OPINION:
“Dunkirk” is the movie hit of summer, particularly with the millennials who may even absorb a modicum of history with the spectacle.
“Dunkirk” is set in 1940 but it says something to the cultural sensibility of our own time, depicting courage, imagination and grit against all odds in the British (and French) strategic retreat from Europe in the early days of World War II.
This version skimps on history, and has a mesmerizing musical score that thumps away so hard it’s sometimes difficult to care whether it has anything to say. Because it’s about men, and only men, feminists nitpick it to death because there were no women at Dunkirk. Women only get to put the kettle on after the boys have had the fun of fleeing death on the beach. Dunkirk was no bikini beach party, and the ladies didn’t miss anything.
But the retreat at Dunkirk was one of the great triumphs of the war and that comes across almost in spite of itself. In May 1940 the British and the French thought they would turn back the German blitzkrieg racing across Western Europe, and were finally bottled up on the beaches on the coast of France. Dunkirk was months before Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States. Dunkirk saved more than 338,000 British and French troops to fight again.
The evacuation of the beaches at Dunkirk demonstrated individual bravery of soldier and civilian alike in a strategy of rescue that somehow succeeded. The English call it “muddling through,” and nobody does it better. Some historians think that if Dunkirk had been a catastrophe Winston Churchill would have been toppled and replaced by a government seeking a passive peace with Germany. German might today be the language of Parliament.
Critics love the movie, and Forbes magazine reports that “Dunkirk” has already earned more than $412 million globally and over $172 million in the United States. It’s likely to receive multiple Academy Award nominations even though its stars, Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance, aren’t given much to say. One critic calls it “classic silent cinema.” The director Christopher Nolan directs 6,000 extras as if they were ants on a flattened anthill, fodder for war.
At times, the movie seems almost a video game, with iconic Spitfires and Messerschmitts dueling for control over the beaches, and the famous flotilla of 800 “little boats” — yachts, fishing trawlers, cockle carriers and paddle steamers — is reduced to one gentleman and his pleasure craft. But he offers a persuasive reason for his participation: “Men my age dictate this war, why should we not fight it?”
Pretentious themes of earth, air, fire and water with little human interest reduces “Dunkirk” to the cliche that “war is hell,” with the soldiers as helpless pawns. But even in this telling an audience experiences an extraordinary story of heroism in defeat, demonstrating how intelligent military strategy in the midst of chaos can inspire men running away to fight another day.
“Dunkirk,” as Richard Brody writes in the New Yorker, may be the first virtual reality movie, with characters for whom young audiences must fill in the blanks of the characters’ inner lives with their own. There are no clues as to what the men on the beach feel. The director, in this interpretation, is so in awe of “the greatest generation” that he wants viewers to walk in their boots fighting World War II. But it’s difficult to imagine the millennials lining up to see this movie can fill those boots.
It’s hard to fathom why this “Dunkirk,” with so little depth except of the water, is so popular. This is the second movie telling of the story — there was an earlier British-made “Dunkirk” in 1957. Perhaps this version, which breaks up history into fragments and does away with the historical narrative actually rooted in a real fight of good against evil, is more suited to their sensibilities. The enemy in “Dunkirk” is never named. There’s no Hitler, no Nazis (not even Robert E. Lee.)
In a visual age pictures have primacy over words, and this “Dunkirk” testifies to history reduced to spectacle without specifics. Pity and fear are depersonalized and it’s all but impossible to feel that “there but for the grace of God go I.” But words have more power than flashy visuals. Winston Churchill is not in this telling of Dunkirk. The director did not want the story to get “bogged down” by the new prime minister.
But for those curious enough to consult history, it was immediately after Dunkirk that Churchill gave the speech that ignited the spirit that preserved the British nation. “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,” he said on the morning after with infectious defiance. “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.”
• Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.
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