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thegeneralreturns · 9 months

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Thoughts on OPPENHEIMER

Christopher Nolan is a great director who, for the past fifteen years, has devoted himself to making less-than-great films. The Dark Knight was the last time he sought to entertain, enlighten, or inform, and ever since, he's constructed his work for the sole purpose of getting us all to congratulate him on being the cleverest little boy there is (yes, even Inception, don't @ me). He directs like Salman Rushdie writes, and I don't entirely mean that as a compliment. God in Heaven save us from artists who know they're good, but think they're cute.

So it is with no small amount of satisfaction that I report that Oppenheimer break's Nolan's dry spell. It's the best film in his filmography, and my dissatisfaction with his more recent work should not, I hope, obscure the Gadsden Purchase worth of ground that covers.

If it is a standard biopic, then it is one fed through the woodchipper of Nolan's penchant for chronological jumble and thematic obfuscation, constructed less to draw attention to itself, and more to follow a dramatic and emotional through-line. The chain of events may be veined with diversion and distributed piecemeal, but how you feel about what you're seeing is as straight and as true as an arrow's flight.

Those worried about an attempted rehabilitation of J. Robert Oppenheimer himself need not do so, for Nolan can't make any clearer the fact that he holds the man in almost sneering contempt. Portrayed by the wraith-like Cillian Murphy, he is not afraid to portray him as a man blessed by vast intelligence, yet in a poverty of anything even remotely resembling a damn lick of sense as his personal relationships blow up in his face as spectacularly as any bomb might. And the film goes to great pains to show that even his late-inning mea culpas are a luxury he can't afford and didn't earn.

This is where Nolan's almost alien detachment really works for Oppenheimer's benefit, as the standard story beats of triumph are handled like that of a parent looking at a child who has no idea what they did. Even the third-act redemption, which would have been milked by a lesser filmmaker, is viewed through a thick film of sour irony. The mask only slips after the Trinity test, when Oppenheimer addresses a crowd of people, and the pyrotechnics attendant make apparent that this character is beheld by a director that hates him.

Oppenheimer is the best film of 2023 so far.

SIDE NOTE THE FIRST: A movie for grown-ups made eighty million bucks in the US this weekend. Say Hallelujah, c'mon, get happy.

SIDE NOTE THE SECOND: It took him over twenty years, but Nolan finally wrote his first legible and compelling female character. Congrats to Emily Blunt on her impending Oscar nomination.

SIDE NOTE THE THIRD: Matt Damon's character states he studied engineering at MIT, and all I could think was that Will Hunting got that time machine up and running.

#oppenheimer

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