Dunkirk

(Warning: contains spoilers for Dunkirk.  But it happened 77 years ago, so you should probably know the ending already)

Dunkirk has been one of the more eagerly anticipated films of 2017.  The first trailers for the film premiered around the same time as Suicide Squad and then there was little by way of promotion until its release this year.  Which, in an era of promotional campaigns and teaser trailers makes it unusual.  But this is an unusual Christopher Nolan film.  Although you could comfortably play a decent game of "Christopher Nolan bingo" (Emma Thomas producing? Check.  Hans Zimmer composing?  Check.  Lee Smith editing?  Check.  Michael Caine?  Check - he's there as a cameo, marking his seventh time in a Nolan film), it is based on a true story and is surprisingly less than two hours long. 

The film is about the Dunkirk evacuation (also known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, and operation Dynamo) that occurred over nine days in 1940.  British, French and Belgian troops found themselves trapped on the exposed beaches of Dunkirk, unable to retreat to Britain, while dogfights roared overhead.  800 boats of varying shapes and sizes (including ferries, fishing boats and lifeboats) set off to try and collect as many people as possible.  Over 300,000 people were rescued, and it led to Churchill's now infamous "We shall fight them on the beaches" speech.

Critically acclaimed (currently scoring 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic), and generating a lot of online chatter, I was keen to see what it was like.

I was disappointed.

There is a lot to commend it.  Generally, historians agree that it is broadly accurate and not glammed up for Hollywood.  This is always pleasing to hear, particularly with regards to World War 1 and 2 depictions as there are fewer and fewer people alive today who can confirm what it was actually like to be there at that time.  Nolan and his team have been painstaking in detail (compare the differing uniforms of various characters throughout the film), and Nolan himself made a point of not attempting to film Dunkirk until he had a lot more experience as a director of big-screen productions.  that is to his credit.  Audiences cannot help but realise how cold, desolate, bleak and dangerous everything about the situation was.

Hans Zimmer's score is excellent at ratcheting up tension to almost unbearable heights.  There is an almost steady drone throughout, which leads to paranoia and uncertainty - is that part of the soundtrack? An enemy plane?  Both?  As a result, the film is uncomfortable viewing, because the audience can never settle because the next barrage of action is always imminent.

The story-telling has an interesting conceit - there are three overlapping storylines (air, sea and land), told at three different times, which means that, like it or not, I'm going to have to watch this film again to better understand exactly what happened.  The dialogue is minimal, so for the most part Dunkirk runs almost as a silent film.  Sometimes you just don't need words.

So far, so good.  And those are three very strong ticks in the "good film" box - looks good, sounds good, is honest.  But, for me, it isn't enough.

For a start, it's a 12A war film, meaning that the people who die do so cleanly, quickly and in one piece.  Even those with no experience of war know that this cannot possibly be true.  Weaponry is not so kind.  Films like Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge and Apocalypse Now have set the bar high for a shocking and compelling account of what warfare is like.  Dunkirk is almost bloodless as a film, and given that Nolan has set out to be as accurate as possible, this seems like a very strange decision to make.  Thus begging the question: who is this film for?

Secondly, it lacks personal story.  For me, the most interesting storyline was the one in the sea where Mark Rylance's character (Mr Dawson) sets off in his little fishing boat with his son, Peter and their friend, George.  Along the way, they pick up a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) who is understandably panicked that their intention is to go to Dunkirk - the very place that he is now trying to avoid.  Their story is a constant tension between two competing points of view, both of which are completely understandable.  This is what brought the enormity of the situation to life for me - that Mr Dawson and his young companions who had no experience whatsoever, were off into the middle of a warzone in a boat that wasn't built for conflict, to rescue damaged soldiers (with no way of treating them), with no instruction from land, no way of proving that they were allies, and little more than a limited amount of tea to offer.  That story is fascinating, but a fraction of the running time is devoted to it.  I would have watched an entire film of that story (Mark Rylance, as always, is impossible not to watch).  Instead, this competes with nameless, faceless, story-less characters in the air (where Tom Hardy is) and on the beaches (where Harry Styles is) and I don't know why I'm supposed to care as much about them.

An entire film of this story, please.  Thanks.

Personal story, I believe, is critical for big scale stories like Dunkirk.  I know that millions of people died in World War 2.  I know that it affected generations to come.  But on film, you need to have at least some identifying figures to understand the scale, and why it matters.  It is sad when people die, but it becomes tragic when we understand them as individuals and not just one of a number.  Which is why scenes like this, are imperative and why (to me) Dunkirk is less of a film for not featuring them.

Thirdly, this film is solely about white, English-speaking men.  To the best of my knowledge, war (particularly world war) is not so selective.  In the real-life Dunkirk, 1 in every 4 crewmen on British merchant vessels was a lascar, and the majority of them were from South East Asia, or Africa.  Women were trained to parachute behind enemy lines, disrupt communication, treat the injured and the dying.  In Dunkirk, they cheerily hand out bread and jam and not much else.  That, in itself, is another odd decision.

Finally, if you see this film having little to no idea about what the Dunkirk evacuation was, you may leave the film none the wiser.  Much as the posters say that this is "the event that shaped our world", there isn't much to put it into a context, or explain the difference that all those "ordinary" members of the public in their boats made.  Explaining the evacuation to the House of Commons, Churchill described the situation as "the whole root and core and brain of the British Army has been stranded at Dunkirk, about to perish or be captured."  The evacuation, he claimed, was nothing short of a miracle.  A national day of prayer was called before the evacuation started, such was the hopelessness felt by everything going on.  The rescue of 300,000 soldiers was arguably one of the main things that enabled the war to continue to the conclusion that it did.  Nolan stated he was keen to "not get [the film] bogged down in politics", but I would argue that without a greater context, it lacks a lot of impact.

I don't get it.  There are reviews I have read that says this is Nolan's best film ever, that this is the best war film ever made, and that it's an instant classic.  That was not the film I saw.  This is disappointing.  Made even more disappointing that Nigel Farage thinks that it is the very metaphor for Brexit.

Who wears a suit to the cinema?

The only conclusion I can come to is that there are three versions of Dunkirk: the one I saw, the one film critics saw and the one Nigel Farage saw.  That's the only explanation that makes sense.  And there are fewer and fewer people who were there who can tell us which one is right.

 

Lion

(Warning: contains spoilers about Lion)

Lion - film about a boy in India who grows up to become Dev Patel.  Same as Slumdog Millionaire?  Well, yes, that bit is, but the rest of it - not so much.

The film that made checking Google Earth look interesting

Five year old Saroo (a beautifully engaging debut from Sunny Pawar) and his family all do their parts to bring money to the family.  Wanting to spend more time with big brother Guddu, he wheedles and begs (as only little siblings can) to come along on a night time job, and gets lost when he accidentally gets carried off on a freight train.  Suddenly, he is 1600km away from home, unable to speak the language and, with a 5 year-old understanding of the world, doesn't know where he is or who his family are (because at 5, your mum's only name is "mum").  Relying on a basic survival instinct, Saroo navigates various harms and winds up on a childrens home, where he is subsequently adopted by an Australian couple - Sue and John Brierley - and moves to Tasmania.
Skipping to the present day (2008), Saroo has turned into Dev Patel, who has a sudden moment of remembrance as he tries jalebi (the sweet delicacy he was never able to afford as a child) in university.  He begins a quest to find his biological family using the newly established Google Earth, and the haziest of landmarks from the back of his memory.

Jalebi - totally good for you, they taste like the frosting on Krispy Kremes.

The film is based on the book (A Long Way Home) of the real life story of the real life Saroo, and it makes for a good film.  The story is told very efficiently - there is very little time spent with Guddu and Saroo, but their relationship is quickly very realistic, and the actions of both are very understandable.  The scenes of a young Saroo, lost in the crowds of Calcutta are vivid and overwhelming, and director Garth Davis (in a strong directorial debut) filmed these scenes at knee height - so we experience what Saroo experiences: legs and knees, and blurred, unfamiliar crowds.  We have all been lost at one point or another, and Lion does an excellent job of capturing the bewildering horror of not knowing where you are, and not knowing how to make yourself understood.  The horrors that young Saroo faces are not always clear - there are people that he runs from that we instinctively understand to be "bad", even though they have not done anything to suggest that belief.  Maybe that was the point - it doesn't matter if people are bad or not: if you're scared, run.

The Brierley's story, though a sub-plot, is equally compelling.  Played quietly and sensitively by Nicole Kidman (an adoptive parent herself) and David Wenham, they decide not to have any biological children (believing the world too overpopulated) and only adopt.  After having such success with Saroo, (who appears to have adapted to his new life well) they adopt Mantosh - a boy of a similar age who has issues of rage and self harm because of his own traumatic history, and the idyll of family life as a three becomes difficult as a family of four.

Adult-Saroo walks a tightrope of being desperate to find his biological family, while not causing distress to his adoptive family.  His task appears insurmountable, and Davis does a great job of a. making someone looking on Google Earth interesting and b. demonstrating the enormity of that task using an increasing amount of maps and drawing pins.

Saroo's family are somewhere in this circle.  Easy, right?

The film's conclusion packs an emotional punch, and it is worth staying around for the credits, in which photographs and updates from the real Saroo bring us up to the present day.  It's one of the few films I've been to where the audience didn't just get up as soon as the credits started rolling (why do people do that?  Even in Marvel films where there's ALWAYS extra stuff?).  Worth seeing.  It will stay with you long after the film has finished.

Additional thoughts, comments and questions:

• This has picked up six Oscar nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Dev Patel), Best Supporting Actress (Nicole Kidman), Best Film, Best Score, Best Cinematography, Best Adapted Screenplay.  Tough categories.  If I was guessing, I'd say it's not going to win any, which is a shame.  But I would be happy to be wrong.
• Google Earth have a feature whereby you can track Saroo's journey:  http://www.indiewire.com/2016/11/saroo-brierley-lion-google-earth-dev-patel-1201748613/ 
• It's interesting to see how far Google Earth has come on since 2008.  The blurriness of the detail that Saroo deals with makes his task all the more impressive.

Hidden Figures

I like puns.  Here's one: someone threw a box of Omega-3 pills at my head, but my injuries are just super fish oil.  It's a stupid play on words, but it made me laugh (but possibly only me, or else I have to work on my delivery).  The next pun I found was in the title of the most recent film I saw - Hidden Figures.  This refers to the mathematical equations that had to be invented and performed by NASA in order to correctly calculate all the zillions of things that would help them win the space race.  Secondly, it refers to the protagonists of the film - a small group of African-American women, who all played their part in contributing to that mission, while living and working in a racially segregated America.  The tagline reads: "Meet the women you don't know, behind the mission you do."

See - the tagline is right there.

Certainly, this isn't a story that I've heard of before and it is one worth telling.  It tells us of how far we've come in some ways, and how far we still have to go.  We're introduced to three women who travel to work together in NASA, and the various small battles they encounter everyday because of the colour of their skin. 

Katherine (Taraji P. Henson) works as a computer (interesting historical detail - a "computer" used to be a job title.  As in, one who computes) in NASA, assigned to a Space Task Group and working with Al Harrison (Kevin Costner, reprising his role as man wearing white shirt in a government job) and Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons, might as well be reprising his role as Sheldon Cooper).  Although she is assigned because of her competence, she is the only woman in the room, and the only person who is not white.  There are variations on ignorance from the men she works with.  It has not occurred to anyone that the only bathroom she is permitted to use is in a building half a mile away ("we all pee the same colour at NASA" an exasperated Harrison comments when he is made aware of the issue).  But there is a pointed nastiness when a second coffeepot is produced on her second day, with a label "colored" affixed to it.  Katherine's work is accepted, but from a distance, and as long as she doesn't touch anything.  Katherine's scenes are initially played for laughs as she runs backwards and forwards to the bathroom, but when she grows tired of the constant small barbs, and calls out the perpetrators (both the well-meaning and the malicious), her words cut deeply.  A small moment which goes uncommented upon is when Katherine is called across campus (to the building where her bathroom is located), escorted by one of her younger male counterparts.  She runs in heels, holding an armful of files, effortlessly.  Her escort, in flat shoes and unencumbered, is winded halfway through the journey - a visual representation of the maxim that you will understand someone better when you've walked a mile in their shoes.

Katherine is a real, still-living person, who is currently 98, and recently received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.  It's worth reading more about her.  You can start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson

Dorothy (Octavia Spencer), is a mathematician, working as a supervisor for the "Coloured Campus" at NASA, but denied the title and pay because of her colour.  Shrewdly noting that IBM computers are coming to NASA, and realising that one machine that can do 24,000 calculations a second will shortly render all in her department obsolete, she learns FORTRAN (an early programming language) and begins teaching it to all in her campus, thus securing their future employment.

Here is some information about Dorothy Vaughan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Vaughan

Mary (Janelle Monae) is encouraged to become an engineer - an idea that is unheard of for women, let alone black women.  In order to take the necessary classes, she must first petition the courts to allow her to attend a "white-only" school.

Information about Mary Jackson can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Jackson_(engineer)

Dorothy, Katherine and Mary (l-r) in real life

Throughout, there are scenes of the women in their lives outside of work, where they are wives, mothers, girlfriends, members of the public.  Those roles are also tainted by the segregation of the country.

This film is fab.  It's inspiring, uplifting, and surprisingly feel-good and funny given the subject matter.  It is also a pointed reminder of what humanity has come from relatively recently, and what we could be capable of again, given certain conditions.  It shows that we can simultaneously be progressive and reductive.  It also shows that progress comes in lots of small but significant ways - the man who holds a door open for Katherine, the colleague who makes her a coffee, the person who lends her his phone at a point of crisis, the supervisor who addresses Dorothy as an equal.  It also shows how tenuously any "-ism" is built, the danger of not challenging things because "that's how they've always been", and how quickly an "-ism" can be overcome (for example, when Al Harrison lets Katherine into the daily briefings, because it makes more sense to keep her up to date with the calculations that have to be made).

It's a film that shows how great people can be.

It's a film that shows how stupid people can be.

Additional thoughts, comments and questions:

• It's unclear to me why NASA hired so many highly skilled black staff, and then put so many restrictions on them. 
• In an interesting twist from the norm, the white people in this film are little more than ciphers.  Jim Parsons, Kirsten Dunst and, arguably, Kevin Costner are poorly served by an otherwise cracking story, and I would have liked to have understood their points of view and actions a little better, especially after such a throwaway line between Dunst and Spencer ("You know, I really don't have any issue with any of you people." "Yes ma'am.  I think you honestly believe that").
• I really like films that can take complicated and unfathomable (to me) topics and make them matter.  I have no idea what any of the calculations in this film mean, but I do understand that if they don't get it right, John Glenn will die in space, and this will be bad.  Well, fair enough then.
• Part of the reason that would be particularly bad is because John Glenn gets some small but significant scenes in this film.  One of which is when he specifically asks Katherine to check all the figures, because no one entirely trusts the IBM computer calculations.  How times have changed.
• Octavia Spencer for Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner, please.