Oppenheimer (2023, Christopher Nolan) (Patreon)

56/100

Glad I went to the trouble and considerable expense* of seeing this in 70mm IMAX, since it excited me almost exclusively as pure spectacle. Trinity in particular is everything one could desire/dread from perhaps the most viscerally momentous single moment in human history. (Obviously Fat Man and Little Boy themselves were orders of magnitude more awful, in both the original and contemporary meaning of that adjective, but nobody was waiting to find out whether the planet's entire atmosphere would ignite; also, "Nolan should have departed from his chosen structure/viewpoint to show us the horror" is a complaint made by people who prioritize ideological messaging over artistic integrity.) But I also dug all of the Expressionistic subjectivity, and the way that it gets craftily spring-loaded—Oppenheimer's triumphant address to his fellow scientists, shortly after the bombings, is to me the film's clear zenith, but I doubt it would've had nearly the same impact had we not previously heard, sans explanation or context, what's now revealed to be the audience's feet stamping their approval at his horrific achievement. Loved pretty much the entire Los Alamos stretch (i.e. hour two), and that qualifier is there only because I continue to part company with most of my peers in finding Benny Safdie damn near unwatchable as an actor, doubly so when he's attempting Teller's thick accent. Had Nolan made Trinity rather than Oppenheimer...well, I guess I already saw that movie long ago, back when it starred Paul Newman and (huh?) Dwight Schultz. Still, Nolan's heightened depiction, focused to leave the moral reckoning implicit, could have been extraordinary. 

Alas, I must now out myself as one of the heathens who found the fission/fusion diptych monotonous in the extreme (to the point where that third hour felt like three on its own). Intellectually, it's quite clever, but understanding that didn't make all of the petty this-is-not-a-trial-sir bullshit (on two fronts!) any less enervating. I will now draw comparisons to a couple of films that I doubt anyone else has even thought of in relation to Oppenheimer: 25th Hour and Primer. Oppenheimer using his security "show hearing" to punish himself for his sins is more or less what I've always contended that Monty's doing when he asks Frank to make him ugly (ostensibly so that he won't be raped in prison); in theory, I have no quarrel with the bureaucratic/reputational equivalent of suicide-by-cop. But having trivial matters stand in for weighty ones is very tricky business, and the sheer amount of screen time devoted to these ultimately meaningless interrogations is disproportionate. Primer errs slightly, I think, in giving us so little information about the party incident that Aaron becomes obsessed with using his and Abe's device to heroically prevent...but what Nolan does here is like turning Primer into a three-hour movie that shows us the party at length over and over and over again, in every permutation. Which would've been worse. Even the ending is sort of bizarre in that respect, combining Oppenheimer's guilt at having become Death, Figurative Destroyer Of World (nothing heavier) with the revelation that Strauss had paranoiacally wreaked vengeance over a self-important leap to the wrong conclusion (which in this context who gives a shit?). Furthermore, the inherent talkiness of those dudes-in-chairs sequences, and Nolan's decision to build the whole movie around them, apparently made him feel an urgent need to "counterprogram" via brisk montage, which to me makes huge hunks of Oppenheimer play like a trailer for Oppenheimer that will not fucking end. (That Malick pulled off a similar approach in Tree of Life without creating that sensation is what makes its first half so miraculous.) 

In short, there's a Dunkirk-length movie in here, focused more on history and less on biography, that I might have loved. Downey does fine work (along with the rest of the non-Safdie cast, though nobody's on my Skandies shortlist), but I'd happily do without almost every scene in which he appears; that would in turn obviate the need to include Tatlock, who feels positively whizzed past. I'll inevitably give the film that Nolan actually made a second look around year's end, but I'm in no way eager to do so. Especially since what I most admire about Oppenheimer will be much diminished in standard 2.35 on my TV set. 

* Probably the most money I've spent to see a single film, though there might be festivals for which my per-film cost ran a bit higher. The ticket alone was $27, and then driving to L.A. burned up another, I dunno, probably $10-12 in gas right now. Was spared the $5 parking fee, though, as it turns out that Universal CityWalk doesn't charge at 12:45am.