2023-07-20 01:09:32
All of Christopher Nolan’s cinema is marked by the same obsession: the fracture of time. If any director manipulates time and space to tell a story, in Nolan’s mind that manipulation becomes something akin to a magic trick—sometimes even literally, as in The final trick–. The obsession with that rupture has led him to get involved many times in thrillers where temporary games were key as narrative trickery (Memento o Tenet as paradigmatic examples). However, the obsession with time is not only something that marks the structure of his works, but something that is also transferred to his most sober films.
Time was key Insomnia (with the weight of guilt and the past as leitmotiv); in Interstellar (where it was speculated that love was the only thing that transcended time and space) or even in Dunkirk, where his three stories of three different durations converged at a point where time is essential, as is a war. There was a lot of interest to see if in what seemed to be his most sober and most conventional bet, a biopic about Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb, he was capable of translating his obsessions, his forms and his staging that works perfectly for an action thriller, but that seemed to squeak to tell the story of the physicist.
once seen Oppenheimer, it becomes clear that Christopher Nolan is an incorruptible filmmaker. That his cinema has clear signs of identity that always appear, and that he ensures that any project is impregnated with his DNA. He is Oppenheimer a Nolan movie from the first frame. It is the filmmaker’s version of a political thriller that could be twinned with JFK, another feature film where the fragmentation of time and editing were key to transferring the conspiracy climate that Oliver Stone intended.
Time is of the essence Oppenheimer for many reasons. First, because the filmmaker points to the exact moment of the explosion of the atomic bomb as the turning point of modern society. A change in policies, in trust in governments and in recent history. The world could be destroyed at the push of a button. Second, because Nolan’s film acts as the countdown to the same bomb. Or, at least, in one of its various plots, since –and once again here time is the key– the film is unstructured and travels from the past to the present without having to explain to the viewer where we are.
We have a line where Oppenheimer watches his friends and enemies walk past him in an act pantomime to try to bring him down and take away his scientific credentials; we have the researcher obsessed with the creation of the atomic bomb; we have the one from before he built it; and we have the one who is devastated after seeing the consequences of his invention. They all mix, blend and are the same thanks to Nolan’s editing and script work. It is a dense, complicated film that moves from one to another without asking for permission, but that masterfully braids them all, making them all talk to each other.
Nolan is still an old dog, and he knows that his experience also has to work for a viewer who goes to the theater to be delivered a different movie, but doesn’t want to feel completely lost in its structure. So he casts it all in the form of a political thriller complete with betrayal and shocking twist ending, but it’s not really what he’s interested in. What interests the director is the study of a contradictory, ambiguous, complex and polyhedral character that Cillian Murphy masterfully brings to life.
A character study that is done from two points of view, and hence the aesthetic decision that one be in color, the one that is subjective, in which the viewer shares the feelings and thoughts of Oppenheimer himself and with which Nolan puts the viewer directly in his head; the second, in black and white, is the point of view of the rest, of those who look at Oppenheimer, especially a Lewis Strauss interpreted in a colossal way by a Robert Downey Jr who will surely enter all the pools for the awards this year. In the color part, Nolan introduces visions, images of atoms, nuclear inserts that seem to have been devised by Terrence Malick himself.
The filmmaker turns his most sober film into a time bomb, despite the redundancy and easy play on words. From the first minute, it provokes a devastating physical and sensory experience. He makes a simple conversation tense. His staging is so sharp, his use of sound and score (Ludwig Garnsonn’s sizzling one is easily the best of the year) so superb that one is overwhelmed by perhaps his most complex film.
Its usual failures are also more exposed in Oppenheimer. Nolan is still a lousy female character writer. Here Florence Pugh’s is ridiculous and, although Emily Blunt borders on her two moments, hers also lacks any kind of development and her scenes feel forced, written by someone who knows that they are going to accuse her of lacking women and tries to correct it, turning out to be artificial. There are also moments in which the film is known to be important and makes the voice too silly, something that usually happens to the filmmaker. It is what he has to try such a high intensity level for three hours that, luckily, here they never weigh.
And then there is the great moment, of course, that of that nuclear explosion that acts as a turning point before the third act and that is pure spectacle. The scene that everyone is waiting for and that Nolan resolves in the most surprising way, with a silence reminiscent of the one that Rian Johnson gave away in a scene from the last jedi and that upset so many people. What differentiates Oppenheimer from the rest of Nolan’s cinema is that, for the first time, what he is interested in telling has a political and social implication. If in his thrillers he advocated reflecting on guilt, love or redemption, what he is talking about here is the moment in which the world changed forever.
The filmmaker directly accuses the US of perverting world peace, using its scientists and creating a fear that will never go away. He also points to McCarthyism, to how a country was capable of persecuting half the population just for its ideals. “The US fears socialism more than fascism”, is heard at one point in the film (which also marks the defeat of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War as another turning point in modern history); and it is impossible not to think that these sludges are from those dusts. That perhaps the rise of the extreme right is marked by the historical collusion of almost all countries with a neoliberalism that preferred the reactionary to the left-wing scientist.
Oppeheimer It ends up being an X-ray of the recent history of the world on a political level, and it is a story with a pessimistic look, as is the end of this film. A brilliant ending that closes one of the enigmas that Nolan plays with throughout the film in the form of a macguffin with a conversation between the protagonist and Albert Einstein that is one of the best closures of his career as a filmmaker.
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