Dunkirk is a pure cinematic experience

Does that make it the Best Picture? Our critics roundtable discusses the Oscar chances for Christopher Nolan’s big, audacious war epic  

By Alissa Wilkinson, Todd VanDerWerff, & Genevieve Koski Feb 27, 2018, 10:00am EST   

https://www.vox.com/2018/2/27/17040540/dunkirk-christopher-nolan-best-picture-oscar 

 

Each year, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences nominates between five and 10 movies to compete for the Oscars’ Best Picture trophy — its most prestigious award, and the one given out at the very end of the night. What “best picture” really means is a little fuzzy, but the most accurate way of characterizing it might be that it indicates how Hollywood wants to remember the past year in film.

The Best Picture winner, in other words, is the movie that represents the film industry, what it’s capable of, and how it sees itself at a specific point in time.

So when we look at the nominee slate for any given year, we’re essentially looking at a list of possibilities for the way Hollywood will ultimately characterize the previous 12 months in film. And one thing that’s definitely true about the nine Best Picture nominees from 2017 is that they exhibit a lot of variety. 

There are genre films and art films, horror films and history films, romances and tragicomedies. And thinking about what the Academy voters — as well as audiences and critics — found enticing about them helps us better understand both Hollywood and what we were looking for at the movies more broadly this year.

In the runup to the Oscars, Vox’s culture staff decided to take a look at each of the nine Best Picture nominees in turn. What made this film appealing to Academy voters? What makes it emblematic of the year? And should it win?

In this installment, we talk about Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, one of the year’s most praised films and a work of mastery that turns the idea of the war film on its head. But will all the praise for Dunkirk be enough for it to land the Oscars’ biggest prize?

Alissa Wilkinson: Dunkirk hit theaters in midsummer, and while it certainly feels like the kind of movie that could be up for a Best Picture nod, it’s still a little startling to find it nestled among some of the other entries. I certainly think it was one of 2017’s best movies — emotionally resonant and technically stunning, with some unforgettable images and performances and an unusual take on typical “war movie” tropes. But because it came out long before most awards season films usually do, it easily could have gotten lost.  

Then again, it seemed like Dunkirk’s release was modeled on that of Saving Private Ryan, which came out during the summer of 1998 and was nominated for Best Picture in 1999. It worked: Dunkirk did great with audiences, and critics adored it, with some (including me) declaring it to be Nolan’s masterpiece. And clearly, it stuck with Oscar voters, right to the end of the year.

By your estimation, what is it about Dunkirk that wooed the Academy? Why have critics and audiences alike responded so strongly to the film? What landed it on the list of Best Picture nominees?

Todd VanDerWerff: On the one hand, of course Dunkirk was nominated for Best Picture. It’s a massively successful movie about World War II, and the Academy loves to nominate hits that take place at some point during World War II, even if they take place in some other part of the world entirely. 

On the other hand, Dunkirk is a really weird Best Picture nominee! I feel like the fact that its premise all but guaranteed that it’d be nominated — so long as Christopher Nolan had merely hit a bunt that got him to first, instead of a home run — has sort of inured us to how weird the movie truly is. 

It barely has a narrative, and what narrative it does have is splintered into three timelines in such audacious fashion that when those timelines converge at the movie’s end, you can’t help but be swept away. Its main character is probably the English Channel, and it’s a bit emotionally chilly, more of a triumph of construction than feeling. (This isn’t a bad thing, but it rarely wins you an Oscar. Just ask Stanley Kubrick.) The film lacks acting and writing nominations, and that sort of indifference from two of the Academy’s largest branches has been tough to overcome in the past.

But on some level, Dunkirk is undeniable. Nolan has succeeded Steven Spielberg as the guy who can direct a movie about nearly anything and make it a hit, no matter how unconventional, and I don’t know anybody who doesn’t at least admire this film, outside of the handful of anti-Nolan diehards in film critic circles who roll their eyes and shake their heads at the rest of us. And, honest to God, Dunkirk still got through to some of them.

Another way to explain this is that when I saw Dunkirk, I was overwhelmed by it. Its last 30 minutes or so ascend to this level of pure, operatic craft, and it left me thinking of something I read a long time ago about “pure cinema” — the idea that the movies are too indebted to theater and novels and need to break free and tell stories on their own terms. Dunkirk, for whatever faults I find in it, comes closer to that status of being this pure moviegoing experience than just about anything I’ve seen this decade.

Genevieve Koski: “Pure cinema” feels like a good lens through which to view the Academy’s recognition of Dunkirk: It’s a frequently visceral experience whose impact can be largely attributed to the “elemental” components of filmmaking — visual composition, movement, the relationship between sound and image, etc. — and whose narrative eschews, to an extent, traditional expectations of storytelling elements like plot and character in favor of a structure that can’t quite be characterized as avant-garde but at least has an eye toward it.

That said, Dunkirk‘s narrative structure is one of the most compelling things about the film, and — with apologies to the Dadaists of the cinéma pur movement — I’d contend that it’s essential to Dunkirk‘s “pureness,” as well as the movie’s recognition by the Academy. 

Let us not forget that last year’s Best Picture winner, Moonlight, was also a triptych, albeit a more traditionally chronological one, and the Academy has over the years shown a recurring interest in films that are willing to get a little adventurous in their structure — think Birdman or Slumdog Millionaire, two films I don’t like nearly as much as Dunkirk but that share its willingness to color outside the lines of traditional storytelling structure.

The reason I frame this quality in terms of the “pure cinema” designation is that Dunkirk‘s structure, like those of the other films I’ve mentioned, is one that can arguably work only as a film; certainly episodic television and theater would be hard-pressed to tell this story in this way, and while you could conceivably appreciate Dunkirk‘s story written out, without the accompanying filmmaking components that make it such an immediate, visceral viewing experience, it would likely die on the page. 

In an entertainment era when the line between film and TV in particular feels like it’s getting ever blurrier, it makes complete sense that the Academy would want to highlight and celebrate films that highlight and celebrate filmmaking, and all the things filmmaking is capable of that other media are not. The only other Best Picture nominees that I think come close to Dunkirk in this respect are Phantom Thread and Call Me by Your Name, but those are also both operating on a much smaller, more interpersonal scale than Dunkirk.

Alissa: It’s funny that you both talked about pure cinema, because though I completely agree, when I reviewed the film — and when I went back to see it again a couple of months after release, with my husband and father-in-law — I couldn’t stop thinking of it in terms of a symphony. It features tonally different movements with distinct sorts of stories (the boys on the beach, almost anonymous; the men with backstories on the boat; the lone man in the sky), and the sum of those movements is what makes the film really feel like a whole. 

Perhaps that’s obvious — the pieces of a movie always add up to a whole — but in Dunkirk, it’s the whole game.

Two other things come to mind about Hollywood when I think about Dunkirk. The first is that it’s actually one of three recent movies that include the Dunkirk evacuation as a major part of their story.

The other two are Darkest Hour, also nominated for Best Picture, and the small but lovely film Their Finest. Is this coincidence, do you think, or is it possible there’s something specific about the Dunkirk evacuation that has motivated Hollywood at this moment?

And the other is the question of the cinematic experience. Lots of people were extremely eager to learn more about the various formats in which Dunkirk was screening, and I heard from many readers who went out of their way to seek out an IMAX 70mm screening — the best way to see the film, in my experience. But fundamental to that is the fact that to see the IMAX 70mm version, the best version, the version Nolan wanted you to see, you had to go to a theater and sit in a room with other people. 

The summer of 2017 was terrible for the box office, which suggests not very many people are doing that anymore. Do you suppose that amid a burgeoning direct-to-Netflix trend for films, it isn’t just filmmaking but the actual cinematic experience that Hollywood is interested in honoring by honoring Dunkirk?

Todd: I’m all but certain that Dunkirk is earning some big brownie points for just how essential a good theater is to experiencing it at its best. (If it wins, I suspect that Nolan’s stand for the theatrical experience will be part of why.) Dunkirk is definitely improved by seeing it in the theater, though anecdotally, I’ve heard it works on phones and in the back of airplane headrests, much as my saying that might make Nolan break out in hives. 

My point is that a lot has been written about Dunkirk as an overwhelming triumph of filmmaking craft — look at how we just did that above! — but it ultimately works, I think, because Nolan is also a really great screenwriter. I’ll admit to sometimes finding the way he plays with time borderline gimmicky, and when I first heard about Dunkirk’s structural gambit, I groaned a little bit. But goodness was I wrong to be suspicious. 

Nolan is in love with stories about what it means to be a prisoner of time, to be stuck in a narrative you can’t escape. Interstellar, the movie he made immediately preceding Dunkirk (and one that was actually improved for me by watching it on television — go figure), takes that idea to its extreme, with a character living out decades in the blink of a cinematic eye, due to the effects of time dilation in space travel. Dunkirk examines the concept in miniature. What does time mean when you’re squeezed up against the shores of death, when you have one week or one day or one hour left, and that might be all you have? 

I think that might be why the end of the movie is so brilliant. As the three timelines converge, and the characters we’ve been following come together, Dunkirk breaks free of time’s prison, and the elation of living past the narrative you were trapped in becomes its own reward. (Nolan also finds a way to make Churchill’s “we will fight on the beaches...” speech feel new, which is a tough thing to do.)

But a lot of Dunkirk’s excellence is due to the acting too, and I’d love to hear who your favorite performers were in an ensemble that could feel faceless. I loved Cillian Murphy, whose character arc was the movie’s best approximation of something more “traditional,” except it was told out of order, because this is a Christopher Nolan movie.

Genevieve: It’s interesting that you characterize the ensemble as “faceless,” Todd, because it wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through the film that I actually recognized one of its most recognizable faces, Tom Hardy, who’s buried under a fighter pilot helmet for most of his time onscreen. (This is doubly embarrassing given the number of times Nolan and Hardy have worked together in the past.) But it’s the first face we see in Dunkirk, that of the British private Tommy — played by the heretofore-unknown Fionn Whitehead — that always pops into my head when I think of this film.

Tommy’s mad dash through the streets of Dunkirk for the relative (very relative) safety of the beach where troops are waiting to be evacuated is a pure shot of adrenaline, and while a good portion of that is attributable to the filmmaking of the opening sequence, Whitehead provides focus amid the chaos. 

This is not an uncommon tactic in war films, giving viewers an individual human reference point or two to latch onto among seas of faceless troops, but Whitehead evokes such naked vulnerability and fear in such a short amount of time, establishing the emotional as well as physical stakes facing the troops on that beach with little more than a series of increasingly panicked looks. 

Whitehead may not have the immediate name or face recognition of a Tom Hardy (minus the helmet) or Cillian Murphy or Kenneth Branagh, but it’s that very lack of previous associations that makes him feel so emblematic of this film in particular.

Alissa: So, given everything we’ve said — in five or 10 years, what idea, image, or scene will stick with you? What will you think of when someone mentions Dunkirk? 

Todd: For me, the first thing that came to mind was just the ocean, the way it stops the characters from going where they need to go, the way it almost becomes a villain simply by its existence. This is a cold and wet movie, and especially in 70mm, on an IMAX screen, those waves seem to stretch on forever.

Genevieve: I’ve already mentioned Whitehead’s panicked skyward glances, but I think what I’ll remember most about Dunkirk is the conversation it engendered about the necessity of appreciating it on the biggest screen available, accompanied by the best sound possible — and my shame over the fact that that’s not how I saw the film, which I watched for the first time months after its release on a screener. 

But you know what? It was still a damn great film when viewed on my regular ol’ television set, which feels like confirmation of the idea that while the “pure” filmmaking on display is generally the most celebrated aspect of Dunkirk — for good reason — it’s not all this movie is.

Alissa: When I think of Dunkirk, I think of its final scenes, after the young men have been evacuated and returned home, and we get the distinct sense that they are overwhelmed with shame. They’ve survived, but they don’t yet know whether their homeland will exist for much longer. There’s one moment where a young soldier encounters a blind man handing out blankets, who tells him that it’s enough that they made it back at all. 

And I think that’s what stirs me still about Dunkirk: It’s not a movie about triumph, but about many people in the face of uncertainty trying to find their way forward in the darkness. To be perfectly honest, that’s what made this film, perhaps uniquely among the others, something I really needed to see in 2017.

‘La La Land’ Makes Musicals Matter Again

By Manohla Dargis

Nov. 23, 2016

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/movies/la-la-land-makes-musicals-matter-again.html

LOS ANGELES — The first time I watched Damien Chazelle’s musical, “La La Land,” I thought a lot about how it worked, about its form, his craft and how the lickable candy-colored costumes bring to mind both M&M’s and Jacques Demy. I thought about how Mr. Chazelle and his stars, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, fit into the history of the film musical. When I went to see “La La Land” again, I was in a terrible state, and this time I just fell into it, gratefully. I surrendered. Afterward, I realized that this must have been what it was like to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers during the Great Depression.

In “La La Land,” Mr. Chazelle has a shot at something that has eluded auteurist titans like Peter Bogdanovich and Francis Ford Coppola: to make musicals matter again. For decades, the genre that helped Hollywood’s golden age glitter has sputtered, resurfacing in Broadway adaptations like “Into the Woods” or sneaking in sideways in the “Magic Mike” movies, where the music is canned and the dancing grindingly dirty. About the only consistent sources for old-fashioned singing and dancing of the Turner Classic Movies kind has been Disney cartoons, television shows like “Glee” and TCM itself. Musicals have been for kids, for knowing winks and nostalgia.

A musical with big numbers, intimate reveries and adult feelings, “La La Land” is a boy-meets-girl tale with early 21st-century rhythms (mostly good, even if its white stars are nestled, more self-consciously than naturally, in a multicultural world). It grapples with love between equals in a story about an aspiring actress, Mia (Ms. Stone), who meets an ambitious musician, Sebastian (Mr. Gosling), Los Angeles-style during a traffic jam on a freeway: He honks his horn at her; she flips him the bird. It takes a while for them to get together — they meet, they retreat, repeat — only to end up swaying in that fading, soft-light time known as the magic hour, tapping and twirling yet never quite touching. After another encounter, they at last move as one — s’wonderful, as Astaire crooned.

Contemporary American movies could use more s’wonderful, more music and dance, and way, way more surrealism. They’re too dull, too ordinary and too straight, whether they’re mired in superhero clichés or remodeled kitchen-sink realism. One of the transformative pleasures of musicals is that even at their most choreographed, they break from conformity, the dos and don’ts of a regimented life, suggesting the possibility that everyone can move to her own beat. It’s enormously pleasurable when an evening stroll turns into a rhythmic saunter and then bursts into dance — think of Gene Kelly walking, tapping, stomping and exulting in the rain.

Mr. Chazelle was studying film at Harvard when Astaire and Rogers first blew his mind. He had begun developing a playlist befitting the young and serious: He loved Alfred Hitchcock and the French New Wave, and was dabbling in the American avant-garde. He had watched musicals growing up but found it revelatory to see Astaire and Rogers cheek to cheek in “Top Hat” while watching Jean-Luc Godard and Maya Deren. “Suddenly, I started thinking of them as experimental movies in mainstream garb,” Mr. Chazelle said recently when we met in Los Angeles. “That was the initial thing where I woke up and went, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been sleeping on a gold mine.’”

At Harvard, Mr. Chazelle nurtured his love for musicals — he became obsessed with Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s “It’s Always Fair Weather,” a musical about loss, disappointment and masculinity — and started on his senior thesis film, which became his feature directorial debut, “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench.” That film grew out of a discussion he had with another student, Justin Hurwitz — they were in a rock band together — and “me just asking him, ‘Hey, if I did something that was either a musical or kind of a musical that I needed original music for, would you do the music?’” Mr. Hurwitz did, going on to compose for “La La Land” and “Whiplash,” Mr. Chazelle’s second feature.

A near-musical, “Guy and Madeline” centers on a young jazzman and a free spirit who split after it opens, only to reunite later (perhaps). The film’s textures, jazz and bohemian milieu as well as its black-and-white visuals evoke the young John Cassavetes, while its playful embrace of the musical suggests the scene in Mr. Godard’s “Band of Outsiders” when three characters line dance in a cafe. (“Parenthetically,” Mr. Godard says, “now’s the time to describe their feelings.”) “I sort of thought of ‘Guy and Madeline’ as not a full musical,” Mr. Chazelle said, “but a movie that kind of becomes a musical.” Part of its charm is that — as he plays, and as she sings and dances — Guy and Madeline become themselves.

The shifts in “Guy and Madeline” from the everyday to its tapping, tuneful numbers is characteristic of musicals that blend the walking-and-talking ordinary world with the singing-and-dancing musical world. In “Top Hat,” Astaire and Rogers start dancing in a gazebo during a storm almost by chance. She’s dressed in a riding outfit while he’s in a jacket and tie, which underscores the ordinariness of their being together until, that is, he starts singing “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain).” In the backstage musical, the numbers tend to be set off from offstage life (as in Busby Berkeley 1930s fantasias); a lot of musicals, including “Singin’ in the Rain,” combine these approaches.

“La La Land,” which opens Dec. 9, integrates its numbers, even the most fantastical, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a guy to tap-dance on a park bench or a woman to dream herself into a waltz. Mia and Sebastian meet early but don’t connect until they bump into each other at a party. Later, while walking to her car, they end up in Griffith Park, a swath of Los Angeles that, like everything in the city, is part of movie history. (“A rock is a rock, and a tree is a tree. Shoot it in Griffith Park!” is an old industry maxim.) As the sky glows pink, Mia sits on a bench to change out of her heels. All at once, they’re both wearing spectator shoes and, as suddenly, they’re side by side. Their feet start moving together, and the rest follows.

In classic style, Mia and Sebastian somehow, amazingly, know how to dance together — they shadow each other in sync — without holding each other. As in the gazebo scene in “Top Hat,” which brings Astaire and Rogers’s characters closer and closer, the park dance in “La La Land” turns flirting into a performance, complete with a little tapping, a little twirling and several neatly executed barrel turns from Mr. Gosling. Throughout “La La Land,” Mr. Chazelle engages distinct genre tropes — the not-quite-touching dance, the constantly interrupted kiss, the miracle of synchronicity — to playful effect, allowing him to transform the everyday into what he calls the dramatically or comically “epic.”

In October 2015, I watched Mr. Chazelle shoot several numbers for “La La Land” at the Hollywood Center Studios, the same lot where Astaire made “Second Chorus” and Mr. Coppola started going broke making “One From the Heart.” Throughout “La La Land,” Mr. Chazelle plays with realism, moving from the recognizable now into full-blown fantasy, as when Mia and Sebastian walk into one of those sets that turn reality into an Impressionistic backdrop, in this case a city that’s distilled into the “Hollywood” sign and the Watts Towers. It’s a tricky scene that requires Ms. Stone and Mr. Gosling to enter a vibrant throng of dancing extras before they part ways.

On both days, Mr. Chazelle used an enormous crane with a telescoping column — the camera was at one end, the operator at the other — which allowed a wide range of fluid motion and high angles like those that punctuate “Singin’ in the Rain.” (“We needed that lift at the end,” Mr. Chazelle said later.) His mantra that day and the next was “It’s got to be head to toe,” a refrain that would have pleased Astaire, who liked to show the body fully in frame. Astaire disliked the fragmentation of Berkeley’s numbers, which could turn bodies into machinelike parts, insisting that “either the camera will dance or I will.” Of course, in great musicals it’s always a duet.

With the choreographer Mandy Moore, Mr. Chazelle worked with what Mr. Gosling and Ms. Stone brought with them. He also showed them favorites like “The Band Wagon” and Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” Together they tried to find “the little weird idiosyncrasies” of their characters’ body language, Mr. Chazelle said, “and then build numbers out of that.” Mr. Gosling was a child performer (“The All New Mickey Mouse Club”) and has a dancer’s posture and silky walk; Ms. Stone starred in the recent Broadway revival of “Cabaret.” Each dances and sings well enough to put the numbers in “La La” across, even as their wobble and strain keep them down to earth.

There are various reasons the American film musical fell out of favor, including the transformation of the old studio system and changing audience tastes, behaviors and more. We stopped dancing, except at clubs and parties; the film musical grew grim and then grimmer (“Cabaret,” “Saturday Night Fever”). Women’s liberation and changing gender relations confused Hollywood — and still do. The movie industry excels at recycling genres, stories and stereotypes, but it hasn’t been adept at making them work with emancipated women, who no longer need men to have their happily ever after.

The problem of the straight couple haunts the musical just as it does contemporary cinema. In his study “Pursuits of Happiness,” Stanley Cavell writes that certain screwball films of the 1930s and ’40s involve the creation of a new woman or what he calls “a new creation of the human.” He sees these films as “parables of a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man,” which is a nice way to describe “Top Hat” and the rather different “La La Land.”

“I find it wonderful that in the same era in Hollywood as screwball comedies,” Mr. Chazelle said, “where everything was about this patter and conversations building to certain catharsis with a couple — that this series of musicals was able to do its version of that, but without any words at all and just with dancing.” For him, the only recent film that suggests such catharsis is “Pulp Fiction” — John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing is the closest to Fred and Ginger that we’ve gotten. Of course, Fred never had to revive Ginger by plunging a hypodermic into her heart after a drug overdose, a scene that suggests why it’s hard for American cinema to again embrace the musical, even as the likes of “Pitch Perfect” and the cheerleading series “Bring It On” flirt with the genre.

Musicals are for idealists. One of the pleasures of classic film musicals is the chance to watch bodies become extraordinary — strolling and then singing and soaring — often in stories that suggest that with some choir practice and maybe an Arthur Murray dance lesson or two, you could soar, too. Musicals are liberation with a beat. When Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow,” she was telling her audience that it would transcend its terrible times. (No wonder gay men embraced her.) When the Nicholas Brothers danced in “Stormy Weather,” they offered a profound vision of the United States that few old Hollywood movies did: two brilliant black men who, despite the racial inequities of their country, could embody the sublime better than anyone else could.

Still, I wonder if the gulf between a film like “Top Hat” and, say, “Pulp Fiction” is too vast to bridge for contemporary moviegoers, who might be too knowing, cynical, segmented or self-absorbed to be transported by — and believe in — two people who spontaneously sing and dance as one. (Among the more familiar dance images of the last decade are the Apple ads with silhouettes dancing alone to their iPods.) I hope not. Because while “La La Land” engages with nostalgia, it also passionately speaks to the present just by asking whether it’s possible (finally) for a romantically involved woman and man to get past the struggle part of the struggle for reciprocity, to borrow Mr. Cavell’s language. We know men and women can go toe to toe, but can they still dance cheek to cheek?