'Oppenheimer' Attempts to Explode My Anti-Christopher Nolan Soap Box
#235: "Oppenheimer," "Theater Camp," "Lords of Dogtown," "Fantastic Mr. Fox"
Edition 235:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: The moviegoing world has once again fallen under the spell of Christopher Nolan, with his dazzling historical epic Oppenheimer. Allow me to explain why it's both good and not for me. On the other end of the spectrum, a Sundance festival hit about youth theater, a movie about skateboarding, and another one in claymation. Something for everyone! In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” I set the official date for the start of #MovieSZN.
Oppenheimer
Let’s begin with the boom. It’s fair to say many people going to see Christopher Nolan’s latest epic are there to see how exactly he filmed the explosion of an atomic bomb without the use of any CGI (the short answer: petroleum and forced perspective). We know it’s coming, and expectation builds for the better part of an hour as Oppenheimer’s team develops the weapon, and yet it’s incredible the way I found myself holding my breath and clenching both arm rests as it happens. Straining my neck from the second row of a 70 mm IMAX theater, it was almost an out-of-body experience.
That “Trinity Test” sequence is peak Nolan, an example of the kind of filmmaking he does better than anyone in the world, perhaps better than anyone ever. He’s a master of spectacle, hoping to overwhelm a viewer through huge action set pieces and what can only politely describe as very effortful storytelling. In this case, four different timelines across some 30 years are intercut with each other in rapid succession, creating a propulsive effect that turns what could be a dry, decades-spanning story about bureaucracy into a full-on thriller.
But a more accurate word for Nolan’s storytelling style is … confusing. Deliberately. These techniques illicit reactions like “wow this is so well made,” and help build Nolan’s reputation, but often block someone’s ability to become immersed in the world of a story and make understanding what’s actually happening difficult (in the case of his intense musical scores, it can literally be hard to understand what people are saying…but…vibes).
He’s said publicly that he enjoys the idea of a viewer not “getting it” the first time around. That’s self-serving, since it can inflate his box office total, but it’s also clever because moviegoers have always had a history of giving visually impressive filmmakers the benefit of the doubt for ambiguity (take a bow Stanley Kubrick!).
In my mind, if I need a diagram, a Reddit thread and three viewings to understand your story, that doesn’t make it genius. These puzzle box plots don’t leave a whole lot of room for humanity, but luckily with this one there is plenty of supplemental reading and historical or scientific detail outside the bounds of the movie that can fill in the holes and color in a classically cold and empty Nolan protagonist, a benefit he didn’t have in his wholly original sci-fi stories.
People under the age of 30, who came of age with The Dark Knight and Inception, cannot comprehend the possibility that one could not like Nolan (trust me, it’s a conversation I’ve had many times). Those two movies are among the most common “all-time favorite” selections in my years-long unofficial polling of everyone I speak to, probably because their sheer scale makes them big enough to be worthy of that impossible title. To me, they’re a starter pack, a signal the person simply hasn’t watched enough movies (I promise I don’t always point this out to them).
J. Robert Oppenheimer is a perfect Nolan protagonist, saddled with the immense burden of his own genius. As with all his heroes, the character is a stand-in for Nolan himself (it’s more than just coincidence that he casts and styles people to look exactly like him), and I’d love to read the movie’s antagonizing of Robert Downey Jr.’s bureaucrat as an allegory for Nolan’s contempt for Warner Brothers brass.
(The funniest possible interpretation of Oppenheimer is as Nolan’s confessional for making his Batman trilogy in the mid-2000s, great movies in their own right which nonetheless kicked off the superhero arms race that has since crippled theatrical moviegoing.)
None of this takes away from the achievement of the movie. In the hands of most directors, even great directors, a prestige historical biopic like this one should end up like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln — which is to say excellent but slow, staid and explicitly awards-minded. Here it’s a fast-paced mystery and a summer blockbuster, with $425 million in box office receipts and counting. I’m obligated to say, just as I did with Barbie, that I wholeheartedly support any piece of actual cinema that reaches a broad audience. And between the two this is way more of a miracle commercially.
Cillian Murphy’s brooding, haunted affect — perfected in “Peaky Blinders” — is a great fit for the tormented physicist, who can simultaneously hold the center of each frame while allowing the characters around him to provide more color. Downey gets the juiciest part, beginning as the movie’s gentile narrator and ending as its snarling villain. In every tiny role in between, you’ll find a who’s who of movie star white dudes: Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Clarke, Josh Hartnett, Benny Safdie, Jack Quaid, Dane DeHaan. The cumulative effect is a weighty gravitas to each scene. Meanwhile, the few women of the film (Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt) are given disappointingly little to do, which may be historically accurate but it’s also consistent with Nolan’s filmography, which is sad.
Following the twisting plot is of course secondary to building the central thesis of Oppenheimer as a ‘great man,’ beginning with the invocation of Prometheus in the opening credits and reinforced throughout as several people tell him he is nothing less than “the most important person who’s ever lived.” Say what you will about this movie or Nolan as a filmmaker, but he’s not subtle. Perhaps his poetic, over-the-top lines of dialogue which can be pulled and turned into high school yearbook quotes only serve his popularity even more.
I could stand here all day and decry Nolan’s style, but the truth is it’s impossible not to be impressed by this movie. There are so many moments of cinematic brilliance, especially from a visual standpoint, that it truly does override the brain’s ability to think critically. Even at three hours long, with the last hour after the explosion being spent almost entirely in hearings and courtrooms, somehow the movie doesn’t drag or wane.
Oppenheimer won’t be among my best movies of the year, based on personal preference, but I can’t argue with anyone who might say this is among the best movies Christopher Nolan has ever made.
Something New
Theater Camp (Theaters): I waded through the sea of pink-clad fangirls (and fanboys, to be fair) still crowding the AMC lobby at 9:30 on Saturday morning so I could go see this year’s big Sundance hit in an empty theater. The little indie comedy about a summer drama camp for kids in upstate New York was always destined to live on a streaming service like Hulu anyway, and really only ever existed for the very niche audience of Broadway theater lovers.
Broadway star Ben Platt takes center stage alongside Molly Gordon, a first-time writer/director fresh off her star turn in season 2 of “The Bear,” as overbearing camp counselors who propose for the kids to put on an entirely original musical in the span of a couple weeks. Inside jokes abound for anyone with theater knowledge, and the comedy still works for outsiders in a “aren’t these people ridiculous” way (I found myself on both sides of the fence at various times). There are capable performances down the board, from Jimmy Tatro to another “The Bear” star Ayo Edebiri plus an all-star list of Broadway legends who make fun of their subculture as only someone who knows and loves it can.
Because this movie has the soul of a theater kid, it’s incredibly sappy and sweet with a heart-on-your-sleeve vulnerability that makes it very easy to watch and enjoy. It’s modest in ambition and execution but everything you could want in a streaming movie here in a couple of months. I’ll let you all know when it drops.
Something Old
Lords of Dogtown (2005): What is that thing within us that really loves to watch movies or shows with famous people before they’re famous? It’s a strange curiosity, yet strong — I’m thinking Wet Hot American Summer, or The Outsiders, or Dazed and Confused. In this case, the primary draw to this mid-2000s programmer is shockingly young versions of Heath Ledger (RIP), Emile Hirsch, and Johnny Knoxville, who play the young surfer kids who essentially invented the sport of skateboarding in the 1970s by sneaking into empty backyard swimming pools in Venice Beach, California.
The movie is actually written by Stacy Peralta, one of the main characters, which lends both an air of authenticity and also subjectivity to the story. As it develops, the focus shifts more to the loss of innocence of the kids as the forbidden fruit of money and sponsorships creeps into their circle and divides them until they … eyeroll … remember why they loved it in the first place. Still, the sort of 70s surfer ‘Super 8’ style cinematography of California beach culture and anchoring performances by the infinitely charismatic Ledger and Hirsch elevate the movie beyond just basic docudrama fare and make it a very fun movie to stream.
Something to Stream
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Max): Never has Wes Anderson’s signature dollhouse style been more literalized than when he used claymation to tell this story about anamorphic foxes, which is hard to deny as one of his all-time best. Every element of the movie is so masterfully crafted, from the script (cowritten by dialogue master Noah Baumbach) to its crazy voice cast — George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson — to its incredibly creative use of animation.
What makes Wes Anderson special (to me) is that beneath his artifice, and contrasts him from someone like Christopher Nolan, he’s able to tell really heartfelt stories with characters we come to care deeply about. This is a story about someone reaching middle age taking one last stab at significance, about a son who wants to prove himself to his father, about a husband and wife deciding they are enough for each other. It won’t quite bring you to tears, but it will elicit some well-deserved “awwww” moments.
Trailer Watch: The Creator
Movie studios must be absolutely terrified of the staying power of Barbie and Oppenheimer, because the release calendar for the month of August is a ghost town. I was curious to see if a movie could benefit from some residual excitement about going to the movies, but now we’ll never know. Instead we’ll wait until September for The Equalizer 3 and a couple big horror movies.
I’m declaring September 29th the official start of what every year we call in this newsletter ‘Movie Season’ (or #MovieSZN), the three-month sprint when all of the Oscars contenders come out. The project to kick us off is The Creator, which looks like an incredibly ambitious sci-fi story on a massive scale, in the capable hands of experienced bid budget writer/director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One). The fact that they’re marketing this for potential awards instead of as a summer blockbuster makes me equally nervous and excited. But if John David Washington can bring the heat, he could come out of this thing as an A-lister, and the success of the movie would show renewed health in the theatrical experience.