How I Fell Out of Love with Christopher Nolan

As a lifelong film fan and movie-goer, Barbenheimer weekender represented something special. Event Cinema, a cultural moment, a must-see. And not just one film, but two. People in fancy dress, packed screens, with everyone talking about it both online and in person. My wife and I did the full Barbenheimer, with Oppenheimer on Friday night followed by Barbie on Sunday (so not quite a double bill, but close enough).

Both non-sequel, original stories directed by household name directors. Huge box office numbers followed, with both films attracting different but overlapping audiences. So for film lovers, for cinema as an art form, for the box office, a brilliant event.

I’ll leave any comments on Barbie for another time, but Oppenheimer… my wife and I didn’t like it… at all. We seemed to be in a massive minority on this one, but we stand by our opinions.

I’ll go into that in a moment, but for me, it represented more than that. I came out of Oppenheimer with absolute certainty that I was completely done with Christopher Nolan.

First, Oppenheimer

For me, this film was a mess. So much was stuffed in — so many story lines, characters, motivations, historic events, meetings, moments.

For me, Oppenheimer was actually three films crammed into one:

• A deep psychological study on how a person’s soul deals with something like creating the atomic bomb. How does a man of science, of discovery, personally navigate his conscience when his discovery leads to the immediate death of thousands, and a forever changed world?
• A Rashomon-style courtroom drama centered around Lewis Strauss, where the various individuals tell their stories of the Manhattan project from differing perspectives, with Oppenheimer’s public legacy being the thing the viewer is grappling with.
• A film about smart people doing smart things, against a clock. Think The Martian, Hidden Figures, The Social Network, The Imitation Game. Just very competent people working together against some big ol’ challenges, and working through them.

Any one of these approaches would work on its own, and would allow the film to be cut by about 45 minutes and give everything a bit more room to breath. None of these approaches are bad, and plenty of films have worked choosing on of these angles. But we got all three, and it felt like a blended mix grill smoothie.

The moment that drove this point home for me was a big one (spoilers) — Oppenheimer hears the news of an old flame Jean Tatlock, who ostensibly committed suicide. Their relationship was complex when they were together, and now he’s married to Katherine “Kitty” Puening, but has been having an on-off again affair with her. She’s was also a communist, a movement that Oppenheimer also had a complicated relationship with. He’s also in the midst of the Manhattan Project, in a race against time to build the atom bomb before the Nazis. Upon hearing the news, he has a complete breakdown. He goes AWOL, and ventures into the desert of New Mexico which he knows from his childhood. The Manhattan project has lost one of its key leaders. His wife Kitty knows him well enough to know where to look, so she gets on horseback and sets out to find him. She does so, finding him in a heap, in a fetal position next to a rock. She has to snap him out of it, and get him back on track, leading the project and keeping focussed on the war. She does so successfully, and the project gets back on track.

And how long does this news, breakdown and repair have one screen? Maybe 4 minutes. The whole thing is crammed into such a short space of time, that if you were in the bathroom at that moment, you’d never know it had happened. It is never mentioned or referenced again. All those complicated feelings of guilt, loss, reflecting on what’s important, mental fragility — over in the blink of an eye. Back to science speak.

In another director’s hands, this might have been one of the most important moments in the entire film. In Nolan’s, it’s perfunctory at best, ignored in favour of long, detailed conversations about the atom bomb vs. the hydrogen bomb.

Nolan didn’t pick a direction, he picked ALL the directions. The last 45 mins in particular felt like a whole new film had booted up — a political thriller in the McCarthy era of communist witch hunts. A twisty tale with characters we’d barely seen up until 2 hours and 15 minutes into the film, with the biggest moments waaaay behind it. I had no idea what Robert Downey Jnr’s character name actually was until afterwards.

This was the main problem I had with the film, but it was by no means the only one. A lot of the things I didn’t like, Nolan does time and time again.

Now, Nolan

Undoubtedly, Christopher does some things really well.

• He has a commitment to practical sets and effects that is wonderful in a era where the norm has become to throw it at an underpaid and overworked VFX team. Sometimes, he makes real sacrifices to make this a reality.
• Actors seem to love working with him. The casts and performances he gets, without exception, are excellent.
• He is committed to telling original stories and uses his fame as a director to make this happen. They perform well enough at the box office for him to continue doing this. In an age of sequels, adaptations and comic books dominating the big screens, this is laudable.
• He can put some spectacular stuff up on the screen, the black hole from Interstellar, the Jumbo Jet heist in Tenet, and explosion in Oppenheimer, all breathtaking.

So far, so good. But there are a few habits he has that also really really bug me.

• THE SOUND MIX — first famously rearing it’s head when the Dark Knight Rises trailer came out and literally no one could understand what the hell Tom Hardy was saying, they did ‘fix’ this one, and by fix I mean make it 85% unintelligible instead of 100%. And every film since then, I’ve missed dozens of lines of dialogue because the choice of sound mix was just all over the place. The first briefing on the ferry in Tenet? No clue. Maybe two dozen lines of dialogue in Oppenheimer, lost forever. I don’t even understand the artistic motivation on this one — realism?
• Dialogue that’s expository and on the nose, and with some big iffy lines. Pretty much every time Michael Cane turns up he’s about to deliver a paragraph or three of exposition. But there’s also some big duds. Take this from the Dark Knight Rises:

Bane- So you came back to die with your city.

Batman- No, I came back to stop you.

So many open goals missed here. ‘No, I came back to live with it’ or ‘Your cult will die. My city will live’ or ‘Yes, but not today’.

• A lack of rounded, human-like female characters. This is a big one, and is becoming increasingly inexcusable. His female characters are shallow, one dimensional husks of their male counterparts, with little screen time and even fewer recognisably human characteristics. I challenge you to say more than a couple of words about any female character in any of his films.

These last two are summed up in Tenet, which was almost the breaking point for me.

Elizabeth Debicki’s character has a son, who she loves, and who she tells people she loves a lot. And that’s about it for her character. When informed about the macguffin/doomsday device, these two lines of dialogue actually take place when talking about its potential impact:

“Everyone and everything that’s ever lived destroyed instantly. Precise enough?”

“Including my son.”

Cool cool, we had no idea up until now that a) you loved your son you barely ever mention it and b) you needed to say aloud that the words ‘everything and everyone’ also include your son, who you love, very much.

How Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt managed to do promo for Oppenheinmer with a straight face, I’ll never know. They are both sensational, and just given the roles of ‘naked communist side piece’ and ‘drunken wife’ respectively. Emily does get one good scene, but her screen time is on par with the amount of time the bomb explosion gets.

And now my big one.

I feel like a lot of directors want to leave you with a feeling when you leave the cinema.

For Spielberg, it is often a sense of wonder.

For Taratino, its a sense of cool.

For Nolan, I think he’s desperate for you to come out thinking that he is clever.

Not that the film is clever. That he, the director, is clever.

With Oppenheimer, I feel he was desperate for me to understand just how much research he had done, and how he understood the underlying theory of how atom bombs work. That he has a PHD in McCarthy era politics, but also can recite American Prometheus off by heart. He can’t seem to do a shit load of research and then decide not to show off that he knows it by focussing on a small aspect of a much larger story, and give it room to breath and land and be felt by the audience. He needs you to know how smart he is and that he knows his shit, and that he understands everything that is going on, even if you, the audience, don’t.

I can imagine this fictional conversation happening back when he was pitching Inception:

“Hey I’ve got this amazing idea. How about we make a film about stealing ideas from within the dreams of someone else”

“Wow, what a concept!”
“But in this, we’re not stealing anything, we’re planting an idea, so its a reverse heist”

“Okay cool — so we’ll need to explain that”

“But wait, there’s more. Sometimes the dream won’t be enough to plant the idea, they need to go deeper into the psyche, so we’ll have dreams within dreams”

“Oh wow, that’s, okay, sure, I guess that could work”

“Wait, there’s another level down too, so a dream in a dream in a dream”
“3 Levels? And will you show each of these in turn?”
“No, simultaneously, and they’ll be another level down after that”

“Christopher, we get it — reverse dream heist, please stop”

“No wait, I haven’t even got the bottom yet, there’ll be a final level down below the dream in a dream in a dream in a dream, called Limbo, where you can get stuck sometimes”

“Good god, stop, please stop”

“It’s simple really, a reverse dream heist that takes place in a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, with a prison limbo at the bottom”.

“Why Christopher, we get it, you’re a clever gentleman”

Do any of the layers apart from the dream and limbo really add anything to the story? Nope.

The same happened with Tenet. A machine that can reverse the flow of time is a really really great idea, but Nolan not only reversed time once, he had character reverse, then unreverse, then reverse, then unreverse an uncountable number of times until you have no clue how many times the protagonist has done this. Why? What did those recursive reversal add to the film?

The final big gunfight in Tenet also showed some ‘cool’ stuff — a tower both exploding and being reassembled at the same time, but I was so fucking confused about the whole thing. I had no idea who was shooting who, and couldn’t identify any bad guys. Or characters I cared about. But how CLEVER was it.

He reminds me of writers that work with a thesaurus on speed dial. Swapping out words and phrases for longer complex ones even when it doesn’t serve the prose. Imagine if Dickens wrote this:

“It was the optimal instance of temporal presence, hitherto the most inferior of subjective presentism, it was the finite duration of circumspection, hithertofore the functional period of utmost folly, theretofore the epoch of unsubstantiated avowal, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Electromagnetic Radiation, it was the season of absence of visible wavelengths, it was the spring of optimistic fortuitousness, it was the winter of disconsolateness.”

It’s complexity doesn’t add, it detracts and distracts. I also think it makes people think they should say that they like it, because if they say they don’t they might be accused of not really understanding it.

The Problem of being too successful

I feel like my problems with Nolan have always been there, but in the past they have been tempered. Over time, with continued success, it feels as if Nolan films have become more Nolan-y.

He’s not alone.

Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Michael Bay, Taika Waititi, George Lucas, Wes Anderson, James Cameron, some later Martin Scorsese films. All directors that I believe reached a certain point of success, and started to gain more control of their work, and a larger and larger belief that the closer the end product came to their vision (and their vision alone) the better it would be.

But there’s a problem here. Filmmaking is an immensely collaborative exercise by necessity — hundreds, sometimes thousands of people come together to make something creative. But this isn’t a bug, its a feature. It’s something great, and can be harnessed. Much of the crew will bring years of expertise and opinions to help realize the vision for the film, and when a group comes together and collaborates effectively, magic happens. Star Wars, famously, was a steamy trash fire on its first cut, with the post-production team performing miracles on what could have been dead on arrival.

This is the inherent power of creative collaboration. The isolated creative genius is perhaps one in a billion. The vast majority of great creativity takes more than one person, and requires the ability to listen and build on each other’s ideas, and often have spirited disagreements on direction. Collaborative creativity can temper an individual’s worst instincts, and double down on their best ones. When all of their instincts are indulged because of prestige, influence, power etc, you may get a purer version of their vision, but you’ll also get Taratino’s ludicrous running times, Michael Bay’s vomit inducing editing, and visually stunning but forgettable Avatar films.

Teams are better than individuals at large complex projects. Films are exactly this.

I don’t hate Nolan, and love that a director can pull people into the cinema. I just wish he’d let those around him temper his worst instincts. And I wish, above all, that he would get the message — we get it Christopher, you’re really fucking smart. Now make a truly great movie.