Oppenheimer - American self-righteousness at its best

I am admittedly not fond of Christopher Nolan's aseptic, clinically-diagnosed, game-planned approach to film-making. I have a great deal of respect for people who act with method and care. I marvel at anyone with the confidence and hubris to undertake something like a theatrical motion picture and shepherd it through both writing and directing to a final creation that can be flung forth into posterity. And there is probably no easier way for a modern director to distinguish himself than by eschewing special-effect, post-production heavy filmmaking and rather, relying and elaborating upon classical technologies and methodologies of making film while consistently meeting deadlines and budgets. I'm not under the impression that I could do what Nolan has made a career of doing: creating films that defy conventions in the most mainstream way possible. He's not Hitchcock or Kubrick, but frankly no one is but also no one else is Nolan and that is an undeniable achievement. Being different in any way possible is an achievement.

Oppenheimer now I'm going to treat very harshly, if for no other reason than the collective consciousness is already lionizing this 3 hour commitment as one of the finest films of the century.

But first, let's get right to the meat of the the thing. In a movie about the most momentous, ethically fraught creation mankind has ever brought into this world - the bomb that violates those everyday laws of nature that we take for granted - that unleashed the strong nuclear force and potentiates the most heinous destruction our species has ever wrought - the bomb that was actually a concern for setting ignition to the atmosphere and killing every living thing on the planet - in a three hour movie about that undertaking and the consequence of that undertaking - how much time do you think is appropriate to devote, if not for shock value then simply for the sake of giving a thorough account - how much time in that 3 hour movie should be devoted to the families or survivors of even just one of the 70,000 victims in Hiroshima or the 40,000 victims of Nagasaki - the people most directly and undeniable and practically rather than ethically or morally or hypothetically or geopolitically or biographically affected by the work at Los Alamos? Run time of 180 minutes, what would be a prudent amount of time to show the aftermath of those bombs for the purpose of adding a simple visual context to the implied horrors of the Trinity Test?

Because if you said anything greater than a second, then Nolan somehow failed. In a movie, a visual medium, whose central subject is the moral question over these weapons and the back and forth discourse over the course that the world should take with their existence, whose main narrative weaves through how the our protagonist's wrestling with those questions shaped his life and reputation, Nolan somehow doesn't even bother to show even one victim of the bombs that troubled Oppenheimer so dearly that he sat in the Oval Office with the President of the United States and felt compelled to say that he felt blood on his hands for his work.  He feels like he has blood on his hands in a movie that really goes out of its way to not show any blood.

Clinical. Aseptic. 

Self-righteous. This is an American movie about an American and the significance of how he felt bad over something that America did. But showing what they did - taking the focus off of Americans achieving the impossible, and then doing the unimaginable, and then destroying each other in the race to lord fire over the rest of the world and then agonizing over what they did - that would take precious time off of the most important parts of the story - namely how Oppenheimer felt bad about being the spearhead of a program that he led enthusiastically right up until the moment of success and then, felt bad about it. He felt bad about it, let's make a movie. And let's not show one single image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let's not show one image of what a nuclear bomb does to a human body.

Because that is a little too messy for a Chris Nolan film. It's a little too risky. You might feel something.

I felt for this movie exactly what I felt in every Chris Nolan movie with the exception of "The Dark Knight" (and quite frankly, that was 85% because of Heath Ledger). Nothing. Dunkirk, Tenet, Inception. I can appreciate marvelous cinematography. I'm not numb to thrilling sound design. I can clearly see the care and work that went into every single scene in the movie.

But did I feel sorry for Robert Oppenheimer when he went to meet Truman and Truman called him a cry-baby? No I didn't. I was confused. Not by whether or not that was a matter of historical record. But by what Nolan was hoping to make me feel there. Was I supposed to feel sorry for the protagonist, that he felt bad for being part of the project? Because I didn't. It seemed remarkable to me that a person could be so casually vulnerable with the U.S. President, confiding in him like he's a long-time friend. It seemed strange to confess guilt to someone who arguably has much more blood on his hands - a person that, if he were a halfway decent person, would probably rather not reflect upon it, reflect upon the millions of lives that he played some part in destroying simply by virtue of being the person in the chair at that point in history.

If I were to feel anything in that moment other than confusion, it would be: well, you spent three years enthusiastically doing something that was apparently 'horrible' in building that bomb. If you actually feel as you say, why don't you spend 4 years doing something 'great'. Go to Japan and do missionary work. Mount your bully pulpit and tell the world of what you did and what must come next.  Offset the scale. Why am I supposed to feel something about you saying that you feel bad when the screen time spent doing the horrible thing as best as you could vs the screen time of you reflecting on it being bad has a 10 to 1 ratio?

Show don't tell. Show me the scene where, in an act of gratuitous self-flagellation, Oppenheimer spends the first hour looking at the after-action report of the blasts. He demurs at first from looking at the human carnage, instead focusing on the technical details of the blast and its effects. Then he picks up a picture. Looks at it. Puts it down. He's on the precipice now, between courage and cowardice - between convincing himself that the image is futile and that the image is the most important thing anyone will ever see. And then he picks it up. Really looks at what his bomb did to another person. His bomb. It's his bomb - regardless of what Truman says - this is what ownership looks like. Then he picks up another. The shame of looking away is too great. He forced himself forward at Los Alamos and he forces himself forward here. He forces himself to look. Then he picks up the film. Puts it on the projector.  Hits the switch.  You don't see the images on the screen. Just his expression. Just the reaction to the horrors to which his imagination didn't do justice. He did that.  He had the power to stop it.  And he didn't.  He isn't blinking now. On and on the projector goes...On and on.

Now it's real.

I couldn't possibly feel anything that Nolan might have wanted me to feel because there is not one scene like that in the film. Nolan doesn't care about feeling.  He's like the inverse George Lucas.  Lucas cares not one whit about the quality of the acting so long as the movie stimulates you.  Its almost like Nolan appreciates good acting but doesn't actually care if the movie keeps moves you at all.   

I'm honestly not sure what Nolan's aim was but Oppenheimer wasn't a sympathetic character in that moment in the Oval Office. He's not really an anything character. They say he's cocky - he doesn't really come off that way. They say he's a genius - Nolan doesn't do a very good job of showing him being the smartest person in the room and Damon's Groves' character makes a point of saying that genius is commonplace in the circles that he travels in - all the physicists at Los Alamos were geniuses. They say he's a man of integrity in a movie that has a subplot of his philandering. And then they make the point that he feels guilty when his ambition or his curiosity (who can be sure which) drove him to be the only consistent voice of the need to make this weapon first - to decide what to do with it first.

There will be people who say that this ambiguity is meant to convey the complexity of the man. And I say the ambiguity conveys the ambiguity of whatever message Nolan might have been trying to tell. Is the message that people are complex? Well, that's profound. Is he trying to say that ambition will be the death of the species? That's not clear.

Is he trying to leave you confused as to whether right and wrong even exists and that the decision to drop the bombs, like Oppenheimer himself, exists in a rapidly cycling quantum state that is neither one thing or another but rather both at the same time?

Let's be honest, that's probably what he was doing. He does, after all have a massive creative mind. He's so creative that in a movie about the birth of the Atomic Age, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were besides the point.  They missed the cut. The soap opera like intrigue of Lew Strauss being cock-blocked from the Cabinet by Jack Kennedy - that's what people want to see.

And then this obtuse drudgery of the three stories out of sequence.  Oppenheimer's reputation was left in tatters after the Gray Board hearings. His life was in ruins; his wife is furious with him for not standing up to the committee and the obvious railroading that is happening. Why won't he fight it, why won't he use his profile and platform to balance the scales? They could be destitute, they could lose their home...

But does Nolan show the aftermath of the Gray Board hearing? Does he show Oppenheimer calling the White House and being denied? Of average citizens calling him a traitor to his country, of his colleagues souring upon him? Nope. It was dramatic and traumatic and devastating and Oppenheimer was never the same again. And we see nothing to confirm that. Nothing to indicate that his life was considerably worse for his politics or his misgivings. Nothing to suggest that his life was in some degree as troublesome as the peoples whose bodies were blown apart in Japan. Is that to say that the man didn't endure hardship worthy of being put on screen? Not at all. It's that Nolan didn't show any of that. Small looks from a lawyer, a shake of the hand or nod of the head from an old colleague testifying at the hearing. And then, seemingly paying off nothing, the triumphant redemption of the Fermi medal - Einstein was right.  He was a pariah no more.  Is this what constitutes compelling drama and animus in Nolan's world? Is this what's more important than showing even a glimpse of the rubble of Nagasaki, even in those psychedelic hallucinations that Oppenheimer would have as part of the lone artistic license that Nolan employed?

I've used the word clinical. I'll move on now to the word bloodless. Let's head over to Los Alamos, the vacation resort.  Where Oppenheimer is never shown to quarrel with a colleague over what direction to take.  No, that's not right.  Teller obviously wanted to make an H-Bomb.  Teller was the lone thorn in anyone's side.  But besides that lone instance of handholding and a single scene of conflict management with the team, the movie doesn't show obvious setbacks and then the elation of overcoming them through collaboration. It doesn't show someone clearly not pulling their weight and the difficulty of carrying someone important. It doesn't show one person who feels clearly superior to the others and the difficulty that comes from one person wanting to shine. In a movie about some of the smartest people in the world, all at the same place, all at the same time, all in the same field, all presumably with competing personalities, reputations, affiliations, priorities and feelings about the work, in isolation for three years from the rest of the world, all we see is them working amicably and unremarkably, without an ounce of passion or animus for each other until, suddenly the high pressure work of creating this $2 billion thing is complete and it's time to test. It was hard work that was somehow also effortless and then it was done. It is a bloodless recounting of things that flies in the face of every experience every human everywhere has ever had working with a group of people under extraordinary circumstances but Nolan manages to make it as memorable as watching paint dry.

Then there is a meeting about how the Nazis are defeated and the threat of them getting there first is invalid. The conscientious scientists, wringing their hands over the weapon, say: let's consider stopping the work. But there is Oppenheimer, giving a 2 minute speech about how the work must continue. The protestations in the other direction have the weight of a waved white flag. The discussion can't even qualify to be termed a debate. "The Soviets." Good enough - let's keep making the weapon that has a greater than zero chance of burning the atmosphere away.

Is Nolan just hemmed in by the story that he's adapting? Or is he endeavoring to make it even more boring and lifeless than the reality because those are the limits of his imagination? I don't want to be unkind but who would believe that a group like that could work without blow-up or disagreement, without passionate discourse over a beer or philosophical confrontation, without anything substantive or remarkable at all happening for three years? And what filmmaker other than Nolan could be content showing only the collegiality, and none of the personalities or contrasting difference of opinion that add weight and colour to the camaraderie?

So we are left with a portrait of a man important and essential enough to make a movie about him.  A movie that in no way highlights what made him so special that he should lead this team and do the impossible.  A movie that leaves one thinking that anyone of the scientists at Los Alamos could have probably done the same given the resources and expertise at their disposal.  And certainly, without the political leanings that were used to broaden the group of scientists involved in the project, the same leanings that were later used to demonize him, that other person might not have finished the bomb in time to drop in on Japan.  But they almost certainly would have done so before the Soviet Union got it, so the actual aim of the project would have been similarly fulfilled.

Now let's contrast all of this with the unambiguous horror story that was HBO's Chernobyl. The casual, almost indifferent attitude to the calamity. The restraint in reaching the conclusion - in slowly revealing the extent of the coming terror. The paralyzing absurdist rage at the Soviet status quo killing people with every moment of inaction and inertia. The unvoiced implications of the accident juxtaposed with the eerie ticks of a Geiger counter.  The brief and indelible flash of melted skin and boiled flesh.  The growing friendship between the military man and the man of science.  The paranoia of being followed everywhere you go.  Everything there - every moment of a family separated by a plastic sheet, of a hole in a reactor wall, of dead birds, of ionized radiation reaching for the sky - is crafted for the obvious purpose of conveying, with images, that this is the death of the world that you are witnessing - this is as serious as life gets. This is something you, as a human, should feel viscerally.

Were there obscene artistic license being exercised there? Yes. But, it this a piece of entertainment? Or is it a documentary? Everything meant to give a sense of the seriousness of Oppenheimer is conveyed through dialogue. Not so much as one scene of a brief, potentially disastrous accident at Los Alamos, dramatized or embellished for the simple purpose of showing the danger of enriched Uranium or Plutonium. Not so much as a near miss? A calculation done incorrectly - an outburst from Oppenheimer as to what was at stake...

Performative. Just going through the motions. Damon's Groves' character yells at a scientist that this is the most important undertaking in the history of the species. Is there anything else in this three hour movie so important or urgent that warrants yelling? A movie that ends with Oppenheimer saying to Albert Einstein that they feared that they'd destroy the world and then might have ended up accomplishing it anyways?

By now, you know the answer.

My enthusiasm for this movie, despite the crass and sensational (and cynical) declarations of the movie making community that this film was going to 'save' cinema from already failing Marvel movies was already low. Biopics are already difficult enough to make entertaining without employing creative license - what filmmaker could drain more blood from my face at the prospect of making a biopic than Chris Nolan? His clinical approach already makes his movies feel like documentaries. Now he's making a biopic, why the hell wouldn't that feel like a documentary?

Oh and he filmed it on IMAX, too? Like...?

A grown-up film for grown-ups? He's showing pointless nudity of American bodies in a movie about the people who made mutually assured destruction possible. That's okay. But showing the naked bodies of children scorched by a fireball? That's a little too grown up from a director hailed for making a war movie. Dunkirk is a movie about war, no? How can he be squeamish about that horrific honesty? How can people so easily call him an auteur while he takes no risks whatsoever?

It boggles my mind. But, to be fair, I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate Mr. Nolan. He wrote and directed a movie about Oppenheimer and did such a good job of it, I'm not exactly sure why I should care.