Oppenheimer (2023) Review

rating: *****

the story: The director of the Manhattan Project discovers great achievements don't always have happy endings.

the review: Most of the time, when you see what's going to be your favorite movie of the year, there ought to be no doubt.  Christopher Nolan has been one of my favorite directors since 2001, when Memento was released, and for a few years held the slot of my favorite movie, and in the two decades or so since, he's continued to make movies that I have very enthusiastically received, The Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar being my favorites from their release years (2008, 2010, 2014).  Although it received a considerable amount of pre-release buzz, in part because it was scheduled to hit theaters the same weekend as Barbie, I had no idea what to expect from Oppenheimer.  I loved his previous attempt at historical, WWII drama, Dunkirk, but it didn't feel like an achievement so much as an experience.  Nolan is very good at experiences, and has at times been on the verge of letting his talents rest of that level alone (here I certainly think of Tenet, which is its own kind of great filmmaking, but not as clear a statement).  Oppenheimer is a complete package.  As social media personality Logan Paul famously lamented, it's pretty much nothing but talking, but it's a tonal masterpiece.  The score certainly helps, but three hours of a perfect score is something even Terrence Malick can't necessarily reliably pull off.  Eventually there needs to be some concrete substance, and that can be found in spades throughout Oppenheimer.

It certainly doesn't hurt the sheer embarrassment of talent, and this is something even I can sometimes get carried away being dazzled by, but Oppenheimer's cast is stuffed to the rafters, and most of its actors are in relatively small roles while the bulk of the film rests on Cillian Murphy (long looking for that one great role, which this is) and a little on Robert Downey Jr. finally proving, once again, he's not just a superhero great at making quips, very deliberately changing his look and most of the time sounding nothing at all like Tony Stark (though happily our Iron Man comes out of his shell now and then), and Emily Blunt resting comfortably in the background until she commands the screen, and Rami Malik echoing that, and Matt Damon playing first supporting role (the man is as near a genius at selecting material as modern cinema has ever found, so often willing to play whatever role he wants it's astonishing that he's also remained a reliable leading actor the whole time), and then there's also Casey Affleck, Gary Oldman and Kenneth Branagh, Jason Clarke...A pair of would-be next generation lead actors, Dane DeHaan and Josh Hartnett, they're here.

Tom Conti, a respected actor from a previous generation, turns in a chameleon role as Einstein, a pivotal if minor one in the movie.  Einstein's role itself in the movie is genius, stepping away from the theatrics of The Prestige's Tesla though hinging on the same basic story structure, of a crucial moment between two characters that must be examined either by the audience or by the story itself to be understood as so crucial, the kind of storytelling Nolan employed in his first movie, Following, that had one of those twist endings that originally made Nolan himself seem as if he might after all be dismissed as a gimmick, as M. Night Shyamalan was for so long (and so many still believe so today), a fad.  

Oppenheimer is the definitive proof that Christopher Nolan is no such thing.  When Spielberg delivered Schindler's List and then Saving Private Ryan, his own one-two WWII punch, it opened new avenues of appreciation for his talent, and depth of talent.  Nolan, even in his superhero movies, never went broad.  He sought audience approval in scale of spectacle, the way Spielberg did it in the '70s, and never in mere thrills or childlike awe.  For too long Nolan was easy to dismiss because he didn't pursue the "truly adult," the straightforward drama.  Even Dunkirk relies on a series of timelines that robs it of a center beyond the central event.  Oppenheimer is classic Hollywood, a biopic.  Except no one's done it like this before.  

In most of his films, Nolan studied the concept of not just identity but self-identity, and while his characters often find themselves misunderstood, he's never really allowed them to suffer for it, never quite left the impression of an unhappy ending, and yet that's exactly what he does with Oppenheimer, and is thus the answer to why Einstein's brief role in the film is so crucial, why the story keeps circling back to it.  In criticizing the past, Nolan is of course giving us a damning metaphor about the present, since sometimes when you can't state things outright, you have to elucidate another way.  

I've long since stopped worrying about what Christopher Nolan can possibly do next.  Anything he wants.  It's all possible.  Of course he could never make another film, and his work will have already towered over his contemporaries, and the whole history of the medium.