Barbenheimer — Review Thread

For much of 2023 I’ve been excited to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer but have also been scared to death on its behalf. The challenges of dramas for adults at the box office are pretty well publicized and the life story of someone as complicated as J. Robert Oppenheimer sounds like a tough box office sell under pretty much any circumstances and Nolan seemed to be making this huge bet that he could turn it into a big summer blockbuster, going so far as to build his advertising campaign around a countdown timer so as to now allow the studios to chicken out and move it to awards season. Everything else that got revealed about the movie, from its three hour running time to its R-rating seemed to point to Nolan committing some sort of box office suicide of the kind that may well make it harder for any other kind of adult drama in the future to be made at any kind of scale and could combine with the financial issues of Tenet to make this wunderkind filmmaker unable to continue making the kinds of movies he makes. It’s still early but if the trades’ projections are right it sounds like I may have been worried over nothing as the movie is on track to a strong opening weekend having confoundingly been saved by internet memes of all things. If that’s true then Nolan may well and truly be the “savior of real cinema” that the stans (myself included) have long claimed he was because as it turns out Oppenheimer is every bit the mature and uncompromising work that it appears to be.

Oppenheimer looks at the famed physicist through the lens of two separate framing stories that intercut at various point. The first one, which is in color and makes up the majority of the film’s running time is framed by an interrogation of sorts that J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) endured in 1954 when McCarthy-esque suspicions were leading the defense department to question his security clearance. The second framing story, which is in a beautiful silvery black and white, follows AEC chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) during his 1959 confirmation hearing for secretary of commerce. The past events that we cut back to during both of these respective framing stories maintains the color schemes in play as a marker of perspective. Beyond the flashback structure and the occasional cutting between the two events though the narrative is fairly chronological so none of this is really as disorienting as it maybe sounds. The narrative begins with Oppenheimer in his student years in Europe and then follows him back to Berkley, where he’s immersed in the political debates of the day while building up a formidable physics department and gets into a complicated relationship with a woman named Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) before eventually leaving her for another woman named Katherine AKA “Kitty” (Emily Blunt) who he would eventually marry. Eventually though history would come calling as the war began and he was approached by Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to head the Manhattan Project.

Christopher Nolan has in many ways become a controversial figure in film discussion circles because he makes movies to be taken seriously but at the end of the day he’s still making big budget action blockbusters and some view him as not being so different from the commercial hacks he’s intended to be an antidote to. Oppenheimer is in some ways set up to be a project to respond to his doubters, basically the first movie he’s made since at least The Prestige (depending on your definition) that is in no way shape or form an action movie. In this sense it’s kind of his Jackie Brown, a movie that shows that he’s fully capable of being a “grown up” if he wants to and on that level it feels like a departure. However, this is still very much a Nolan film to its core. It’s non-linear but still follow-able double helix structure feels like Memento in its shifts between black and white and color and its serious tone and focus on dudes in suits is also well in line with his usual visual style and its occasional cuts to illustrations of its scientific concepts would not feel out of place in Inception.

One thing Nolan often doesn’t get credit for though is writing dialogue and for being an “actor’s director” and you can kind of see that in the film’s marketing campaign which almost seems to imply that the payoff to seeing this movie is to look at a bomb blow up really good in for IMAX. Honestly, while the eventual Trinity Test explosion looks fine, at the end of the day it’s just one of several mushroom clouds we’ve seen on screen and isn’t even really a highlight but you don’t care because you’re so riveted by the drama around it. The film’s writing is bold and uncompromising. Nolan makes few if any concessions to dumb down this material and happily has characters discuss scientific discoveries, government bureaucratic agencies, and political ideologies without stopping too much to explain themselves. People who felt he explained too much through exposition in past movies will probably not have too much to complain about here, and he does do this without making things very confusing at all really. On top of that he is very willing to talk directly about issues like the differences between left wing social issues and soviet communism and later McCarthy witch hunts directly, and shows “both sides” of the coin but in ways that feel honest rather than like audiences pleasing compromises.

As for Nolan’s reputation as an actor’s director, this film should bolster that quite a bit as well because this cast is stacked. The movie has something like fifty characters in speaking roles, many of them based on real people both famous and obscure and we have notable actors like Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Casey Affleck, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Alden Ehrenreich, Benny Safdie, and Alex Wolff all showing up to work in parts that only last a couple of scenes, but Nolan doesn’t just gratuitously use cameos and is also willing to have less recognizable actors also show up to play major figures. But of course the core cast is where the real attention will be, and the real surprise of the film is Robert Downey Jr., who has a bigger role than a lot of people were probably expecting and is perhaps putting the most work into a role that I’ve seen him do since he started playing Iron Man and kind of went on auto-pilot as an actor. That was a really canny bit of casting as they need to make this guy seem like a bit of a rat but in a way that’s smart and formidable and with at least the appearance of gravitas. Florence Pugh is also really alluring as a woman in Oppenheimer’s early life and does a good job of making it clear what the guy saw in her despite somewhat limited screen time. Emily Blunt is a bit more of a mixed bag, partly as a consequence of the film maybe abandoning her storyline a bit in the second act. I also think she probably handles the subtle aging required by the story a bit less successfully than some of the other actors. Then of course there’s Cillian Murphy, who’s been working in bit parts in Nolan films for years and now finally finds himself in the role he was born to play and just pretty much knocks the assignment out of the park.

So what, besides the obvious, particularly drove Christopher Nolan to tell this particular story at this particular time? This couldn’t have been the safest financial choice at a delicate moment in his career where he’s coming off something of a bomb (albeit one with a heavy asterisk) with Tenet and is working for a new studio for the first time. This may be a bit of a galaxy brain take but I think it might be because he sees a lot of parallels in this story to the act of Hollywood filmmaking and to his own career in particular. Throughout the film he depicts the scientific community as a group of eccentric intellectuals with all sorts of different political and philosophical leanings who are often at odds with the powers that be in academia and the government. Not unlike the uneasy relationship between artistic talent and studio moneymen that Nolan likely witnesses every day and here the Manhattan Project almost feels like a blockbuster film shoot with a lot of money on the line and all sorts of mistrust and disagreements going on between the eccentrics doing the work and the top brass overseeing it and with both sort of using each other for different ends. And at the center of that whole production is Oppenheimer, who is essentially the director in this equasion: a genius himself to be sure but whose ultimate job is to synthesize various different departments each with their own specialty but who despite being the ostensible boss still has to answer to higher authorities who are signing the checks he needs to see his passion project through.

So if Nolan is Oppenheimer in this analogy does the comparison run any deeper than job roles? Maybe. This is even more of a stretch but I do wonder if Nolan perhaps sees at least something of himself in Oppenheimer’s role as the guy who sort of opened Pandora’s box. After all it was Nolan who scored over a billion dollars at the world box office with The Dark Knight, arguably the success that solidified the superhero movie as the definitive Hollywood genre of the 2010s and set DC and Marvel off on something of an escalating arms race for supremacy of this ultimate weapon of cinematic mass destruction. Like Oppenheimer, Nolan tried to influence the way that studios used his invention and reign in the excesses they were tempted to lean into but at the end of the day his invention wasn’t his anymore and they just had to keep chasing their rivals into “cinematic universes” and the like, possibly to their own eventual detriment. Meanwhile for all his trouble he was still pushed around and disrespected by his former employer. Is the whole Robert Downey Jr. story a subtweet of some Warner Brothers executive that Nolan thinks pushed him out vindictively? For that matter could casting Iron Man himself in that role be some sort of elaborate joke to this end? That side of this may ultimately be unconfirmable and to be honest this whole tangent might be a very wild exercise in overthinking things that maybe trivializes this whole movie that does not need all this subtext to excellent, but the mind goes where it goes with these things sometimes.