The fame of Christopher Nolan precedes him - and that's not always very good for his films. Commercially, of course, Hollywood loves a "brand director", who doesn't depend on big stars to guarantee a captive audience in the movie theaters. Artistically, it's another story. Being a filmmaker like Nolan implies being part of a cultural discourse, partly constructed by himself, partly evolved from semantic exchanges that entirely escape his control - and, when the expectations of this discourse clash with the reality of a work as personal as Oppenheimer, the disaster is almost certain.
That's because there is a very real possibility that the film will only be understood from parameters that do not do it justice. The relentless focus on the latest technical feats, how the movie should or shouldn't be watched, how long the filming took, its Oscar prospects... all of this is - in the precise words of James Mangold about Indiana Jones 5 - marketing talk. Watching the movie and absorbing it in these terms would be a triumph of promotion, a manufactured and artificially fed Discourse™, in opposition to a much more interesting reality: Oppenheimer is a weird as-hell movie.
Just for starters, this is a scientific biopic that treats its technical dialogues about the complexities of the quantum world as mere window decoration, background noise for the neurotically charged interpersonal relationships that form its true narrative interest. No fan - or casual viewer - of Nolan's films will be much surprised by the concerns he elaborates in his script: man and woman as sorrowful bearers of each other's burden; male friendship as a minefield of sexual tensions and repressed power relations; ego as a force that propels the human being towards his obsessions, and the need to share them with others.
In a way, the story of Oppenheimer - a brilliant and insatiable man in his desire to be recognized for his brilliance, pushed into sentimental and political isolation by the way this desire consumed him - encapsulates these obsessions like no other Nolan has found so far. Consciously or not, the filmmaker understands this and finds in this film the opportunity to bring all these concerns to the surface, to turn into disturbing sex scenes what were previously "only" inferences of disturbance, to express his Oppenheimer's fixation on a world that only he sees through intermittent inclusions of cosmic landscapes accompanied by oppressive synthesizers.
Not even in the movie where he literally put his characters inside the heads of others (Inception), did Nolan allow himself as much expressionism as in Oppenheimer. It's true that, at that time, he didn't yet have an editor of Jennifer Lame's caliber at his disposal - it's in her stitches that the new film takes a poetic form previously elusive for the filmmaker, connecting images and disparate periods of the protagonist's life to create thematic rhymes not always exact, but invariably efficient. Oppenheimer is much more a felt film than a thought one, and seeing Nolan groping through the dark path of his fixations in this looser way is honestly exciting.
The aspect of the story least well served by this approach is the political, of course. Always elusive in his philosophy, Nolan seeks in the inconsistent alliances of his protagonist a way out to justify the dubious thinking that has always characterized his "political" films. It works in the sense that Oppenheimer engages with the terrifying possibility of destruction and violence much more directly, due to the nature of the great deeds of his biographee, which gives more impact than usual to the platitudes Nolan is willing to assume (the atomic bomb was really bad, people!).
It doesn't work, on the other hand, when the film dances around symbolisms to avoid blaming the American military complex for the use of the bomb, hiding behind human minutiae (fear, paranoia, thirst for power) that fail to explain the inhumanity of the act they caused. Cillian Murphy does a reflective and visceral job that begs us to understand, but not sympathize, with Oppenheimer's mistakes; and Matt Damon is excellent as the wolf in sheep's clothing who works to undermine the genuine interests of the protagonist while posing as his ally, hiding in the bureaucrat's facade a quiet exercise of concrete power, perfectly capable of crushing the symbolic power of science.
In the way they construct this dynamic, the duo of actors sends a much clearer message than the film itself seems willing to send. Oppenheimer is much more solid, finally, as an extrapolated aesthetic-therapeutic exercise in film than as message-cinema, manifesto-cinema, or even spectacle-cinema. But here's the good news: if you came here for Nolan - the real Nolan, not the one manufactured by the gatekeepers of prestige and Hollywood money - it doesn't get more Nolan than this.
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