It's Flat, Man, and a Little Boring
'Oppenheimer' is an over-directed (non)-explosion of artifice.
Finally saw the season’s most Oscar-nominated film, the first night it was available on Peacock. Seldom has a man spent three hours in a state of such abiding disappointment. [By the way, this review is intended solely for those who’ve seen the movie, as it’s one big spoiler.]
So, Oppenheimer was an okay biopic. Just okay. A 6 or a soft 7 on the 10 scale, and that mostly because of the compelling subject matter. I can’t even be that generous about Christopher Nolan’s directing. To my mind he botched the thing. He got in the way of his story-telling and missed so many opportunities to create what should have been—far more than a biopic—a chronicle of America’s nuclear coming of age and the portentous dawn of the apocalypse. I hope at least some readers got my titular allusion here to 1989’s Fat Man and Little Boy. As a total film experience, Oppenheimer wasn’t close, in my judgment. As a prospective “best picture” winner, it’s a mystery wrapped inside an enigma wrapped inside its director’s ego.
You see, Nolan forgot the cardinal rule of directing: It’s more important to make a great film than to constantly strive to remind your audience of what a great filmmaker you are. In the case at hand, Nolan’s work was ham-fisted, self-indulgent and clumsy.
I think first of the sporadic, seemingly random fantasy scenes (or dream sequences or whatever the hell Cillian Murphy’s reveries were meant to be). I found them intrusive and distracting; they took you out of the suspension of disbelief. Imagine if you will that you knew nothing about the movie West Side Story and you walked into a room where someone was watching one of the more earnest scenes; you’d think drama—and then someone breaks into song and you burt, “Oh, it’s a musical!” Which is fine, but that realization transports you into a different genre and head-space where you no longer watch the film the same way. You don’t take the action literally. Oppenheimer, if nothing else, needed to be taken literally as a drama. [This ain’t Batman, Chris.]
By the time we get to the so-called blast scene—which deserves a dissection all its own, later—I half-expected little harpies to fly out of the mushroom cloud and into the sky while shrieking in Revelation-esque horror—a la something from Rosemary’s Baby. I don’t say that just to get in a reviewerly dig. It wouldn’t have shocked me.
And how many times can you have your protagonist just sort of standing in space looking haunted or thunderstruck? I’d say maybe once or twice per movie, tops. We get it, Chris, the man is eccentric. A tormented genius. On a different plane from the rest of us. But as an ongoing motif it was like watching a steroidal version of that scene from Spike’s Malcolm X, where Denzel is sort of floating down the street. It’s self-conscious. And it’s just plain overkill after a while. A very short while.
Oppie was even depicted as haunted and austere during sex. I get where Nolan was going with this, but I’m sorry, no one is that cerebral when being ridden in bed, let alone if it’s a rapturous Florence Pugh doing the riding.
Then you had way too many male characters with assorted accents drifting in and out of assorted shots in supposed supporting roles, firing off quantum jargon or a tepid inside joke while doing nothing to advance the plot. I kept saying under my breath, will you just tell the fucking story, please? If ever we had a need for composite characters or “scenes condensed for dramatic purposes,” Oppenheimer was it. Was anyone able to keep all the scientists straight: Teller and Feynman and Szilard and Bohr and Bethe and Bush and Bainbridge and Pash and Rabi and on and on? With one or two exceptions they were characterless and interchangeable. They were scenery.
Only Einstein was truly unmistakable. Of course he was. He looked like Einstein.
And yet for all the high-minded palaver, there were almost no process shots of the sort you had in the aforementioned FMLB. How did they actually assemble the damned thing? What obstacles did they encounter in the building or in the field? (I kept waiting for something akin to John Cusack’s famous lab accident from FMLB. Nothing in Oppenheimer even approaches it for organic tension or plot exposition.) Did they do no lab work at the Los Alamos lab? Just mapped it all out on a blackboard and one day the Gadget appeared?
Oh wait, I forgot, they gave us marbles proliferating in jars. And that stupid ball-puzzle-like thingie they showed about 19 different times.
Speaking of blackboards, there’s the contradiction of that early scene comparing music to algebra, which Oppie says is not his strong suit. If the important thing about Oppie was that he heard the music rather than fixating pedantically on the notes (or whatever that precious line was supposed to mean), why is he always standing at a blackboard doing algebraic calculations? If anything he should’ve been shown “hearing it,” i.e., working it out in his head. I would’ve even preferred another one of those blessed fantasy scenes to depict that, if need be.
Nor does it matter if this was actually said to or about Oppenheimer. A great film does not land on incongruities that will be noted by viewers, unless incongruity is itself the point (not true here). You cover them in passing or omit them altogether if they impede the narrative. Nolan, instead, highlighted the incongruities, and not just in that one case.
The lone “bright spot” in the film, if you can call her that, was Pugh’s rendering of Oppie’s longtime paramour, the achingly poignant Jean Tatlock. Pugh somehow gives a performance that is, simultaneously, please cuddle me/keep me safe and please fuck my brains out. When Oppie says his final good-bye and she turns to him with that wounded look and says, plaintively, “You told me you’d always answer,” you feel that you are watching Shakespearean tragedy, not early steps in the march to Armageddon. (And even if you don’t know the story, you know what’s coming.)
For my money, Pugh and (to a lesser extent) her oppositely charged emotional particle, Emily Blunt as Oppie’s beyond-all-caring wife, gave the only two convincingly human performances in the movie. (Downey was decent, but written in almost schizophrenic terms.) So yes, I’m saying Murphy was unconvincing; just could not take it anymore by the time the bomb got hoisted. Had there been one more vacant stare from him, I might’ve picked up the remote and fixed it so that I no longer heard the music or saw the movie. Note to Nolan and Murphy: Showing a character perpetually wide-eyed is not enough to communicate excitement or wonder if we in the audience do not share his motivation. One is reminded of those obnoxious laugh-tracks where the ersatz studio audience erupts in hysterics at a joke that’s mildly funny at best.
The latter half of the flick devolves into para-documentary about Oppie’s security travails. Nolan must have perceived the boredom quotient here, so he felt required to sex things up with that laughable shtick during questioning about Oppie’s relationship with Tatlock. I refer of course to the fantasy flashback wherein Murphy and a posthumous Pugh are naked—right there at the hearing—and having sex on Oppie’s chair. Hard to describe how bizarre and awkward that felt, revealed as it was at first from the camera’s omniscient angle, a totally wrong point of view for the scene. If it needed to be shown at all, we should’ve experienced it from inside Blunt’s head as she listens to the uncomfortable testimony about the affair. Made no sense artistically or thematically to show both her and the chairjinks from the same third-person POV.
Despite that eye-opening visual, I began to nod off as the hearings dragged on. It all seemed so terribly anticlimactic—which is in fact a misnomer thanks to Nolan’s worst of all possible directorial sins: he robbed the film of its obligatory climax.
I refer to the non-explosion. The Trinity test. The utter silence when, after just about two hours of foreplay, the thing goes off. Sort of. Yes, yes, YES, we know it would’ve taken 25 or 30 seconds for the sound to reach the observers in their bunkers five or six miles out, but THAT DOESN’T WORK IN A MOVIE!!! (Again one thinks of FMLB, where the spectacle of light and sound at detonation was hypnotic and chilling. Hell, Reznor did a better job in his video for Closer.) Even if you foreshadow the sound lag skillfully, which Nolan didn’t do, the audience feels cheated. It’s like, to follow the metaphor, a silent orgasm. Or having the rhythm section suddenly drop out of a jazz cut you’re listening to. Jarring, unsatisfying.
Here you have a director who injects all sorts of gratuitous fantastical effects throughout the rest of his movie and he couldn’t give us what we needed in the one scene we came for?
As I said, a soft 6 or a 7. Or maybe a soft 6 at that.