What marks a Nolan movie? Attention to time, memory, and every part of the cinematic experience.
Reviews of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (including mine) are calling the movie the director’s best work so far — the Village Voice’s Bilge Ebiri says it is the “movie Christopher Nolan was born to make.”
High praise, indeed. But what does it mean to say that a movie is a Nolan masterpiece? What makes Nolan distinctive as a director? And how does Dunkirk — a movie about a historical event, not normal fare for the director — fit into his most distinctive interests?
Plenty of things mark Nolan’s work, some of which make him beloved to his fans and others that raise eyebrows. He’s sometimes dinged for making films that are too clinical, light on character development, largely uninterested in female and non-white characters except as props for the protagonists, and marred by their director’s private obsessions with time and trickery.
But while some of these criticisms have merit, it’s hard to dispute that Nolan is an important director, one who’s managed to find a way to make big-budget movies that people want to talk about, dissect, and revisit after they’ ve seen them.
Dunkirk in particular leans hard into Nolan’s interests as a filmmaker, but with a twist that works to the historical story’s advantage. Here are four things to remember about Christopher Nolan’s films that help position Dunkirk in his larger body of work.
Most of Nolan’s films (many of which feature screenplays by his brother, Jonathan) explore big philosophical concepts, and none of them attempt to offer concrete answers. But whether he’s making science fiction, a crime drama, a superhero film, or a war movie, Nolan is remarkably consistent in his favored themes.
One of his most clear interests is memory: how it works, how it gets corrupted, and how our memories shape and even create what we consider to be “reality.”
Two of his films — 2000’s Memento and 2010’s Inception — are the most explicitly interested in the topic. In Memento, the protagonist (Guy Pearce) is literally suffering from a form of amnesia that leaves him without a short-term memory, and both his and the viewer’s perception of what’s “real” are affected by that condition. In the considerably higher-budget Inception, the protagonist (Leonardo DiCaprio) is trying to implant memories into someone else’s subconscious, and the nature of memory drives the plot.
But most Nolan films deal with memory in some way. Across the Dark Knight trilogy (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises) , Bruce Wayne is haunted by the memory of his parents’ death — and though this isn’ t Nolan’s invention, it is something he pulled out of Batman lore and emphasized. In The Prestige, the big twist hinges on a person — and the audience — relying on their memory, only to discover it’s faulty. And the near-future world at the start of Interstellar has tried to scrub its society of a collective memory, claiming that the Apollo missions never happened.
While Nolan’s films are sometimes accused of being clinical and emotionless, he at least seems to consider memory to be tied very tightly to our emotions. Following the release of Inception in 2010, he told Wired, “I wanted to deal with the world of dreams, and I realized that I really had to offer the audience a more emotional narrative, something that represents the emotional world of somebody’s mind. So both the hero’s story and the heist itself had to be based on emotional concepts.”
In Dunkirk, the role of memory is subtler than it’s been in his other films. The memories of battle experiences, which seem to have settled more in the soldiers’ bodies than their conscious minds, certainly affect how they act under siege — how they duck for a bomb, or react to enclosed spaces.
But Dunkirk ’s true relationship to memory is in its source material: It takes as its basis an event that is part of our larger history, then tweaks that memory ever so slightly. In addition to taking some of the wind out of the triumphalist mythology that has grown up around the event — it doesn’ t end on an entirely upbeat note — Dunkirk illustrates how many and varied types of heroism contributed to the evacuation.
So with Dunkirk, Nolan doesn’ t address memory directly; instead, the movie performs a small and benevolent inception of its own, subtly reframing the audience’s memories of a major historical event.
Particularly in movies like Inception, Interstellar, Memento, and his 1998 debut feature Following, Nolan likes to mess with the ways we’ re conditioned to think about time, particularly at the movies, where we expect a relatively straightforward progression of time that mirrors real life: Start at the beginning, proceed in an orderly fashion, and end at the end.
But Nolan isn’ t all that interested in following those rules. In his films, time is just another tool in the arsenal, meant to be bent to the filmmaker’s will and not the other way around.
So frequently, what you’ re seeing in a Nolan film feels like it’s chronological, and then you get to experience the thrill (or maybe annoyance) of realizing that what you assumed about the movie isn’ t true: These two scenes don’ t follow each other logically, or that event actually happened at a different time. It’s usually not just a neat trick, but rather an integral part of the storytelling. You’ re supposed to suddenly feel dislocated, realizing that all of your assumptions about the world are a matter of perception.
In Memento, for example, the story is told on two parallel tracks; one runs forward, but the other runs backward, and that’s something we in the audience discover on our own. The story is slowly constructed as a kind of dance between filmmaker and viewer, who are working together to find the meaning alongside the protagonist. The audience’s temporal disorientation mimics the protagonist’s — and that makes for a more powerful viewing experience.
Nolan’s love of messing with time is no surprise, given his interest in memory. Memories go hand in hand with time, after all; memories are the primary way that the past is “real” to us. But memories can be faulty, especially in Nolan’s world. That means that sometimes our perception of time is faulty, too. We lose track of when something happened, or we failed at the time to recognize how it fit into other life events. Nolan repeatedly compels viewers to reexamine the “facts” we take as settled truth about our world by giving us a mini-lesson at the multiplex.
One of the key features that sets Dunkirk apart from other war films is how it treats time: The movie moves along three separate planes of time, which it lays out right at the beginning of the film and cuts between throughout. We observe one set of characters over the course of a week, another set over a day, and another set over just an hour. The film itself is only about two hours long, which means “time” is moving much more quickly for some characters than for others.
That’s not normal for a historical film based on a famous battle, but it’s certainly done with purpose in Dunkirk. It helps underline an experience that’s hard to demonstrate in a more straightforward movie: that war (and other experiences of extreme stress) tend to distort memory and perceptions of time. Our experience of dislocation out in the cinema seats matches, in some small way, how people who were actually present at the events would experience them.
But in Dunkirk, right from the start, we know the planes of time will also eventually converge on each other. And that point of convergence — when all of these people who have been moving along separate timelines suddenly are in the same place, at the same time, at just the right moment to avert utter disaster — helps dismantle the tendency of war films to promote a kind of “great man” theory, or to make the eventual moment of rescue seem like it was inevitable. In war, nothing is inevitable; no one person is solely responsible for what happens; and chance (or Providence, depending on your philosophical commitments) governs both victory and defeat. Dunkirk ’s unique time structure builds that insight into the film as a whole.
Though he started with small, low-budget thrillers like Following and Memento, Nolan rapidly became a blockbuster director. Nolan’s evolution into a maker of big, plot-driven films reflects his interest in getting moviegoers to revise their expectations about what a popular, successful, big-budget movie can be.
One of the most effective ways he does this is by taking popular genres (mysteries, thrillers, sci-fi, superheroes, war) and rethinking what they can do. This is something he shares with filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen brothers, all of whom also love film, study the history of cinema, and want to move it forward by seeing what kind of new tricks old genres can pull off.
