Dunkirk & Get Out (Movie Reviews by Bob Racine)

                     Dunkirk (1 hr & 47 min, color, 2017)

Get Out  (1 hr & 44 min, color, 2017)

The first time I saw the very popular movie of the 1940s “Mrs. Miniver”, I experienced an adrenalin rush during the sequence in which the subject of Dunkirk came to the fore.  The title character, a very brave British wife and mother, was played formidably by Greer Garson, a woman who suffers from the German bombing of her home and community during the early days of World War II.  She sees her husband, played by Walter Pigeon, off one morning on a dangerous cruise across the English Channel. The name Dunkirk did not register in my brain at the time. I was eight years old; it was much later in my life that I was filled in on it.  

What I remember most about the way the event was filmed is the note of gallantry with which it was mounted.  Pigeon set out in a private craft along with numerous others to perform a rescue operation and was gone for many hours.  What stood out for me at that early age, with my tender mind hungry for excitement, was the size of the small fleet and the sound they made in an impressive motorized unison advancing over the water.  They looked and sounded like an armada, linked and cruising together and all pointed in one direction.  It was to my child’s sense of adventure a very thrilling sight.  All this manpower was surging forth to deliver a wallop to the sneaky and cruel Germans.  Strength in a gigantic unity!  Chills ran up and down my spine.      

But the real story of Dunkirk is something quite different.  It was May of 1940, right after Hitler’s army had invaded and captured France, that British troops sent to aid the French in the fight found themselves surrounded by the Germans. It is estimated that there were over 300,000 of them, cut off from the French, unable to get home.  An invasion force to rescue them on short notice would have been impossible, and the use of destroyers to pick them up would have been impractical for getting close enough to the beaches without themselves being attacked. The requisitioning of private small crafts was put into play instead, and they came voluntarily from all up and down the English Channel.  Churchill put out the call for them and they showed up in dribbles here and there, not in an organized armada.    

That was the situation at sea, while there was an air war going on overhead and a land war behind enemy lines.  These are the three perspectives from which the largely fictional screenplay is constructed – land, sea and air, the action shifting back and forth between them throughout the movie’s length.  The directorial competence behind the epic is Christopher Nolan aided by his wife Emma Thomas.  They have taken us deep into the tangled threads of this historic rescue operation.  They could have made a documentary, but they have chosen to dramatize the personal lives and struggles of varied characters aiming to get back to England and home.  It is a narrative of heart and soul as well as military engagement.  That is what makes it something very special.     

There was a time when if a movie was clearly and intentionally a comedy, you could tell as much from the ads.  You knew you were in funny-land almost from the moment the projector started grinding out the images or at least starting with a spoken word of dialogue that, if not hilarious, at least had a droll or cockeyed slant to it, signaling more jocular and farcical and ridiculous material to follow.  There was a tilted quality to what you were both seeing and hearing.  You knew it was safe not to take what was happening on the screen too seriously.  This has often been true even with black or grisly humor.  In “Dr. Strangelove” the world is about to come to an end, but the devices are so “far out” that it would be a crying shame if you did not laugh.       

Apparently that policy has been revised, though who has done the revision,  who the agent of change could be, it would be difficult to determine.  “Get Out”, the bizarre story of a 26-year-old black man going to meet his Caucasian girlfriend’s family somewhere on the far edge of suburbia and finding himself walking into a swarm of unearthly oddballs, was one of the movies that competed in the recent Golden Globe Awards in the category of Comedy or Musical!!!  I saw it with the expectation of having a rambunctious good time, but I was almost all the way through the footage before I came upon anything that I would call truly funny.  Instead of humor, it is largely pure horror, especially in the later sequences – bloody and ever so grotesque.  It is a tale of slow entrapment from which our hero must extricate himself.  It kind of reflects upon the current feeling that black flesh is as cheap in some peoples’ eyes as ever.  The idea for the plot is one of singular invention. The fascination is watching how it makes use of faces to set the mood and deliver the scary goods.   Close-ups on just about everybody’s part are the most conspicuous feature.  

It is an extraordinarily well produced, acted and directed movie, as long as you can accept it on its true terms – not as a comedy but as a burgeoning nightmare.  There are brief scattered moments that are darkly humorous, but such moments do not justify calling it a comedy vehicle.   It is currently competing in the Oscars with four major nominations, including Director and Original Screenplay for newcomer Jordan Peele and Actor for Daniel Kaluuya .  It appears to be the sleeper of the year. The film’s future bears watching, as do the careers of all the consistently fine talents that make up the cast.          

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.