – floods of water, rat-a-tat guns, grim expressions. 

By the time the stories start to intersect, weaving details in and out, allowing us to see, say, a plane crash first as a moment from above, then floating next to it with another group of character’s later. Eventually, all three storylines converge, climax upon climax upon climax, every character’s peak danger and despair in the same moment of converging crescendos. This remarkably effective structure – experimental, but completely coherent in its logic and effects – is in service of an impeccably detailed recreation. Although the characters it focuses on are sketched quickly, fictional composite stand-ins for the masses of people involved and impacted, the overall sense of fastidious reenactment gives the film the historical weight under its immediacy. This is a lean, tense true-life thriller, every moment pulsing with the unforgiving tick, tick, tick of time running out (further emphasized by Hans Zimmer’s relentlessly simmering score). Shooting on film, and full IMAX film for many scenes, allows cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema to craft shots of remarkable size and scale, with tangible texture and detailed grit, expansively filling the frame with eerie pale light, foreboding blank beaches, cavernous clear skies, and vast expanses of ocean. The men huddled against the forces of warfare are arranged in patterns and lines, formations and orders, holding steady to rules and regulations even in these desperate hours. 

These groups of men are buffeted by elaborate and concussive suspense sequences, immersive effects and booming sound design building dread out of the roaring engines of approaching bombers, the slow smack of waves against a tiny boat, the sputtering propellers of a struggling aircraft, an unforgiving howling wind whipping at frayed nerves. The individuals involved are merely part of the crowd. They aren’t given lengthy moments of backstory and exposition, or made into easy heroes and villains. In fact, the enemy remains unspoken, barely glimpsed behind their weapons of war. Nolan’s focus is on the effect the situation has on the groups of people involved under the vice grip of unceasing peril. They simply do what they must, in every moment, in hopes to see the next. This is an extraordinarily well-made, exceptionally well-crafted film of beautifully elaborate detail building a work of startling simplicity: three straight lines concluding in the same inevitable. It’s a film about process and strategy, how they hold together and fall apart under tough conditions when survival instincts kick in. It’s about how even in defeat you can find dignity, even in fear you can find small acts of heroism. Best of all, it’s an experience that’s uniquely cinematic, overwhelming in its scale and power.

Speed Racers: RUSH

It’s amazing to see how anyone’s life turns into biopic cliché when run through the Hollywood prestige drama machinery. There’s the early rising promise, the problems with health and/or addiction, and then the inevitable triumphant comeback. We’ve seen it all so many times before. Where Ron Howard’s Rush steps smartly and does much to combat the pitfalls of its genre is in the way it bifurcates the based-on-a-true-story of 1970’s Formula 1 racing rivals Niki Lauda and James Hunt. It’s two biopics in one, gaining excitement and energy from crackling two variations of the clichés off of the other. It allows the men to seem in some ways equally insufferably arrogant and admirably dedicated to their careers. We can see why they’d come to see each other as professional enemies, as well as why they’d come to admire the other’s professional bravery.

As James Hunt, Chris Hemsworth (Thor himself) humanizes what could’ve easily been less a man and more a monster of machismo. Tall, blonde, muscled, he’s a rippling mass of self-satisfaction and self-confidence. He’s a jerk. It’s hard to care about him, but Hemsworth’s brings to the part creeping insecurities that sometimes temper harsh judgments without excusing his behavior. Similarly, Niki Lauda could be seen as only cold and calculating, using technical precision and cutting remarks to win without caring what others think of him. But as played by Daniel Brühl (the Nazi propaganda star from Inglourious Basterds) he becomes a man whose unstoppable need to prove himself is intensely sympathetic and just as much a potential danger.

Tracing their rivalry, the film follows their careers in the 1970s as they meet again and again on the racetrack. Their ascents are intertwined; one’s biggest failures on the track the other’s biggest successes. Between races, much attention is paid to the politics of corporate sponsorships and relationships with pit crews and mechanics. There’s also a token amount of romantic interest as Hunt and Lauda each find women (Olivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara, respectively) who love them enough to have the thankless task of serving as cutaway reaction shots during the races to underscore how dangerous it all is. They’ve got something to lose.

The screenplay by Peter Morgan (of The Queen and Frost/Nixon, among other films like them) has his characteristic insight into the based-on-real-people characters’ psychology and their relationships with each other. It also suffers from his characteristically stiff dramaturgy and the kind of clumsy narration that often insists on telling us exactly what people are thinking when the acting on display would and could do just as well. But for all the clunky dialogue and routine biopic paces, the film takes off at top speed, hurtling through cliché with a blistering sense of stirring, energized sports’ movie hokum. I’d like to think a movie about any job, even, say, rival pencil-pushers, could have a great deal of entertainment value if done right, but the fact that these men have careers racing cars is a gift that the filmmakers sure don’t squander. It becomes the film’s greatest asset.

Foregrounding Hunt and Lauda’s needs for speed in a continual quest to best the others, Rush is muscular, speedy, and masculine. Pistons pump, sparkplugs fire, and motors roar. The film bursts with bruising sound design and a thunderous Hans Zimmer score. It’s practically Bruckheimerian. Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography rattles at top speed, images blurring, edited to smash one into the next, then the next, next, next. The cars fly down the track at top speeds, danger around every corner. The death defying nature of the sport is never far from the film’s awareness, an appreciation reflected in the film’s visual bombast. It’s all movement, a blitz of frames Howard marshals with atypical freneticism. No stranger to fast cars – his directorial debut was the 1977 Roger Corman production Grand Theft Auto, after all – he takes Mantle’s propulsive camerawork and makes out of it a film that outraces the sometimes rigidly formulaic writing.

Quick Look: Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Someone has taken Sherlock Holmes and turned it into Pirates of the Caribbean, by which I mean the title character and his exploits have been run through the modern blockbuster system and turned into a jokey set-piece extravaganza. In this case, even though it’s not as good as some of the Pirates films, the results are not entirely a bad thing; it could have been much worse. Guy Ritchie’s blunt ham-fisted direction pounds the material into submission, but Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law (as Holmes and Watson) keep the movie feeling bouncy and agreeable with their funny chemistry and likable screen presences. Ritchie’s late-1800’s London is suitably grubby, the mystery’s just compelling enough, and while the supporting cast is underused, they are not underappreciated, especially the villainous turn by Mark Strong and the proto-femme-fatale vamping of Rachel McAdams. The set pieces scrape up some thrills and there’s some small amount of wit in their staging. This isn’t exactly the Holmes of the past, but the movie has no sworn duty to ensure the perfect enforcement of fidelity to the source material. This is a mostly enjoyable experience, a big-budget, slightly goofy, action-thriller-mystery driven forward, and kept afloat, by its cast, its production design, and the charmingly off-kilter score by Hans Zimmer that recalls The Third Man’s zither in its unexpected instrumentation.