Oppenheimer reviews

[Sabin]

SPOILERS, I GUESS...

I just rewatched Oppenheimer prior to Oscar night (second viewing) and I've more or less come around on it. I fell somewhere between a champion and a skeptic on my first viewing. I still think it's appropriate to be both. I still sense that Nolan is a craftsman, not a thinker. When his characters discuss theory, it could be anything. But Oppenheimer really isn't about science in the first place. It wants the viewer to believe that it's more about when a life of theory meets a life of pragmatism. I sort of get what it's saying there but I think it's most successful as a depiction of a pretty weak guy who had grand, ill-thought out ideas about what his work really meant and then his life became nightmarish as he realizes that would never happen and instead he had ushered in apocalypse. If that's even true. It's hard to know what Robert does or doesn't believe in any given moment because he's so wishy-washy. It's hard to figure out what he believes at any given moment besides in himself but it's clear he seeks the role of Oppenheimer the Prophet of the Nuclear Age for reasons that are messianic because he can't face the moral consequences of his actions. It's telling that when a room full of people watch a video of the human toll of the bomb, he looks away. A sidenote: I think Nolan made the right choice by not showing it. Oppenheimer is a ruminating, worrying film. Watching it the first time, I was thrown by the third act because it felt tacked onto the Trinity Movie. Watching it again, the Trinity sequence is clearly part of a larger film that seeks to interrogate Oppenheimer not just for his actions at Trinity but about if there's anything solid in his core. Oppenheimer is an interesting Great Man Biopic because Nolan believes that Oppenheimer is a Great Man but he also believes his greatness is his flaw. And yet, while I think the final third of the film is important to what the film is doing, I don't think it's dramatized as successfully as it could be. It's never totally clear (or compellingly clear) why Lewis Strauss' crusade against Oppenheimer became an important part of his confirmation for Commerce Secretary and it's never entirely clear during what part of Oppenheimer's hearing he willingly martyred himself. We don't really need both answers withheld as long as they are, which resulted for me occasionally in the same feeling I got during the part of Inception where DiCaprio's team moved into the snow dream lair: "Wait what are they doing again? DiCaprio's team is trying to incept an idea in Cillian Murphy's brain to dissolve his father's company so that... wait, why are we doing that? I don't care." Because Oppenheimer is concerned with more than silly science fiction (silly describing the kind of sci-fi, not describing sci-fi), I never disengaged on a second viewing, but I think too much identification is withheld from us for too long. Or at least it feels that. What sells it isn't Downey Jr.'s performance but Murphy's. I'm a little surprised that Murphy swept the precursors because it seems like the kind of performance that's usually taken for granted. Murphy creates compelling psychological continuity throughout, which is no small feat because I don't think Nolan wants to have it both ways between whether Oppenheimer does or does not realize the enormity of his actions, how much his messiah complex is compensating, how much in denial he is, etc. I think this ultimately reveals the limits of Nolan as a storyteller. One always gets the sense that he's more concerned with flowchart rhythms than psychology. But it does a terrific job of demythologizing the Manhattan Project and I appreciated the opportunity to reflect on our actions with worry. I spent a lot of my childhood discussing the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with my WW2 veteran grandfather who was confident we did the right thing. I've never held that confidence.

I'm still not there calling Oppenheimer a great film. That third act stumbles too much and I just find too much of Nolan's rhythms exhausting. But I like it more and if it wins it will be one of the better Best Picture winners of the last ten years.

[Mister Tee]

This is basically a very good movie. 3 hours, but they fly by pretty fast. Solid material, some notably good dialogue (as good as I've heard in any Nolan movie), excellent actors all around, crisp pacing. There are some modern-y touches -- the massive editing involved in surfing multiple framing devices -- but, at heart, it's a classically constructed non-fiction film: not up to the level of All the President's Men or Schindler's List, but in that genre ballpark (and well superior to something like Apollo 13). If this wins best picture next March, it won't be as exciting as Parasite, but light years ahead of the Green Book/CODA claque.

Perhaps this reads as faint praise, and to some degree it is: this is the sort of movie that journalists will tout, the way they did Patton back in the day: for its intelligent depiction of relatively complex history. My own preference is for something that delves deeper into the human heart -- which is to say, Past Lives still remains my number one for the year. But I will say Nolan gets closer to art within this history framework than most such efforts do. Many characters are well-drawn; there is, as I said, that memorable dialogue (a particular favorite: "You're not just self-important; you're actually important"); and political issues are given fair exposure from multiple angles without feeling like rote bothsiderism. This is a feat not to be diminished.

I know some have difficulty with the time-jumps -- not difficulty comprehending, just feeling they don't serve any purpose. I disliked the similar structure in Dunkirk --there I felt not only was it irrelevant, the stories being told had so little heft that the film was nothing beyond the structure. Here I feel it had purpose: to enable us to move through both the heroic and questionable parts of Oppenheimer's legacy, and see them as all part of the same flawed human. The various strands comment on one another; let us see how one was impossible without the other. (It also gave the audience a satisfying denouement: Oppenheimer might have got less than his due in the end, but at least his tormentor got his comeuppance, as well.)

A few nit-picks: all too often, I felt like the music was shouting at me "this is IMPORTANT!", which got annoying... The Einstein moment didn't have a big enough payoff for the number of times it was referenced... The revelation of the key no-vote on Krauss would have been amusing with the first reference ("the junior Senator"), and could have still worked with the second -- but explicating it a third time, splashing his full name in everyone's face, felt like a "Make sure even the lip-readers pick up on it" moment. (This became even more annoying when I found out the hearing took place in 1959, by which time the man in question would have been widely known enough not to need such identification.)

By the way, re: that other repeated moment of Krauss' humiliation -- did anyone besides me find it reminiscent of Obama's Correspondents Dinner jokes about Trump that allegedly prompted the latter's presidential run?

As for the actors and their Oscar prospects: Murphy seems the sort who's automatically nominated in tandem with his film, but rarely wins. Downey is very good, will clearly be in contention for the win and may well get the prize. Without Downey, Matt Damon would be very much in the running for a nomination (maybe he'll get one, anyway). On the female side...for much of the film, I was baffled by the touting Emily Blunt's been getting. Not that there was anything wrong with her performance; it was just too brief -- her scenes, more than most, seemed to be clipped short to move the film on. Going into the final reel, I though Florence Pugh had made as much an impression. Blunt's ace is obviously that testimony scene, and she does finally get to cut loose for a bit. Even there, though, I thought Nolan gave her short shrift: another minute or two, and she'd have made a solid case. She's good, will probably be nominated -- but if she's left off, I won't view it as outrage.

[Sonic Youth]

What can I say except, Christopher Nolan has done it again!

Make of that what you will. I'll write more later...

[Sabin]

Couple of follow up thoughts on Oppenheimer.

The more I think about it, the less it stays with me. Watching it, I was a little irked by how much Christopher Nolan has shifted the film into feature-length montage territory. A couple weeks out, I can remember more than a handful of scenes. It's a conceptually audacious film but thinking back on the film I felt like I was watching a flow-chart. I think he's just becoming a filmmaker I enjoy less and less. Only Nolan could take parties of sexually adventurous communists in the 1930's and make it un-sexy. But I'm open to revisiting it and liking it more. Now doubt when it's nominated for double-digit Oscars, I'll give it a rewatch.

That said, I will go to bat for the "Now I Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds" scene. I know that it's silly but if you were to ask me where in the movie will he say that line, I would never guess it would be there!

[Sabin]

Okri wrote
Sabin, I find it interesting you don't think that Downey Jr's role is something in Oscar's wheelhouse because I think structurally he functions almost like a key.

I think Downey Jr.'s role is in Oscar's wheelhouse for a nomination. I don't see a winner. But who knows? I didn't think Brad Pitt was going to win for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.


EDIT:
In terms of Oscars, I think this is going to be Nolan's biggest tally. The Dark Knight, Dunkirk, and Inception all tapped out at eight. I expect Oppenheimer to exceed that with nominations for Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Original Score, Cinematography, Film Editing, Production Design, and Sound virtually assured. That's ten. I think Supporting Actress (Blunt), Costume Design, Makeup, and Visual Effects depend more on competition.

[Okri]

I need to see it again, but I thought it was fairly remarkable. The three hours zip by. I found the performances were all strong. Sabin, I find it interesting you don't think that Downey Jr's role is something in Oscar's wheelhouse because I think structurally he functions almost like a key. From the to-be-excluded by the SAGs ensemble peeps, I found Jefferson Hall quite affecting. Cillian Murphy is quite good as well [after that initial burst of onto the scene, he didn't seem interested in seeking out these types of roles].

I confused David Krumholtz with David Dastmalchian and wondered why people were enthusiastic about the latter, to be honest.

re: the score

Honestly, I do actually enjoy scores that function as another form of sound design and was listening to Oppenheimer on the walk home from the movie theatre, if I'm being honest. The way the film uses sound and silence is fascinating to me.

Interesting question: both this and Killers of the Flower Moon are now established as critically hailed. In an earlier time, that would make each prime best picture bait. But do Academy voters still look for such films to win their top prize? They've passed on things like Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Dunkirk and The Irishman. Even 12 Years a Slave limped to victory. Has the voting pool changed to the point where they're more likely to go with a genre piece, like Argo/The Shape of Water/Parasite, than what used to be natural Oscar bait?

I think this question deserves its own thread, given the potential emptying out of fall, but I think it'll be the top contender.

[dws1982]

It also deserved a better score.

I'm in the middle on the score. I think it is effective in the film and well-used, but I miss scores with melodies and themes and such. Many still do, but the cacophony of different sounds and instruments seems to be the trend on the popular scores now. I've seen some people on Twitter saying things like "I've been listening to the score all weekend", and I'm like, "Really??"

I guess I get it if you want to listen to the score to evoke specific moments in the film, but I cannot imagine listening to it on repeat, because it's not far from listening to ambient sounds on repeat.

[Reza]

Blunt is very effective in her few scenes but a long-overdue nomination for her in such a limited role depends on the reception of supporting actresses in other eagerly anticipated films.

Yes she is overdue for a nomination and I think she will get swept in with all the nominations the film will get. Her Oscar moment in the film comes during the Atomic Commission sequence.

I think Downey will win along with the sound design award - the only awards this film will get. I feel its Scorsese's year. His film will sweep the awards.

[Sabin]

If they had trimmed the last hour of Oppenheimer by half-ish and sculpted it better, I think I might be able to talk myself into loving the film and not just greatly admiring it. What the last hour of the film is doing is very interesting as we watch Oppenheimer's creation instantly slip out of his hands, but it gets far too lost in the weeds of who is testifying when and why that it loses track of its story. The last hour basically becomes about keeping track of names and it's a real shame because what its two messages about Oppenheimer's naïveté, self-delusion, and place is history couldn't be more interesting. One movie that I haven't seen referenced with Oppenheimer is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Both are about protagonists who are carried by destiny to one moment and have to deal with the muck of their legacy. The final scene in Oppenheimer lands very strong but the road to it doesn't work as well. It deserved better editing; in general, I'm getting tired of Christopher Nolan constructing his movies like one big montage. This really gets in the way of Oppenheimer being the psychological portrait that it wants to be. It also deserved a better score. But it's still such a pleasure to watch a movie this big that's about real shit. It's also a pleasure to watch a biopic where you keep peering at the protagonist wondering about what makes him tick. Cillian Murphy's thousand yard store, penchant for theory, and terrific accent never got old for me. He gives an excellent performance.

Great supporting cast. It's fun to watch Robert Downey, Jr. dig into something like this but it just isn't a role that screams Oscar to much. I was a much bigger fan of David Krumholtz whom I've been a fan of for some time. He's a welcome kind presence in a Christopher Nolan film.

[Big Magilla]

There are just a small handful of filmmakers getting the resources that Nolan gets to make a project like this. That said, it's strange to see some of the things he doesn't use those resources on, specifically: certain makeup details. At the end, there's a brief scene that uses some old age makeup that is pretty low-effort. (But it's only seen for like two minutes.) And Murphy clearly has piercings in his left ear that are frequently noticeable in close-ups, which seems like a really easy fix.

While Murphy and most of the other actors appear to look roughly the same through 1954, the JFK medal ceremony in which both he and Blunt appear to be older occurs nine years later in 1963. Oppenheimer was only in his late 50s. He was just 62 when he died four years after that.

In a conventional biopic that would have been the final scene, but in Nolan's typical non-linear fashion, for no logical reason it goes back to Oppenheimer's brief meeting with Einstein circa 1941.

The film will undoubtedly garner Oscar nominations across the board but how many will it win?

Cinematography, production design, music, visual effects, sound and score seem to be its greatest strengths. It could win all six without winning Best Picture, Director, or Screenplay. Editing seems questionable.

Murphy will certainly be nominated. His body language from his facial expressions to his walk is terrific but I found his soft-spoken delivery of dialogue difficult to hear through most of the film. I am probably going to have to rewatch it some point with subtitles in order to fully appreciate him in several scenes. It's too early to predict a win.

Downey is tremendous as his nemesis. It's the kind of role that easily wins Oscars, but he faces strong competition from at least two other actors so far (De Niro and Gosling).

Blunt is very effective in her few scenes but a long-overdue nomination for her in such a limited role depends on the reception of supporting actresses in other eagerly anticipated films.

While many of the other actors are fine, none of them seem to have much of a chance at an Oscar nomination though several of them would be in the running if there were an award for limited performance or cameo.

[dws1982]

No, although it does suggest somewhat obliquely that she may have been killed as a national security risk, due to her communist associations. (I don't remember if the movie shows it, but she did leave a suicide note, so it was almost definitely suicide.)

[Greg]

Does Oppenheimer get into a great irony in Oppenheimer's life, that his affair with Jean Tatlock was with someone who was a psychiatrist whose clinical depression caused her to commit suicide?

[dws1982]

Did the Barbenheimer double feature yesterday. Had only planned on Oppenheimer yesterday, but the person I had planned to see this with had something come up.

I'll have more thoughts on this later, maybe after more have seen it, and maybe after I've seen it again. It's not a spoiler type of movie, but I do think it'll work better if you don't know a ton, so I'll try to keep that in mind with the few thoughts I post in here:

- There are just a small handful of filmmakers getting the resources that Nolan gets to make a project like this. That said, it's strange to see some of the things he doesn't use those resources on, specifically: certain makeup details. At the end, there's a brief scene that uses some old age makeup that is pretty low-effort. (But it's only seen for like two minutes.) And Murphy clearly has piercings in his left ear that are frequently noticeable in close-ups, which seems like a really easy fix.

- Exists in interesting conversation with Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, and features Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg both in small roles here (Heisenberg is in one scene in mentioned in others; Bohr is a bigger role, but only about five minutes of screen time still). Copenhagen ends up floating the possibility that Heisenberg maybe sub- or un-consciously sabotaged the Nazi nuclear program through his wrong turns, and through the fact that he knew that Hitler did not take quantum mechanics seriously as "Jewish" science, which this touches on a bit. Kind of some broadly similar structural details too, in that Copenhagen is set outside of time and space, and this kind of loops around as well (not going to be more specific for now because a lot of people have not seen this); and of course Copenhagen is about, essentially, the souls of Bohr and Heisenberg and Bohr's wife Margarethe coming together one last time to break down what happened at their 1941 meeting, but also the moral and political implications of nuclear weapons and their roles in it.

- Has several truly excellent sequences, as good as anything Nolan has done. I think the final scene hits pretty hard.

- Murphy is great, will probably get nominated, especially with lots of movies probably about to leave this Oscar year. Could even win, because he really does dominate the movie, and he's been around for a long time and I think people realize they've not appreciated him. Doubt that Pugh or Blunt have much chance because those characters are mostly seen through his point-of-view, and a lot of the film is about his distance from other people. Still, it could've done more with those characters.

- The sex scenes were overhyped on Twitter. I don't mean this in an "I wanted more" way, but more along the lines of, they relatively tame compared to what you've seen in other films, although it does earn the R-rating. One of those scenes, I suspect will attract a bit of criticism, and I had an issue with it as well because there was very little in the movie before or after that made the case for staging it that way. I get what Nolan was going for, but execution was clunky. You will know it when you see it.

- Robert Downey Jr. has the biggest of the supporting roles, and he is very good. It's a substantial supporting role with a few Oscar clips; it is your classic antagonist supporting performance, although it is more complicated than just an antagonist, and isn't revealed to be that just that initially. It has a very solid group of supporting actors: Damon is very good, Josh Hartnett is good although maybe not the most convincing intellectual, Rami Malek is good and very well cast, David Krumholtz is really excellent (although I didn't recognize him right away, because he seems to have gained a substantial amount of weight).

- This is one of those films that exists to annoy people when it gets an ensemble nomination at the SAG awards. Everyone credited below Kenneth Branagh in the cast list will not be eligible for the ensemble nomination at SAG, which will leave out David Krumholtz (just as deserving as Downey of a nomination in my opinion), Matthew Modine, Tom Conti, Dane DeHaan, and Alden Ehrenreich, all of whom are very good, in my opinion, among others.

These are just random surface thoughts; there is a lot going on here.

[Big Magilla]

Strong reactions following the film's premiere in Paris:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235533586/

[Big Magilla]

I can only go by what I would have voted for. Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Dunkirk, and The Irishman were all worthy contenders but not of them were top choices in their years. I also felt the same way about Argo, The Shape of Water, and Parasite.

From 2012 on, my choices were Les Misérables over Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, in agreement with 12 Years a Slave, Boyhood over Birdman, in agreement with Spotlight, Manchester by the Sea over Moonlight, Three Billboards over The Shape of Water and Dunkirk, First Man over Green Book, 1917 over Parasite, Minari over Nomadland, The Power of the Dog over CODA and Tár over Everything Everywhere All at Once. The last two I wouldn't have even nominated.

Although I haven't seen either Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon as yet, they are the ones I'm looking most forward to seeing and have been since well before the reviews came out. If they live up to my expectations and nothing else comes along to surpass them in my estimation, one or the other will likely be my choice to win. Going by my recent track record, however, that's not a particularly good omen.