Christopher Nolan is probably the most overrated and underrated (in very specific ways) director currently working. His movies are generally thought of as genius by a particular type of movie-goer (frat boy with an Interstellar poster)..and while many of his films contain brilliance in them, very few coalesce into fully formed greatness for roughly 2h 30m. I’d give the nod to The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Dunkirk as the three that go well beyond ‘dude that was awesome, when they were in the hallways upside down and the room was spinning…..”
The Dark Knight for example, almost a cliché to praise, and yet it absolutely deserves it. I was vocal in my love for last year’s The Batman, particularly in Reeves’ strict adherance to aesthetic choice; the color palette, the grit and grime of the city and the film recording it, the soundtrack, etc. But one thing I came away thinking was “wow that was long and I wish I could have trimmed it down 15–25 mins”. I flipped on TDK 2 months after seeing The Batman a couple times in theaters…there is not an OUNCE of fat in that movie. There is nothing to trim even if you wanted to. Everything is solid. It has PACE. It never drags and doesn’t feel breathless either. That’s an area that Nolan is so underrated in, he knows how to keep things moving. (this is partially why it was so shocking to watch Tenet, the whole movie drags somehow)
I did a video essay titled ‘ how great artists steal better ‘. I used Chris as an example because he really does know where to pull from, the greats, the hidden gems, etc. And in that same video I show how much more skillfully he pulls the strings when building tension than some of his contemporaries..another way that I would notch as an underrated quality of his. This came through in a brilliant sequence in Oppenheimer, the test buildup.
He’s really good with budgets, meaning whatever movie he ends up making will punch above its weight in look and feel. Oppenheimer feels huge and expensive and its got a 100m price tag. For comparison, Thor: Love and Thunder had a 250m budget….does that necessarily matter to you when you are in the theater — no — but it greatly increases the viability of his films and means studios will continue to line up to write checks.
This is a *three hour* long, R rated movie centering around an oddball scientist — most scenes are people talking in rooms to each other and yet this movie feels every bit as huge as Interstellar, every bit as tense as Dunkirk, and nearly as snappy as The Dark Knight. On paper that’s impossible but I saw the movie and that’s exactly what it was. And it’s performing like it, making back double its budget in the opening week.
Nolan has a brand, and he’s loyal to it even when I wish he would push the boundaries. Dunkirk contained a frustrating scene where the realities of an explosive and what it would do to the human body were severely downplayed to keep a PG-13 rating. There’s an obligation to the violence in Inception…it’s so vague, so broad, so bland. It’s there because it has to be (time for a shootout in the snow!)…for mass appeal. The Dark Knight tried its best to be violent and edgy (non-derogatory) with Ledger’s Joker and remains largely successful….the pencil trick was a clever way to feel much more violent than they’re able to show. I say all this to make the point that Christopher Nolan tends to take his subject matter and shape it until it fits with his brand, within the framework of his quest for mass appeal. I don’t use mass appeal as a slur, if you are a pop artist you are a pop artist. There is no shame in being Dua Lipa (I would’ve previously said The Weeknd but yes there is shame in that as we have come to find out). Nolan toys with weightier subjects and themes, a big subversive theme in TDK that’s a favorite to spotlight is mass surveillence…how far are we willing to go….are we the baddies etc. It’s an element of subversion within the Pop elements. It’s Brian Wilson using bicycles and goats in the recording studio on Pet Sounds.
Oppenheimer marks the first time the 52 year old director has taken his brand and made *it* work around the subject. A 180 from Tenet, a film about cardboard cutouts masquerading as characters (literally called The Protagonist) and an advertisment for cheap suits — this one is a deep deep character study on a complicated and very real man who had a profound impact on the world in which he lived.
There’s no compromises, Cillian Murphy’s performance is layered and nuanced and given both the space and time to portray a paradox of a man.
The entire thing is a subversion of expectations, Nolan has taken broccoli and slapped a Starburst sticker on it — the achievement, the part I keep going back to in my mind is that it does not feel like a trick..somehow the broccoli tastes like candy.
What’s the big moment you’d expect to be in a movie about the man who is credited as the father of the atomic bomb? Probably the only two instances in human history in which it was detonated on people, right? And yet in Oppenheimer, both of those moments happen offscreen. Instead we see a *brilliant* sequence leading up to the test detonation of the A Bomb in New Mexico….there’s no footage from the plane as it drops or on the ground of civilians — instead we get the secretary of defense ruling out Kyoto as a strike target because he honeymooned there. Playing God with the fates of millions of people with the casual tone one would use to order breakfast.
The fratboy wants to see the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, on Hiroshima in IMAX— so does the guilt junkie, for different reasons. The fratboy wants to see an epic mushroom cloud, to see the destruction in the way that a child picks up a Hot Wheels car and rams it into a Lego set. The person who consumes griefs wishes it was filmed to feel *so bad* about what was done, to wallow in a sorrow that is not theirs, to take on a pain that they don’t have to live with.
There is no tactful way to directly show the horrors of nuclear war as an outsider. White Light/Black Rain is a documentary that features survivors of the bombs retelling their experiences alongside archival footage. There are photographs — there are artfully heartwrenching imaginings of the firebombing of cities preceding the atom bombs like Grave of the Fireflies. Oppenheimer is a tight rope walk, the mere inclusion of a scene featuring the bombing would cause the film to fall into a pit of crass indecency.
Mooring the film to the Scientist’s perspective allows the audience to get wrapped up in progress, in the scientific achievement…as they do. An area I did not bring up earlier that Christopher Nolan is so so so skillful at is the plan coming together, in testing and failing, in people hurriedly talking as they try make adjustments and figure out what went wrong. (think: interstellar chalkboard scenes, the dark knight scenes with lucius, inception planning the heist, this movie).
The progress almost allows for Oppenheimer to have an excuse for not realizing what was to come, but the film does not allow for that.
The critiques levied at this movie are unable to land with force. Oppenheimer is too crafty, too well thought out. The namesake gets rebuked by the President for his convenient and oh-so-late handwringing over the use of the bombs. “get that crybaby out of my sight” …something the President said in real life as well. His wife Kitty, played by Emily Blunt, in a parallel story in which Robert is guilty says: “You don’t get to commit sin and make us feel guilty for the consequences”. . . in an unrelated scene there is another rebuke from her: “Do you think if you let them tar and feather you the world would forgive you?”
It is complicated. The man successfully slowed down any development on the hydrogen bomb, a weapon far deadlier than his own nightmare project. He tried to get the President to be vigilant in policing nuclear armament outside of the US. He was clearly thinking about the future and preventing further catastrophe. And yet when it came to his own invention he didn’t allow himself to consider its practical application and its inevitable horror, or convinced himself that it was worth it in the name of ensuring peace. He wanted all the credit for being the father of this device while simultaneously trying to second guess its use, conveniently after it had been used twice. He wanted the guilt and the glory. In many ways he is a paradox — the film allows him to be one, and allows questions to remain..regarding his status as some kind of hero, how guilty he actually felt, how necessary the bombs even were, how the US should have handled the end of the war and even what led into the Cold War.
To try and wrap your arms around this shapeshifting beast, to try and squish it into a convenient idealogical box or to try and load it into a particular discourse canon is to do yourself a disservice. You are wasting your time. The film is too much of a behemoth, too shifty, and far far too smart to be pigeonholed.
Wisely ..it’s been constructed to offer perspective. People drop in and out of Robert Oppenheimer’s orbit, many people are shown in quick flashes, appearing one dimensional because to stick out in a film with 200 characters, details will have to be emphasized in order to make any impression. Not every relationship has to be a well rounded experience. Is every relationship in your own life deep? Or are some things straightforward? Like an on/off again fling with a woman who doesn’t want to make the affair something it’s not. Interestingly Pugh’s character Jean’s real life counterpart broke the relationship off, not the other way around like in the film. As a creative story, it makes so much more sense to have Robert break it off, setting up Emily Blunt’s powerful delivery of the previously quoted: “You don’t get to commit sin and make us feel guilty for the consequences”
The fictional Jean ends up losing agency and is used as a pawn. Nolan’s great weakness is character — even in this movie. Like stated before, there are so many characters that it’s hard not to reduce them to smaller scenes with more indentifiable traits to make it work. Jack Quaid might as well be credited as bongo player, there’s blue collar/red blooded American scientist guy, there’s the mistress, there’s the cold hearted prosecutor…these people could be labeled as caricature…I wouldn’t go that far but there’s something to it.
Nolan is a practical guy, he’s got an engineer’s brain, or dare I say, that of a scientist. I’ve written before about his lack of ability for emotionality — Inception’s climactic scene is a son finally hearing ‘i love you’ from his father. Batman is completely emotionally stunted. Part of what made Dunkirk so great is it let Nolan hide from his weakness — not much is said in battle, the horrors that young men survive leave them largely unable to speak. A nod of understanding might as well be a kiss on the cheek.
In Oppenheimer he largely avoids his own pitfalls in this regard, partially because it’s a true story and partially because he’s given them the focus. The spectacle takes a backseat, so much so that the test nuke goes off with something like an hour+ left to go. After that it’s more akin to 12 Angry Men or JFK — much to the fratboy’s dismay. Or it would be, if it wasn’t so expertly written and acted. There’s too many great performances to spotlight even. Some standouts were: Emily Blunt, Jason Clarke, Cillian Murphy, Josh Hartnett, and Benny Safdie.
The one complaint that everyone who sees it will have is the score. It’s beautiful and haunting and electrifying. That’s not the problem…the problem is it (almost) never stops. There’s a few sequences that contain more horror than Chris has ever put on screen before, and in all of them the score stops for a brief moment. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these sequences are some of the best. When the score is tapped to step up, it is every bit as tense and epic as it needs to be. The test scene in particular…
This movie is in some ways a huge montage a la Goodfellas or Boogie Nights, a nonstop parade of action and music..except there’s not much action. The dialogue is overrun at times by a score that is desperately trying to keep the pace up. It’s like Nolan was sitting with the brilliant composer Ludwig Göransson and explaining that the movie is like a basketball — “I don’t care if we pump it up too much, whatever you do, DON’T let it go flat.”
The pair inject so much pace and speed into a movie that has no business flowing as quick as it did. Even when the film gets bogged down in a sequence I suspect would’ve been shorter had it not been for Robert Downey Jr. being the star that he is…the score keeps everything ho-hum.
This is a great movie — at the very least an achievement worth commending. There is a case to be made this is Christopher Nolan’s finest outing, particularly with what Jennifer Lame was able to do in editing, creating haunting and sensational walking nightmares and dreams, externalizing the mind and thoughts of Oppenheimer…one of the few times we see him naked.
Christopher Nolan knew what the masses wanted and he instead gave them what was needed. And somehow, some way, no one noticed. Subversion…on a massive scale.
