To paraphrase a line delivered from
another Christopher Nolan film, consider for a moment what he has achieved with
Oppenheimer.
Christopher Nolan managed to get
greenlit from Universal studio a two-hundred million dollar biopic of a
scientific figure at a time when event cinema was dying and in the aftermath of
a massive lockdown that had nearly killed the theater business. As the title character he chose Cillian
Murphy, a very accomplished actor but one known primarily for his supporting
roles and in no way the kind of person you would think capable of carrying a
film of this magnitude.
He then made a three hour film, and
persuaded Universal to release in the midst of the summer when serious films
are almost never launched and the studios have been publicly avoided them for
decades. The film then received an R rating
– the first that Nolan has received for any of his films since Insomnia nearly
twenty years earlier - making it harder
for the teenage audiences that usually come to see his films – assuming any of
them would have been drawn to it in the first place. And he did all this after
his previous film Tenet had opened in the winter of 2020 – against the
wishes of his studio – and was both of a box office and critical
disappointment.
After a little more than two weeks
in theaters Oppenheimer has grossed more than $150 million domestically
and far more internationally. It is on
the verge of setting box office records for both an R rated film and a
biopic. And somehow he’s managed to
convince people to see this movie on the same day as Barbie, turning the
idea of event cinema back in the heads of millions of theatergoers. He has none of this at the cost of his
critical integrity: the film has been robustly praised by the majority of
critics and audiences (it’s ranking at imdb.com is currently 8.7, which is 29th
in the databases history) Directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver
Stone have praised it as a masterpiece.
But because so many of my so-called
fellow critics are only happy when they are tearing a popular film down, there
has been a fair amount of criticism, some from expected circles, some from more
targeted ones. Much as I would like to just review Oppenheimer on its
merits (which I will, trust me) I felt compelled to answer many of these charges.
I think I could have done so just as well before seeing the film as now, but I
wanted to be fair. So now that I have seen the film, I will address them,
It does not shock me that the
harshest critique I have seen of the movie comes from Anthony Lane of The New
Yorker. Those of you who have followed this series know that I share a very
special disdain of both Lane and his acid-tongued counterpart David
Denby who seem to be determined to carry on the grand tradition that there is not
only should commerce have nothing to do with film, but that film itself only
has value if they alone can see it. I have found their attitudes contemptuous over
the years, and particularly tone-deaf in recent months when one of them (I don’t
know which, but their loathsome contempt for every part of film is so universal
it hardly matters) chose to openly mock not only Paul Schrader’s recent film
but almost his entire career as a filmmaker within weeks of a profile in their
own magazine of Schrader – in which he acknowledges that death has coming
soon. Don’t worry Paul; they’ll be
pissing on your grave soon enough.
Because Oppenheimer contains
all the things that Lane usually praises in films he decided to spent his
review essentially damning it with faint praise. He admonishes at the start and
end that for all its skills it is a Christopher Nolan film (as if he is above
such things) praises Robert Downey Junior while bashing his career in the
Marvel Cinematic Universe, deciding to find away to mock the Mission:
Impossible series for no other reason than to sound clever, and shows off
his intellect by telling us that there was an opera written about Oppenheimer
called Dr. Atomic. His actual opinion of the film gets lost in his own snideness;
at the end of the day, it’s pretty clear that his opinion most people might
think this is a masterpiece, but he knows better. Reviews
like Lane’s make me wonder if he and Denby pre-draft their pans in advance of
the screening and then edit them to work around the facts.
Lane’s opinion is, of course, the
fundamental reason that I have not taken the film criticism of The New Yorker
seriously for several years. Other criticisms that I have seen or heard
online are more pedantic but I imagine will have some appeal to specific groups.
They seem to boil down to:
1.
Robert Oppenheimer should have played by a Jewish
actor.
2.
Oppenheimer is yet another example of
Nolan’s inability to write female characters.
3.
The film should have shown the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At the time I thought the first two
were just mindless complaints that I could rebuke even without having seen the
movie but needed to see Oppenheimer to judge the merits of third. Having
seen it, I now I think I can state it fairly.
1.
Yes, Cillian Murphy is not Jewish. He bares a very
striking resemblance to Robert Oppenheimer both in appearance and voice, but he
is not Jewish. Neither is Tom Conti who plays Albert Einstein or Robert Downey,
Jr. who plays Lewis Strauss. Kenneth Branagh, last I checked wasn’t Norwegian,
but I supposed I’ll told by Jewish friends that’s not the same thing.
I realize given the issues
involving anti-Semitism both in the era of the movie and today the significance
of this. I don’t think it races to the
level of whitewashing as so many people might say. Considering that it far less
Oppenheimer’s religion then his politics that are the center of Nolan’s film, I
am less bothered by this as a critic.
There is also the issue of what Jewish
actor could have been able cast in this role and done as good a job as Murphy
does in his performance. I realize that
this is a minefield to step into these days. For now, I’ll just say this: I am
Jewish, and speaking for myself this discrepancy did not trouble me.
2.
Nolan is now faces the same criticism that Martin Scorsese
did not long after The Irishman came out of not writing strong female
characters. That was, pure and simple, a canard considering how many actresses
have received Oscar nominations and wins starring in a Scorsese movie. With
Nolan, its harder to prove that fact but having seen all of his films, it’s a
false flag. Carrie-Ann Moss’s performance in Memento was one of her best
film roles (she won a Supporting Female prize from the Independent Spirit
Awards) Hilary Swank and Maura Tierney both gave superb performances in Insomnia;
Ellen Page’s role in Inception featured some super wrinkles and Interstellar
would not have worked without Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain at the
center. (Yes I know the problems with The
Dark Knight trilogy, that’s DC’s fault, not Nolan’s.)
I grant you that Oppenheimer
only truly has two female roles:
Emily Blunt’s as Kitty Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock,
Oppenheimer’s mistress. I’ll also grant that the sex scenes in Oppenheimer
were exploitive.
That said, this
was a period piece: 1940s America. You
do remember what it was like for women back then until, let’s be generous and say the 1970s? Nolan was supposed to paint a mirror of
America at that time: that’s the roles women had. I honestly thought the role
of the female engineer was frankly a bridge too far by Nolan: historically I
find it impossible to believe the U.S. Military would have let any women, no
matter how qualified near the Manhattan Project. The level of secrecy was
such that most of the wives of the scientists did not know what their husbands
were working on until the testing of the bomb. I suspect the only reason Kitty
did was because her husband was heading the project.
What realistically
could Nolan have done? If he had included the wives of scientists or
secretaries, they would have been window dressing. Women weren’t involved in the Manhattan Project
or in politics beyond being campaign wives.
I have little doubt if Nolan had written in a female character of this
kind, he would have lambasted for being politically correct.
For the record,
the larger reason that most directors don’t have strong female characters is
because Hollywood has never been very good at writing strong roles for
women in movies. With of course the exception of Woody Allen…but we don’t talk
about that any more.
3.
To be clear, if Nolan had shown the effects of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki being bombed, I’m certain there would have been just as
much cursing from these same critics of exploiting the suffering of
Japanese war victims for cinematic glory. There is no winning with some people.
And let’s not kid
ourselves, much of the movie is about the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nolan makes no bones about telling us that every action Oppenheimer takes from
the moment the bombs are dropped is about to trying to deal with the genie he
has let out of the bottle. It’s clear in the scene when he is being cheered at
Los Alamos and sees the bodies dissolving; it’s clear in one of the climatic
scenes where we see the room shaking; we see the very consequence of it in his
last change with Einstein. Do we really
need to see the actual bodies burning or hospital rooms of the dying to know the
consequences? Strauss even says a
variation of it in one of his final scenes.
With the possible exception of
Steven Spielberg, I don’t know of any filmmaker working today who could have
done what Nolan did and managed to have the power to get it done on his
terms. He deserves all the praise that
he received and the critiques that those raise are that of the nitpicking I am
more accustomed to finding about the pedants involving sci-fi franchises
everywhere. Nolan in a very real sense
may have done both directors and the world of cinema a great service by making Oppenheimer.
It is childish to critique him because of trivia.
Later on, I will review Oppenheimer
both as a work of art and a work of history. Spoiler: It is a triumph in
both regards.
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