Christopher Nolan revisited: Oppenheimer is great

I did not rush to see Oppenheimer, in part because I found all the Barbie cross-marketing somewhat distasteful (I can see why the Japanese, in particular, took exception to it), but also because I have almost always had mixed feelings about Christopher Nolan. 

I enjoyed the hell out of Memento, some 23 years ago. Until recently, it was the only Nolan film I returned to three or four times, the only film that I came away from convinced of its greatness. I remember reading former Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum's dismissal of the film and being stunned. A capsule review on his website notes that "it exemplifies what the English mean when they call something too clever by half," which is one of those jaw-dropping lines in a review that focus your attention and make you wonder what movie the critic in question has seen -- is it the same one you did? He continues that it's "a fascinating and gripping but also rather heartless and mean-spirited tale... [it's] more a puzzle than a meaningful story." I recall -- maybe in one of his books? I've read a couple -- his being even more thorough about its ultimate emptiness. I thought it unfair, like he resented the work that the film demanded if you wanted to take something from it; that kind of reaction I associate with the sort of middlebrow/ middleclass/ middle aged jobbo film reviewer, the sort of reviewer (I won't name names but maybe all of us can think of a couple local ones who fit this bill) who almost never seem to want to think about the films they review beyond the question of whether they were entertained, like that is the be-all and end-all of cinema; not to enlighten or enrich but simply to facilitate someone shoveling popcorn into their hole. It seemed unworthy of a relatively highbrow writer like Rosenbaum, almost lazy; more to the point, I had liked the film and felt bruised and defensive. Surely Memento offers plenty to contemplate, if you accept the formal challenges; complaining that it took too much work to negotiate them, or refusing to do that work because he did not believe there was anything there to justify it, seemed a puzzling approach for a critic as intelligent and thoughtful as Rosenbaum, especially when the film seemed so rich to me...  

Somehow, though, Rosenbaum's point of view came to capture my reaction to Nolan as a whole. Tenet was the most egregious example: it seemed to have nothing on its mind but its gamey structure. I watched it and emerged a) understanding it would take a great deal of work to really make sense of what I'd seen, but also that b) there was no sense of a valuable act of meaning-making at hand, no sense of a reward offered for doing the work. "Clearly I would have to think about this and re-watch it to get anything out of it, but is there anything there worth getting?" 

I mean, if you think there's a prize at the bottom, you might eat a whole box of Cracker Jacks, but at some point as a kid, you discover the prizes aren't commensurate with the effort required. It was just plain easier to dismiss the whole thing, an empty spectacle -- a what-he-said about that other Nolan film: "too clever by half." 

If I came away with a decisive shrug-and-meh, Tenet somehow didn't annoy me as much as some of Nolan's other films. Inception also felt irritatingly gamey, while incorporating elements of plagiarism (of Neuromancer; it owes more to the plot of that book than even The Matrix) and doing, I thought, an injustice to the richness of the human dream-world (I remember writing at the time I first saw it of how annoying it was that there were so many guns in it, since at that point, I had never once seen or used a gun in a dream, that I could recall. I did have a gun dream a couple of years ago, in fact, long after seeing the film; but at the time, I kind of felt sorry for anyone whose dreamlife was so shallow that Inception spoke to it. Bear in mind, I regularly dream of shopping for books and records, so that's sayin' something...).

Interstellar pissed me off even more, because unlike Inception, I found a huge chunk of it really engaging. The first half suckered me in completely, made me wonder if I'd have to re-evaluate Nolan, who, by that point, I realized I had issues with. As I recall, watching it, I had this flicker of apprehension that some bit of business early in the film was setting up a twist at the end of it; "It better not be going there," I thought. But that flicker aside, I was hooked in quite deeply by the story, right up until the end, whereupon EXACTLY the dumb twist I worried would be coming arrived with a flourish -- exactly the sort of stupid bullshit I had anticipated and feared. Whereupon I got annoyed with myself for having fallen for the thing, and annoyed with Nolan for having put so much care and craft into essentially what was an empty puzzle (further quoting Rosenbaum, from the Memento capsule: "it reminds me of how Edmund Wilson compared reading a mystery to eagerly unpacking a box of excelsior, only to find a few rusty nails at the bottom." Exactly!).

I never got around to Dunkirk, but I still managed, despite having come to think of Nolan as VASTLY OVERRATED, to see every one of his films besides. I liked Following, but don't remember it. I was struck by how annoyingly broad Al Pacino's performance was in Insomnia on first viewing, but revisiting it recently thought it was actually a pretty good film, if you got over that one thing (with the exception of Glengarry Glen Ross, there is not much Pacino's post-70s output that I've seen that impressed me, though I had loved all that came before; it almost always feels like he's phoning in the same performance, the same style, like he just rolls out of bed, glances at the script, and does himself, in film after film. I didn't even like him in Heat). The Batman trilogy definitely is well-made, but the way that Nolan used current events seemed at best positively amoral, with the first film seeming to be "about" 9/11, the second the War on Terror, and the third on the Occupy movement. Again, Nolan didn't seem to have anything valuable to say, and in the case of the second film in particular -- which I wrote a pretty hostile review of at the time -- I was actually offended at how he would presume to probe some fairly raw, open wounds, when all he really had to offer was another fucking superhero movie (I said at the time that it was "a dull, relentless, 'one-ordeal-after-the-other' celebration of NOTHING, a boring, grim, nihilistic burp of sloth, cynicism and despair"). Maybe someday, at a remove from the headlines, I will revisit the film and find it fascinating, an insight into how Americans processed their guilt over Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and enhanced interrogation, but I still doubt I will be impressed with Nolan for having made it; it felt more like a cash-in than a commentary, like he was presuming to touch on these very important issues in the service of utter crap, as if as an artist, he thought the work of art was somehow more important than the ideas, issues, experiences, and lessons that it channeled... 

About the only film of Nolan's I kind of was amused by after Following and Memento was The Prestige. It's at least honest about not having much to offer besides a fun game for its audiences. I wanted to like Bowie as Tesla more than I did, since I love the IDEA of Bowie as Tesla a fair bit more than I enjoyed Bowie's actual performance; but otherwise, I was quite entertained. I have no problem with games in cinema, per se, with silly period pieces that employ tricks and twists, as long as they aren't plagiarized from William Gibson or arriving with an air of being utterly convinced of their own importance, their apparent sense of which is vastly out of step by any trace of the same that you can see. (Insomnia also doesn't have much bombast going for it; it's on Netflix, if you don't recall it). 

I wonder if Rosenbaum liked Oppenheimer? Charles Mudede did not, but his is the only review I've actually read. While I would, when they were more active, hungrily read whatever certain critics, like Ebert or Rosenbaum or Kael, for example, said about films I liked, there aren't many active, "name" critics whose film writing I am curious about these days. I enjoyed what Adrian Mack used to do for the Straight. I like MaryAnn Johanson at Flick Filosopher, though I've fallen out of the habit of going to her site, maybe because I feel guilty about not forking over $$$ (I rarely pay for content online). I'm usually curious to read Armond White, because though I seldom agree with him, I often am at least given things to think about, and there are usually a few sentences that are fun in-and-of-themselves to read, in his reviews. But these days, criticism works in a rather different way; sometimes before but more often after I see a film, I'll scroll through Rotten Tomatoes, read a few lines here and a few lines there, and while I do sometimes go to read the full review, I seldom find any one critic whose take on a film is interesting enough that I go back to see what else they've written about other movies. The days of the celebrity film critic, film critic as "writer," seem to be drawing to a close, replaced by an online world where everyone's a critic, even me. Occasionally I might find my own views on a film validated by the reviews I find, but seldom do I find them enriched. (Feel free to let me know if there are critics I'm missing out on).  

Maybe when I'm done here I'll go see if Rosenbaum stepped out of his sort-of-retirement to reflect on Oppenheimer? 

I loved it, though, I must say. Mudede found it "boring." I found it gripping. It is so briskly paced that you have to really focus to keep up -- it requires some work to watch, is kind of jam-packed with ideas and details, such that I was surprised, when I peeked discreetly at my cell phone at one point to see how far into the film we were, thinking we must surely be at the halfway mark, that we were less than an hour in (it's three hours long; when you get to the Trinity explosion, you're only half-way, with much of the "story" of the film -- not the story of Oppenheimer, but the drama, the conflict that the film turns around -- only kicking into place after this point). But -- compelled to check the time though I may have been -- I was never remotely bored. It deals with history I know very little about, in fact -- vastly less than Mudede, anyhow; perhaps if you come to the film from a place of knowing, having at least read American Prometheus, say -- I have not -- you'll find the movie shallow, wanting. Certainly, even if you do get involved in its storytelling, like pretty much every film Nolan has made, ever, it won't be all that easy to sum up what its saying about its subject matter once it ends. 

Unlike pretty much every movie he's made since Memento, though, there's a sense that there is a WHOLE LOT to be gotten from thinking about the film. It's not so inspiring that I'll go buy American Prometheus and dig in, but I know a bookstore owner -- Tim Carson -- and have chatted about it with him, and know that the demand for that book (or anything about Oppenheimer) is at an all-time high as a result of the film. It leaves you hungry to know more, perhaps to see it again. It's idea-rich, intellectually demanding, has a ton of character detail (and has a ton of fine performances in it, some from actors I have not seen for years and barely recognized, like Tom Conti; every moment he was on screen, I was going, "I know who that is..." but when the credits rolled, I sat back in my chair: Tom Conti!). 

There's not much else I can actually say about the film, but do go see it. About the only caveat I have: see it somewhere that has comfortable seats. I caught it at the Hollywood Three in Maple Ridge, which is fine for a movie that's less than two hours long, but by the end of Oppenheimer, my arse, back, and legs were requiring some pretty fancy positioning to keep my body's complaints at bay. 

I would suggest seeing it on an empty bladder, as well (and seeing it in a cinema; it deserves it. Not sure it requires IMAX-level viewing, however).

Maybe I've had Nolan wrong? Maybe my dismissals of the majority of his films have been as unfair as I thought Rosenbaum's were, re: Memento? (At the very least, I guess I now have to see Dunkirk). 

Oppenheimer is the best thing I've seen in the cinema in quite some time. What was the phrase... something about thumbs...?