OPPENHEIMER, PRO AND CON:
Pro: John Podhoretz:
When middlebrow movies of this kind—Gandhi, Cry Freedom, The Killing Fields, and many others—vanish from the scene, that doesn’t make new space for highbrow stuff, because high culture will always be an elite minority taste. Instead, everything just goes lower. And that’s exactly what happened with Hollywood. Over the past two decades, movies that try to tell a real story about real people (and I don’t just mean actual real-life people like Oppenheimer, but just everyday folk) have gotten smaller and more insignificant. They are unambitious and unassuming. When they work, they work because they are touching slices of life and seek only to make us shed a tiny tear. They’re not weighty. They’re gossamer.
Oppenheimer is weighty, and it’s kind of magnificent. Writer-director Christopher Nolan has decided the story he is telling is the most important story in human history, and he wants to do it justice. This movie’s level of ambition is something I’m not sure we’ve seen in a major studio release in decades, and Nolan is so skilled a storyteller and so authoritative a director that his reach blessedly does not exceed his grasp. This is not a subtle movie, and there’s barely a joke or a laugh in it; as in all his pictures, Nolan presents us with an earnest, formal, and heavy world. But what he doesn’t do is preach, and that is what makes this movie such a triumph. Oppenheimer is a wildly ambiguous portrait of its titular subject, the work he did, the life he led, and even the humiliation to which he was subjected by political and ideological enemies. The titanic performance of Cillian Murphy, who does nothing to ingratiate himself with the audience, takes this incredibly complex and deeply troubled man and follows him through four decades of scientific growth, political activism, engineering achievement, and raw power politics. And it does a beautiful job posing the key question of his life without answering it: In doing something transcendently great, did he do something evil?
Con: Armond White: Oppenheimer’s Revenge of the Geeks. Christopher Nolan remakes Dr. Strangelove for today’s moral idiots:
On the way to turning pop cinema into a weapon of mass destruction, Christopher Nolan specialized in narratives about amoral excitation — Memento, and his Batman Begins / The Dark Knight / The Dark Knight Rises trilogy. These bad productions changed movie culture by appealing to the terrors of naïve film nerds the same way Stanley Kubrick corrupted adolescent pop-culture devotees — through technological preening that made geeks feel smart.
There’s always a moral vacancy in Nolan’s films. Now, Nolan has made his ultimate geeks’ movie: the overhyped biopic Oppenheimer, which mystifies physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by the eccentric, intense Irish actor Cillian Murphy), credited for creating the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Japan in 1945 to end World War II. This is Nolan’s subversive remake of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, from 1964. The real-life basis of Nolan’s film is all the more enticing for kids who know nothing about military or scientific history. He introduces them to Oppenheimer in the same way that Marvel distorted Oppenheimer’s wizardry in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And surely Nolan is aware of how Zack Snyder’s Watchmen used Oppenheimer’s oft-repeated quote — “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” It came from the Bhagavad Gita, a Sanskrit epic that polymath Oppenheimer knew, but the proclamation now teases pop-culture nihilists — and that’s the purpose behind Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Not since David Fincher’s serial-killer epic Zodiac has there been a crime procedural as plodding as Oppenheimer, even though Nolan constantly switches to black-and-white flashbacks of the scientist’s early academic years, his wartime bomb research on the Manhattan Project, and his post-war persecution by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Murphy is outfitted in a wide fedora, and his imperious manner makes him seem half-hero, half-nemesis. Nolan lacks the momentum to dramatize Oppenheimer’s travails (Murphy’s blue eyes do all the work), but the precarious portrait of a genius recalls Fincher’s worship of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Both Nolan and Fincher exploit the zeitgeist’s disinterest in what’s moral or immoral. This film dithers for three hours, as if viewers were also morally uncertain and aesthetically gullible.
Like Nolan’s Dunkirk, his latest film feels detached and Kubrickian. I watched The Imitation Game on Saturday night on Netflix as a sort of warmup for Sunday’s big movie. (In this case, England’s tortured WWII genius, Alan Turing). While the plastic CGI SFX from 2014 were nowhere near as good as Nolan’s practical effects, and I felt much more sympathetic to Turing as played by Benedict Cumberbatch than Cillian Murphy’s cool and detached Oppenheimer. And while the plot was also non-linear, it was much more obvious in each scene which period of Turing’s life was being recreated. But Oppenheimer is big, bravura, and smart filmmaking, something that as Podhoretz writes above is quite rare in post-’80s Hollywood.