Oppenheimer Review
6.5/10
Oppenheimer is the personification of everything wonderful and frustrating about Christopher Nolan. He used to be one of my favorite directors until I started feeling he was more focused on filmmaking than storytelling. I admire his technical brilliance and dedication to practical effects. Doing everything in-camera is a daunting proposition, but I’m glad he is committed to minimizing CGI usage. We need craftsmen like Nolan who make films that feel like experiences rather than merely popcorn fodder.
While I have a lot of respect for Nolan, his writing has always been his weakest link. The Prestige was a rare exception. That was back when he was writing with his brother, Jonathan Nolan. He is much better off with this co-writing approach. Jonathan balances out his brother’s flaws with a stronger emphasis on characters. Dunkirk was a bit of an anomaly since the film’s underdeveloped characters were meant to be representatives of the common soldier’s experiences. Their lack of characterization created a way for us to be put in their shoes. It’s far from a perfect film, but this approach to writing was a way for Nolan to distract me from his lackluster character writing with a magnificent, layered experience of visuals and sound, although it did fail to capture the scale of the Dunkirk story with far too few soldiers and boats.
That is not the case with Oppenheimer. There are aspects of this film I love. From a purely technical standpoint, it is stunning to look at. Hoyte Van Hoytema continues to be one of the best cinematographers in the industry. He conjures incredible imagery that makes you forget you’re just watching a bunch of people talking in a room. It’s interesting that the 70mm Imax format this film was made to be displayed in has gotten so much attention when fewer than 40 cinemas in the U.S. can show it like that. Usually, I associate Imax with faster paced spectacle driven films. The grand scale of Oppenheimer’s narrative was combined with the intimate character study of the man to create something quite unique.
Unfortunately, this statement only applies to the main character, Robert Oppenheimer. Here is where some of Nolan’s worst tendencies are brought out. Oppenheimer is the only well-developed character in the entire film. Considering how many people populate the story, that is a big problem. The supporting characters highlight what makes Nolan’s films tedious for me. His characters often feel like exposition machines. They exist to propel the plot forward and explain everything that is going on. I rarely feel connected to them. This is made even more distracting in this film since he cast multiple famous actors to play these flat often fleeting parts. It draws attention to the actor and takes away from the already uninteresting characters they are attempting to inhabit. I don’t see Casey Affleck playing Boris Pash, I just say to myself “Oh, it’s Casey Affleck.” If his role was more defined, then that would not be an issue.
Rami Malek is a fantastic actor, but his role as David Hill was so brief when he was introduced that when he comes back to deliver a fiery defense of Oppenheimer, the film treated him like a pivotal person. I had no idea who this guy was. This especially applies to the two main women in the film, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh. Both are great actors playing real life substantial people. These two women had a significant impact on Robert’s life and views. You wouldn’t guess that by how they are written. Emily Blunt plays Robert’s wife Kitty Oppenheimer. Her role is reduced to being the wife. That’s it, she’s just wife. Blunt acts the hell out of the part and gives Kitty a spark of life.
Pugh is even more short changed. Jean Tatlock was a complicated person who helped shape Robert’s views on Communism and knew him intimately for years. Pugh is one of the best actors around. She spends most of her screentime naked and gets ignored for most of the film. I saw very little of her influence on Robert. All I knew was they had an affair, and she made him read the famous Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita passage we all associate with him out loud when they have sex. It is difficult to keep a straight face when you see Cillian Murphy quoting “I am death, destroyer of worlds” while having sex with Pugh. That moment seemed to only exist to provide context for where that quote comes from.
All the scientists in the film other than Oppenheimer can be boiled down to “Hello, I am a scientist, here is some science talk,” as well as the equally compelling, “Will this science work? I do not know if the science will work. What about this science? That science is stupid and you are stupid. Oh, look, my science worked, Huzzah!” I know this makes me sound like some kind of uneducated cretin. I adore intellectual films where I can immerse myself in their world. However, there is only a certain amount of being talked at I can take before I start to feel like I’m back at school zoning out in class. The Los Alamos scenes during the development of the bomb are when these scientific debates are far more compelling. They have a palpable tension that makes up for the one-dimensional characters.
The Los Alamos setting is where the film shines brightest. The film delves into the psychology of what Oppenheimer and his team are attempting to build. I feel every pang of dread and uncertainty they deal with. The buildup to the first bomb test was a brilliant examination of dread. Even though we know historically they succeeded, that pressure was riveting to watch. The implications of their accomplishment seeps into the pores. They are so focused on the culmination of their work that most don’t stop to think about the horrific future they are paving the way for.
Nolan’s fixture on time jumps and non-linear storytelling can be clever but here I found the erratic nature of the first hour or so of the film before we reached Los Alamos to be disorienting and confusing. I understand that is likely the intention, but it felt like a long trailer with snapshots of interest sprinkled in to maintain audience attention. This non-linear approach does pay off once the film settles into its rhythm, but for a while it was jarring and made me disconnect with what was happening on screen. Ideally, a storytelling device should feel interwoven in a natural way, not visible from space. If you notice the methods of telling a story more than the story itself, that is an issue.
The other part of the film that took me out of it was the dialogue. More specifically, I couldn’t understand a lot of it. Nolan has stated he does not like to use ADR. For those who don’t know, that is when you have the actors re-record their lines in post-production to fine-tune the audio. Most films and TV utilize this for a reason. The audio obtained on the day of a shoot is not clean and is notoriously finicky and difficult to enhance. I am all for giving a filmmaker creative freedom to express their ideas, but this has been a problem with his work for way too long.
He defends this approach as a more natural way to get audio. He wants to capture the moments on the day of shooting. That is an understandable defense, and it makes some degree of sense to keep actors in the moment. That doesn’t help much when I can’t hear much of what is being spoken. There are plenty of times when ADR is obvious and looks sloppy, but if you do anything poorly that is a possibility. If Nolan utilized ADR properly, I doubt many would raise an uproar.
I don’t like sounding this negative about a director I have a lot of respect for. Oppenheimer tells a compelling narrative about a fascinating person, but it is constantly bogged down by Nolanisms that compromised my enjoyment. Cillian Murphy is the saving grace of the film. He delivers one of the best performances of the year. He captures every nuance of the man and how uncomfortable he is in his own skin. I have been a fan of Murphy since seeing him in 28 Days Later. The other bright spark is Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss. He is understated for much of the running time. We don’t truly understand his intentions until toward the end. This can make him inscrutable, and difficult to engage with, but Downey brings a seething resentment to the man. It was a refreshing reminder that before playing Iron Man, Downey was one of the most captivating and eclectic actors in Hollywood.
Oppenheimer will resonate with a lot of people in a profound way. It has powerful ideas about the repercussions of our fixation on destruction. It puts forward the very real idea that we have sowed the seeds of our own collective demise. Robert’s guilt in the last half of the film is where the story is at its most potent. We don’t see the man agonize in tedious monologues to those around him. Robert carries this weight of his actions inside. The guilt he harbors festers deep within him, threatening to claw its way out. When the film focused on this, I was hooked and enthralled. Even when Nolan went out of his way to irritate me with his trademarks, I stuck it through because the central heart of the story is what makes it occasionally extraordinary.
