OPPENHEIMER*****

I have found Christopher Nolan's films deeply frustrating. I regard him as our most accomplished technical film-maker since Stanley Kubrick. And yet I have serially struggled to be truly emotionally involved in his films. I admired them. I was intellectually provoked by them. But they were arid, sterile things that failed to move me or to tell me anything insightful about the human condition. 

With OPPENHEIMER everything has changed. For the first time, Nolan has trained his IMAX camera onto a deeply personal, ethical, political, sexual story of a great but troubled man.  He has given us a film that feels at times more like an Oliver Stone political conspiracy film that takes us under the skin of American history. But at the same time, he gives us images and sound design of surpassing beauty and power.  Best of all, he allows us to view it on actual celluloid IMAX film.

Nolan's film is an interrogation of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the genius physicist who ran the US government's Manhattan Project and delivered them the atomic bomb that was controversially used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  One might think this would earn him a nation's grateful respect but in the Cold War anti-Soviet hysteria of the McCarthy witch-hunts, Oppenheimer was refused his security clearance on the basis of his 1930s sympathy with left-wing causes and effectively publicly silenced. Was Oppenheimer a Communist? No. But he was a fellow traveller who donated to worthy causes that were Communist front organisations. After all, as a Jew who was funding the escape of fellow Jews from Nazi Germany he was deeply sensitive to the plight of refugees. Was Oppenheimer a traitor? No. He hated Hitler and feared what would happen if the Nazis got the A-bomb. It was Klaus Fuchs who was leaking Los Alamos' secrets to the Soviets.  Oppenheimer - even after everything his country did to him - loved it to the end.

Oppenheimer was not, then, a traitor. But he was indeed guilty of naivety and highhandedness.  He was naive about how far his celebrity would protect him from the political machine. He was naive about how far a prurient establishment would excuse his incessant womanising, not least with the actual Communist Jean Tatlock. He was naive about how far he could cover up for his Communist friend Haakon Chevalier without being seen as complicit.  

Oppenheimer was also high-handed.  Perhaps this should be no surprise for the wealthy son of first generation Jewish immigrants who grew up in an apartment filled with expensive art and who had the resources to travel throughout Europe to lear from the champions of the New Physics. For a man who could be devastatingly charming at a dinner party, he was careless of appearing rude to powerful politicians. He had no time for the Game, and Game beat him in the end.  

In this film, politics is embodied in and personified by Oppenheimer's nemesis, Lewis Strauss. Strauss was also a second generation Jewish immigrant but unlike Oppenheimer didn't have the money to study physics at university, becoming a shoe salesman to raise the tuition fees. Despite later wild financial success and political success he never lost his insecurity over this lack of formal education. After World War Two, Strauss maintained his interest in science by chairing the Atomic Energy Commission, and so butted heads with Oppenheimer.  While never publicly regretting creating the A-bomb, or its use against Japan, Oppenheimer used all of his influence to try and steer US policy toward collaboration, containment, and against developing the H-bomb.  By contrast, the pragmatist Strauss simply wanted the US to be better armed than the Soviets.

Nolan's framing device for his film are the two trials in all but name of these two men that took place in the febrile McCarthyite political climate of the 1950s. The latter is the 1958 Senate hearing of Strauss, shot in black and white, where he fails to be confirmed for a Cabinet position.  The reason?  The vindictive kangaroo court he inflicted upon Oppenheimer in 1954 when the AEC refused to renew his top security clearance, and all but accused him of being a Soviet spy. Publicly shamed, Oppenheimer public life was effectively ended. 

The vast centre of the film within this framing device is the story of Oppenheimer's life as told by him in his statement to the 1954 Gray Commission.  In this part of the film we are in vivid colour and firmly in the subjective experience of our protagonist. From young student in Europe to charismatic Berkeley professor, to impressively driven manager of the Manhattan project.  We see him trying to balance his politics with his top security cleared job, and his ethics with the need to win the war against Hitler.  This becomes infinitely more muddy when Nazi Germany surrenders and it becomes clear that the bomb will be used against civilian subjects in Japan.  That decision is still debated, and it's unclear how much influence the scientists ever really had on the politicians. But Oppenheimer's self justification went along the lines that a demonstration of the awesome power of the A-bomb would scare politicians into co-operation within the United Nations for arms control. Evidently, this was not the case.

What can we say about this infinitely complex, nuanced, moving drama? Nolan's writing is a masterclass in concision and precision. Every line is considered - every intertwining of timelines adds meaning.  His direction is masterful. Working with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema he conjures up the magisterial beauty of New Mexico; the claustrophobia of the Commission's interrogation room; the vivid abstraction of quantum physics; and the awesome power of nuclear fire.  Working with composer Ludwig Goransson, Nolan creates a sound design and complementary soundscape that is at moments tender, at moments tellingly silent, and at moments so powerful and literally awesome that it shakes your entire body.  And working with his actors, well Nolan is simply a master.

Let's start with Cillian Murphy's haunting central performance as Oppenheimer - arrogant, haughty, stubborn, guilt-ridden, hunted.  But let's also speak of Robert Downey Junior as Strauss - puffed up, prickly, wiser, harder. And then we have the balancing presence of Matt Damon as General Groves - physically intimidating, no nonsense, practical, but humane. In smaller roles, I loved the interrogatory intensity of Jason Clarke's Roger Robb; Dane De Haan's sinister precision as security officer Nichols; and a truly intimidating cameo by Casey Affleck as his superior, Boris Pash. 

For the women, well, this is Nolan's weakness. I feel that both of the female stars are given short shrift. Florence Pugh is all too brief a presence as Oppenheimer's true love, Jean Tatlock. She is reduced to being naked, demanding, capricious.  We don't see her brilliance. But we get something of her brave, troubled nature. I also think (but need to rewatch to confirm) that Nolan inserts a slippery quick shot of a gloved hand intervening in her narrative. Similarly Emily Blunt has little to do for much of the film as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty.  A brilliant botanist who resented giving up her career to be stuck at Los Alamos with the kids, Kitty is a brittle alcoholic from the start in this version of her life. She exists to urge Oppenheimer to fight back - perhaps cathartically for the audience.  And to provide a channel for our anger when he is intent on being a martyr.

The short-changing of the female characters is a minor blemish on an outstanding film that pushes Nolan from technical mastery into the realm of "complete" film-making. He is now to be considered with the true masters of cinema.  This is a film that is intellectually and emotionally provocative, that excites visually and aurally, and that showcases outstanding performances. Please try to see it on IMAX celluloid. 

OPPENHEIMER is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK and has a running time of 180 minutes. 

TENET (some spoilers but they won't deter your fun)

Try to feel it!

TENET is a return to form  for Christopher Nolan after the technically brilliant but narratively simplistic and arguably jingoistic, DUNKIRK.  He is far safer in his home territory of cerebral sci-fi and kinetic action sequences.  In TENET, the big concept is that a future scientist created a technology to reverse an object's entropy. So it's not technically time travel but it does involve people and objects (cars/guns) going backwards from our present-day perspective.  None of it really makes sense, and there's a funny early sequence where poor Clemence Poesy has to do her best Basil Exposition impression, both explaining the concept AND telling us not to think too much about it.  

Realising the danger of this tech, the future scientist splits the algorithm into nine parts - like Horcruxes or Infinity Stones -  and hides them in our present. (Why doesn't the scientist just destroy it? Who the frack knows.) This naturally pisses off vague future people, who want to find and re-assemble the algorithm and use it to wage war on the present. 

It's not a very original plot is it?!

Why does the Future hate us, mummy? They hate us for the same reasons Greta Thunburg hates us.  Moreover, they are making a massive gamble that by wiping us out they won't also make their own existence void. And so they enable a present-day Russian oligarch called Sator to re-assemble the Infinity Glove, sorry The Algorithm, starting with a piece that was hidden in the closed Soviet city where he grew up.  

Is this a spoiler? Well yes, but not in any way that should detract from your enjoyment of the film.  The real fun is in seeing how Nolan takes us and his Protagonist through his world where the action is happening simultaneously in linear and reverse time. It’s a lot of fun of seeing events replay themselves from different time perspectives, and recognising little Easter eggs laid early in the film pay off later on.  This involves hand-to-hand combat scenes and car chases where people are fighting in dual times. It's all just enormous fun and technically an absolute marvel. No other film-maker is going to literally crash a 747 into an airport hangar for you.  And the delightful insouciance of Himesh Patel's Mahir explaining this plan is presumably a meta-comment on Nolan's own audacity.  

Another reason why this film is fun is its knowing humour.  First off, we have John David Washington playing against the very notion of suave sophisticated Bond - throwing barbs about snobbery back at Michael Caine's knighted fixer.  But mostly, it's all about Robert Pattinson's Neil, who starts the film as a kind of crumpled linen-suited alcohol soaked minor diplomat but ends as something of a hero.  I couldn't resist his rakish charm, perhaps modelled on a younger Jeremy Irons?  Let's see more of this! Every time he wasn't on screen - for example a deathly dull interlude on a yacht in the middle of the movie - I wanted to press the fast forward button.

Tailoring goals.

Another reason to love the film is its intelligence and its absolute refusal to dumb down for a mass audience. And to all the reviewers out there who claimed they couldn't understand what was happening, my retort is to DO BETTER.  Nolan takes great pains to colour code the timelines and to play back scenes so that we really understand what is happening from each angle. If you don't get it, that really is on you.

That said, there are limits.  Nolan's refuses to give the protagonist a name. He's called The Protagonist. He even has a conversation with Dimple Kapadia's arms dealer about who really is the protagonist. This is the sort of pretentious wank that only literary theory students should be allowed to indulge in.

The plot is also - sci-fi concept aside - pretty hackneyed. The idea of protagonist and antagonist in a race to assemble a MacGuffin that can - da da daaaaaah - end the world - is fairly common. And even at the micro-level, the idea of a protagonist falling for a waif-like blonde abused by her evil oligarch husband is pretty well-worn. Indeed it's something straight out of a B-list Bond movie like NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN. 

I am a waif-like blonde on my abusive lover's yacht, please help!

As is Kenneth Branagh's awful Russian acc-yent.  Could they really have not found a Russian actor to play Sator? Not to mention poor Elizabeth Debicki basically just reprising her role from THE NIGHT MANAGER here.  Every time Nolan tries to make us care about the fate of her and her son, I thought, I just don't care at all. Also, if you marry a very rich old Russian dude, are you not somewhat suspicious about what he did, and what kind of man he was and is, to get all that money?  My sympathy is thin. Let's get back to cool action sequences!

Please save me from my luxury yacht - again!

Anyway, B-grade Bond plot and silly Russian accents aside, TENET is a superbly fun and twisty, technically marvellous ride. And for the first time since THE PRESTIGE, I actually CARED about the characters. Not the stupid woman and her pointless son, but the evident bromance between Neil and The Protagonist. Now there's a sequel I wish Nolan would break his no sequel rule for.

TENET has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated 12A in the UK and PG-13 in the USA. It is on release in the UK and wherever the pandemic is allowing cinemas to be open.

DUNKIRK

Christopher Nolan is a director of superlative technical skill, and his new film of the evacuation of DUNKIRK lives up to that billing.  However, in his choice to strip it of all historical context, and to keep a close-up on three sets of anonymous character tropes, he has created a film that has no epic sweep; that fails to convey the magnitude of Dunkirk; and that fails to move.  Where it works, it works because of fleeting nuanced moments of acting brilliance.  But this is no LAWRENCE and he is no Lean: he has failed to combine the epic with the personal.

So, some context, because the film gives you none. (I wonder if this will affect non-British audiences' ability to engage with the film?) We are in the early months of World War Two. Ignoring captured intelligence to German plans, French, Canadian and British and other allied troops have been lured into Belgium by a German feint and have now been encircled and driven back to the French coast. Roughly 340,000 men - the principal strength of the British army - crowded the beach at Dunkirk - a port protected by a mole, or sea wall, from which they could board the large vessels sent to ferry them back across the English channel.   In doing so, they were hugely aided by the French forces tangling up the German troops sent to cut them off at the Siege of Lille. They were also hugely aided by Hitler's inexplicable decision to order the Luftwaffe not to pursue the troops.  

The evacuation took days, and combined large ships taking people off the Mole with small requisitioned commercial vessels collecting soldiers from the shallows. All the time, the troops subject to aerial assault on the beach and in the water, and the risk of being torpedoes once aboard. The scale of the battle was thus immense - with the RAF flying 3,500 sorties and engaging the Luftwaffe in dogfights away from the beach (hence many soldiers wondering where the fuck they were) - 36 Royal Navy destroyers ferrying men home as well as the Small Ships flotilla - and c340,000 soldiers ultimately evacuated.  It was both a great military failure and a success - because as humiliating as the lost Battle of France was, it enabled Britain to survive to fight on with its men and materiel largely intact. 

Christopher Nolan makes the decision to avoid all of this explanation, and to give us a Dunkirk that focuses on the personal experiences of the war by land, sea and air.  These theatres are inter-cut but take place along different time-scales.  The land evacuation takes place over the week, although frankly days merge into each other and I couldn't keep track.  The sea rescue takes place over a day and the RAF dogfight takes place over an hour, roughly corresponding to a Spitfire's fuel limit.  I rather liked the concept of intercutting the three, and although we do get a cute crossover with the same character appearing in two of the theatres, Nolan doesn't make it too intrusive or incredible. 

Where I think his claustrophobic personal approach works best is in the air battles.  Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden play RAF Spitfire engaging in dogfights some distance from the beach. With IMAX cameras mounted on modified Yaks, Nolan takes us into the air for some quite spectacular aerial photography.  Nonetheless, the downside of this approach is that one gets the impression that the men on the ground are right to ask where the RAF are - that the scale of the aerial assault is minute when it wasn't.  I also find it absolutely incredible that a RAF pilot, knowing how desperate the British were for materiel, would risk his plane in the way that Hardy's character does.  This utterly took me out of the film. 

The sea battle is also done very well from a technical perspective.  We get a sense of the claustrophobia of being aboard ship, the shell-shock and the terror of a watery death, especially when combined with lit gasoline.  I thought the acting was by far the best in this segment.  I very much liked Mark Rylance's quiet earnestness as a civilian sailor sailing to Dunkirk with his son - the quiet communication between the two of them with glances - the profound sympathy toward Cillian Murphy's traumatised rescued RAF pilot.  And the scene of soldiers drowning under a fiery sea is one of the most memorable and rightly horrific in the film.  But I also had deep concerns with Nolan's portrayal of the naval evacuation.  He has Kenneth Branagh's Colonel declare that the Navy is only risking one Destroyer. This is just untrue. There were 36 in use! In general, his character summarises the worst of the writing on the film. He's not a character so much as a Patriotic Reaction Machine. When he gets teary at the sight of the Small Ships as Elgar floats up through the score (superbly done by Hans Zimmer), Nolan is telling us to shed a tear.  When he looks concerned at the Luftwaffe flying overhead, this is a cue for us to get concerned.  And when at the end he remains in peril to help the French, we are meant to think, ah well, this has been EXCLUSIVELY from the perspective of white male Brits, but never mind, we sorted out the French too.  Appallingly crass stuff. Still, this being Nolan, Branagh will probably get an Oscar nom for this nonsense.

Nonetheless, it is on the beach itself that this film ultimately fails.  We have small nuanced scenes of brilliance - a soldier decided to commit suicide by walking into the water - or the quietly proud smile of a Royal Engineer who has built a makeshift pier out of trucks - but there is no sense of scale or chaos. According to Nolan, the beach at Dunkirk was filled with about 3 columns of about 200 soldiers neatly waiting to be evacuated, and ducking and turning on cue to the director's megaphone. There's no fear, panic, chaos, disorder at all.  There's also no sense that we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of men.  Ultimately, then, Nolan has made a gross error.  He has given us a film that tries to convey intimacy - without ever naming a character or making a character more than a trope - and he has chosen NOT to convey the epic sweep of battle. Worst of all he has made gross historical simplifications and some outright errors that massively impact our understanding of what is happening.  And his refusal to name the enemy as the German army is simply perverse. 

DUNKIRK is rated PG-13. The film goes on global release the weekend of July 19th.

The last woman in England to watch SPECTRE, watches SPECTRE

Despite my avatar name, I actually don't like Bond. His glib superficial sado-masochistic fantasy world of spying struck me as thin soup compared to the morally murky but properly Romantic world of John le Carre. Insofar as I liked Bond, it was to appreciate the role that escapism and big brand consumerism has in all of our lives. In other words, if I must have Bond, let it be Bond - kiss kiss, bang bang - Roger Moore's arched eyebrow - absurd gadgets. And so I have struggled with Daniel Craig's Bond films, filled as they are with existential angst. They're Bond trying to be Bourne, lacking in self-confidence, desperate to show that they KNOW the very concept of Bond is absurd in our post-millennial world. Nowhere is this more obvious, nor as grating, as in SPECTRE.

THE FIGHTER - Bale is outstanding, the rest is cliché and caricature

THE FIGHTER is a good old-fashioned boxing under-dog movie, with all the clichés and genre-conventions that go with the territory. 1. You get a boxer. He's scrabbling around getting beaten up for half the film. He gets a title fight chance - there's a training montage - he wins against all odds. 2. The boxer has a trainer who is self-destructive and threatens to derail the boxer's career. But the boxer really does need him and so they reconcile before the title fight. 3. The boxer has a girlfriend. She really believes in him and protects his interests against all the liggers and users who try to derail him. It's been the same story ever since ROCKY.

In this version, The Boxer is real-life Boston fighter, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg). He's the stereotypical good guy, but hen-pecked by a manipulative, over-bearing mother (Melissa Leo) and his seven sisters. The Self-Destructive Trainer is Micky's step-brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale). Dicky used to be a fighter too, and is living off the memory of the time he supposedly knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard. Like many addicts, he's developed a charming, witty, winning personality out of survival instinct - as a crack-addict he's constantly having to charm his way back into his family's affections. Together, Micky's family put him in shitty fights, needing the money, and emotionally blackmail him from getting outside help. The Girlfriend is Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams), a feisty waitress who sits in Micky's corner, but essentially, rather than liberating him from his family, she just provides another set of commands. Coupled with its straightforward genre-convetions, THE FIGHTER has a straightforward, linear plot. We meet Micky as a third-rate journeyman boxer - see Charlene force a split with the family - only to unite before the climactic title fight. Nothing new there.

The resulting film gives us no surprises. You can predict how it's going to work, and who's going to do what. Most of the characters are caricatures. Silent, frustrated Micky. The evil manipulative mother - a far less subtle portrayal than Livia Soprano, and practically on a level with the animated Mother Gothel in Disney's TANGLED. The Feisty Girlfriend. And the performances are pretty mono-dimensional too. I think Wahlberg has been unfairly blamed for being "absent" - that's what his role calls for. But I really don't get all the praise for Melissa Leo and Amy Adams. Their characters are just crude portrayals of one-note harpies. Maybe I should blame the writing, but honestly, there's nothing demanding or insightful here. Only Christian Bale as Dicky Eklund is given a character with real depth, contradiction and development. He's a man trapped inside a delusion - a fictional character called "the pride of Lowell" that he performs for his fellow townsfolk, crack addicts and inmates. Sure he plays up to the cameras, when the HBO documentarians come to town, but he's playing up to reality too. As the movie unfolds, we see him confronted with his delusion and move towards some kind of self-knowledge. It's a superb piece of writing, and a bravura performance from Bale - as broad as the Joker in the "Pride of Lowell" character, yet also reflective and quiet as the reforming Dicky. Dicky is the real Fighter in this film - and the real emotional centre of the movie. When we see the final frame static capture of the brothers celebrating Micky's triumph, it's Dicky's face we look to. It's his triumph to have reformed, to have been let back into Micky's corner, and to have become a big enough man to allow his brother his success, and to be proud of him. Bale should be getting all the awards this season - but for Best Actor, rather than Supporting Actor.

I guess I've already hinted at what I perceive to be the weaknesses in the script - the broad characterisations and resistance to pushing the envelope. I think there are also real weaknesses with David O Russell's (THREE KINGS, I HEAR HUCKABEES) directorial choices. Essentially, I feel that Russell is living in the shadow of Darren Aronofsky in this picture. After the success of THE WRESTLER, Aronofsky was down to direct THE FIGHTER and lives on as its executive producer. A lot of the way in which Russell approaches the material seems to be "Aronofsky-lite" - a sort of pastiche of the filming style used in THE WRESTLER. It's all hand-held cameras, faux-documentary intimacy and visible grain. Which is ironic because as much as this film tries hard to capture the clothes, accents, and gritty reality of 1980s Lowell, with a script trading to high in cliché, it really could've been set anywhere. Worst of all, David O Russell bottles out of doing anything interesting with the boxing scenes, with the convenient excuse of using the HBO crews to re-create the pay-per-view look.

THE FIGHTER opened in 2010 in the US, the Philippines and Canada. It is currently on release in Singapore, Greece, Australia and Iceland. It opens this weekend in the UK and Brazil. It opens on February 11th in Portugal, Russia, Poland and Turkey. It opens on February 25th in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Norway. It opens in March in Malaysia, Lithuania, Sweden and the Netherlands. It opens on April 7th in Germany.