Last week, prompted by some social media buzz comparing Imtiaz Ali devotees with Christopher Nolan fanatics, a fellow critic and I discussed the two storytellers over beer. Mentioning them in the same boozy breath might have sounded far-fetched.
But while one has built a career upon the systematic intellectualisation of convention, the other has altered the large-scale cinematic landscape by conventionalising intellectuality. Ali’s hypnotic hold over a niche, existential cross-section of the country’s urban millennials is vaguely similar to Nolan’s grip over an elite global legion of cerebral junkies. There’s an invisible pressure on both to outdo their previous films, as well as a mass tendency to celebrate their work solely in context of their own legacies.
When Ali’s latest, Jab Harry Met Sejal, was critically panned for being “hollow, underwritten and un-Ali-like,” his response was telling. “My last film (Tamasha) was praised,” he said, “but it didn’t reach many people.” Here was a victim of his own heritage. Dissuaded by his bravest mainstream film’s relative lack of commercial success, Jab Harry Met Sejal was evidently his solution—a slow-burning reaction to economics, as opposed to his previous films, which were individually thematic reactions to his own burgeoning reputation.
At first glance, Nolan’s tenth feature-length film, Dunkirk, which released two weeks before Ali’s rom-com, also looks like an urgent reaction to his own legacy. It presents itself as a drastic, one-note departure from our notions of his creative stature. Over his two-decade-long career, he has inadvertently convinced a generation of cinema enthusiasts that there exists an exclusive high-functioning nation called ‘Nolan-verse’. He has made low-budget, high-concept movies (The Following, Memento) and big-budget, high-concept movies about the past, present and future (The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar); his first step into studio limelight was with a small-town, atmospheric non-thriller (Insomnia); he has rebuilt a jaded superhero franchise (The Dark Knight trilogy) from bottom to top by adapting material naturally at odds with conceptual heft.
And yet, this versatility of ambition is grouped under a singular stylistic umbrella: non-linear narratives, labyrinthine plots, Michael Caine, space-time rifts, in-script exposition, haunting Hans Zimmer music, and morally conflicted male protagonists.
While others are accused of telling the same stories over and over again, he is accused of creating different universes that overwhelm us with the same intensity over and over again. Because, while the rest of Hollywood is action and performances and sex and blood, Nolan has become an idea.
Master storyteller
His ideas adopt frameworks ranging from the sparse to the over-crowded, from indie-impulsive to blockbuster-clinical, but at no point do they stop being thoughts. These thoughts remind independent filmmakers of why they tell stories, and mainstream filmmakers of why they should tell stories.
Extending his Inception terminology, if his contemporaries are Arthur stuck in a dogged gunfight against unseen mental enemies, he has become the smug Eames, who serenely butts in with a grenade launcher and declares, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
He is, therefore, accused of sacrificing soul at the altar of imagination and sequence, of being too ambitious and forcing us to continuously re-examine the potential of artistic expression. Soul, however, is not an adjective but a destination in his movies; it is a non-intimate search, a subversive notion of “home” overshadowed by distractive story-building devices: magician Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) tricks our eyes to reach his motherless little daughter in The Prestige; dream-extractor Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) executes a complicated heist to re-enter America for his motherless children in Inception; and Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) escapes a dark hole to reunite with his daughter in Interstellar.
Which is why Dunkirk—a cold, bleak, bloodless, kinetic, discomforting and near-wordless World War II snapshot—might on the surface seem like a consequence of his reputation. Like a conscious attempt to rid his palette of all the tamasha, un-Nolanify popular perceptions, seduce the Academy and prove a Kubrick-shaped point.
The kick in the dream
In context of his bombastic filmography, Dunkirk looked like Nolan himself does in his films’ official set photographs—an old-school, out-of-place, unglamorous but elegantly dressed “human” with a portable video monitor around his neck, dwarfed by volcanic landscapes and customised revolving corridors, carefully observing Batman, Bane, Joker and David Bowie inflate their adventures. The antidote to world-building, the kick in dreams, the practicality in illusions.
Dunkirk, though, on closer look, is the filmmaker’s most distilled version of his voice. It too is about a battle to get home. About sons reaching their parents, instead of the other way around. Only, the battle is literal; it’s a war. And the war—the mechanics, rules, risks and rewards with crisscrossing timelines—is the real story. Not its soldiers. There are no characters in war, just numbers and faceless survivors. The idea of war, like most Nolan-verse concepts, is complex, man-made, close-ended and cyclical too. There are only two roles—living and dying—and neither of them is derived from personal disposition. The action is plotted elaborately, as opposed to the plot being elaborately explained.
On another day, the realness of the Dunkirk evacuation could assume the methodical imagination of a fictitious maze-like dreamscape, the vast technicalities of an intergalactic space mission, the cat-and-mouse rivalry of two ruthless magicians in 1890s London, or even the audaciousness of an amnesia-afflicted investigator’s backward-playing narrative.
Dunkirk is, in fact, very much Nolan in those set photographs—detailed, focused, instructive, and a precise reminder of lived-in truth in a world full of masked franchises and mythical legends. It is the ancestor of world-building, the kick without dreams, the rationality preceding illusions.
And appropriately so. Because as much as we’d like to identify “order” to this storyteller’s filmography, the fact remains that none of his work is reactionary. Each of them is based on a feeling: a wide-eyed whim independent of the era they end up defining or the cinema they end up defying.
Discovering magic
Dunkirk was conceived as his first film, 20 years ago, on a boat ride with his wife across the English Channel. He made the film in 2017 because he could, not because he needed to. And certainly not because of what preceded it. The Prestige, too, was written before Insomnia and Batman Begins, while Interstellar’s foundation was laid much before Inception. Those films are, in hindsight, indirect descendants of Dunkirk’s vision—of a youngster discovering, not manufacturing, magic in history.
If anything, his movies are a limit-pushing reaction to the traditionalism of genres they occupy, just like his techniques (film over digital; no phones and chairs on set; practical effects over CGI) are a reaction to the cascading modernity of the craft. None of his films are “follow-ups”; they exist with the kind of stubborn force that suggests there’s nothing to precede or follow them. Irrespective of his language, we still believe he is repeatedly asking us: are you watching closely? The problem, of course, occurs when filmmakers watch us, and themselves, as closely. Perhaps his deliberate lack of self-awareness, an aversion to the very idea of creative fulfilment, is what sets him apart.
His 1997 short, Doodlebug, was about a paranoid man trying to kill a tiny bug-like creature across his room. The bug is later revealed to be a mini version of himself, whose movements pre-empt his own. He squashes it, which results in him being squashed by a larger version of himself. Ironically, this could well be a psychological metaphor for most filmmakers embarking upon a new production and “building” a career.
But Christopher Nolan isn’t in that room. He likely knows that nobody cares about the man in the box.
When not obsessively visiting locales from his favourite films, the writer is a freelance film critic.