ENTERTAINMENT
CINEMA REVIEWS BY JOHN CAMPBELL
DUNKIRK
Every blue moon, you find a connection between director and subject that is nothing short of alchemical. Christopher Nolan’s career has looped from the best Batman, The Dark Knight (2008), to the wank of Inception (2010), with the films in between being, if nothing else, visually stunning. Dealing here with a comparatively recent historical event, Nolan, who wrote the screenplay, has tempered his penchant for showiness, his tendency to allow style to take precedence over content (it is the CGI effect), with a laser-like focus on the big picture. And the outcome is superb. Routed by the Nazis in 1940, 400,000 British and Allied troops were stranded on the beach at Dunkirk (France). Their annihilation was imminent. That most of them were saved by a flotilla of privately owned fishing vessels, pleasure craft and boats of all shapes and sizes was one of the most stirring and, in the long run, influential episodes of WWII. Few cinema-goers would get more bored with battle scenes than I do, but Nolan has shot some incredibly gripping, white-knuckle, aerial combat sequences in the dogfights that a British pilot (Tom Hardy) engages in with the German planes that are harrying the Allies’ retreat. Likewise the chaos and terror of unsheltered men being bombed by a merciless enemy is keenly felt.
A through-line is provided by the private whose fate is tracked from street-fighting in Dunkirk to his safe arrival by train at Woking, while Kenneth Branagh plays the unflinching ‘John Bull’ commander whose duty will always come first. Music and sound design – the screaming Messerschmitts! – is awesome, as is the sense of triumph created by Hoyte van Hoytema’s camera, which captures the epic and the humane. To his credit, Nolan does not indulge in a gore-fest, but neither does he go in for schmaltziness or glorifying war in any way – perhaps that’s why when Branagh sees the boats sailing from England to save the boys, there is not a dry eye in the house. One of the year’s best.
A QUIET PASSION
Emily Dickinson (1830–86) was an American poet whose work can be found in any anthology of western poetry. She apparently lived a miserably unhappy life and director Terence Davies has decided that if Emily (Cynthia Nixon) suffered for her art, then you might as well suffer for it too. Extracts from her writing, read as voice-over by Nixon, are frequently used to accompany events as they happen – not that much actually does happen, Emily being a shrinking violet who literally never left the house. The great and surely unacceptable irony is that Dickinson is held up to have been, from an early age, a defiant proto-feminist, but here it is made out that her endless gloom was brought on by the fact that she didn’t
have a bloke. She envies other women’s beauty, especially her sister Vinnie’s (Jennifer Ehle), and is severely judgmental of others’ morality, particularly that of her gormless brother Austin (Duncan Duff ). Apart from having a crush on a pastor, all she does, really, is mope around feeling sorry for herself. Out of the blue, Davies inserts horrific photographs from the Civil War that was being waged outside of the refined air of the Dickinson compound, but generally there is no external world related to. Contrary to the intention of any bio-pic, the end result was that, though I now have a greater appreciation of the context of Dickinson’s poems, I like them less.
There is a terrific line in an Ani Difranco song: ‘If my life were a movie, everything I said would be interesting’. Such is the case here, for this is one of those movies in which each line of dialogue is jam-packed with bons mots, profound retorts, insightful observations and the sort of erudition and philosophising that you and I can only come up with half an hour after a conversation is concluded when we’re on our way home. Did people really talk like that in the nineteenth century? Even educated New Englanders such as the Dickinson family of Massachusetts?
North Coast news daily: www.echonetdaily.net.au
The Byron Shire Echo July 26, 2017 35