Oppenheimer and Nolan as a Historical Filmmaker

It took me a while to find something meaningful to say about Christopher Nolan’s latest, and one of his best films, Oppenheimer. As made obvious in the previous statement, this is not because Oppenheimer is a bad movie. Far from it, this biopic slashes the inspirational successor of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s The American Prometheus is easily Nolan at his best. Oppenheimer ranks up there with Inception, Dunkirk, and The Dark Knight as one of my favorite Nolan experiences I’ve had.

(Image credit: Entertainment Weekly)

That’s probably not a surprise to anyone. While Nolan’s most recent film before this one – TENET – was a conceptual success masked by an implementational failure, something about the story J. Robert Oppenheimer just screams a sweet spot for Nolan. The fact that it is a biopic means it’s grounded, but the story behind the man is complex enough to give Nolan an intellectual playground. In the end, everything works out. Everything you expect to be great about Oppenheimer is great. The nuclear bomb scene is a cinematic spectacle; the story-telling is deliciously non-linear; and the performances, especially that of Cillian Murphy, are amazing and quite frankly, Oscar-deserving.

That said, there is also nothing immediately surprising about this movie. Nolan’s trademark greatness is there, but so are his weaknesses. He struggles with writing female characters in complex and interesting ways. He gives them agencies, so they are not objectified – but not quite enough agencies for them to stand as interesting characters (the absolute waste of Emily Blunt is quite infuriating). Nolan does not or fails to, interrogate the complex interpersonal relationship surrounding the titular characters. While he finds great visual expression of abstract concepts and philosophies, when it comes to emotional outbursts and dramatic convergences (such as those surrounding Robert Downey Junior’s characters), he relies on straightforward dialogs.

(Image credit: The Mary Sue)

In Nolan’s legendary body of work, these problems have felt less like problems and more like limitations. They can often be overcome by powerful elements in his films, which he as a director undoubtedly enables. Most obviously, the lack of emotional expression through a visual medium is made up of amazing performances. If Robert Downey Junior’s dialogs are way too straightforward and the scenes surrounding his character a bit drier relative to those surrounding Oppenheimer’s, the MCU veteran makes it up by giving the most captivating performance he’s given in years. Cillian Murphy is great at conveying complex emotions. Looking back at Nolan’s filmography, you find great actors expanding on the basic concepts Nolan gave them, most notably Heath Ledger as the Joker.

Nolan has been described as a highly pragmatic director. His rise from an obscure indie filmmaker to a global star who can count on studios to throw millions at him to make non-IP original stories with expensive technologies like IMAX seems to be the result of his efficiency with budget and with actors. He is a director’s director, and he allows actors and other coworkers – composers, and cinematographers – to show their talents. In other words, Nolan allows his limitations to be filled in by others.

In doing so, Nolan has an extremely confident stride in his storytelling. Understanding his limitations, he allows himself to tackle highly complex premises and pick projects that work best for him. And increasingly, it seems Nolan has found a niche in the expert telling of historical stories.

Historical films have a, shall we say, controversial atmosphere to them. History, as a subject matter, is almost always antithetical to storytelling – at least history as accepted by the current post-modernist academia. You can’t tell a historically accurate story with too much drama unless, of course, you make it very clear that that is the intention. And indeed, in films like Jackie, that is the intention. And Jackie is an amazing historical film. Or you go into the dramatic and the inventive, like Hamilton. Again, in that musical, there is no pretense of objectivity.

It is hard to make a subjective historical film that is self-aware and makes meta-commentary on itself. Still, it is far easier to embrace the theatricality than to attempt to ride the line between fiction and documentary. Indeed, the pretense of objectivity has allowed some documentaries to outright bend the truth.

In this sense, it is more honest to make your film so antithetical to the truth that the audience is left questioning the narrative. For instance, Jackie uses the framing device of an interview with Jackie Kennedy herself and has a scene where she edits what the journalist is writing after the interview. That scene signals to the audience that they are watching a very biased telling of the story. Or in Hamilton, where again, the key concept is “who lives, who dies, who tells your story”. And of course, we all know the founding fathers weren’t dancing around and rapping.

With Nolan, however, his love for immersive cinema is so high that he doesn’t seem to work well with meta concepts. The one time he tried this – naming his main character “the protagonist” – it failed miserably. He likes to play with the concept of storytelling but still lets his audience be immersed in another reality (For more on this, watch Nerd Writer's incredible analysis of The Prestige)

Therefore, Nolan opted for a different approach. He presents his film as objective but strips it of the more dramatic elements of story-telling. Sure, there are moments of emotional turmoil and conflict, but it is often one of the more obvious emotional beats. The point is, that he never tries to pass judgment on his characters and the situation and leave them opaque.

Therefore, in his telling of Oppenheimer’s life story, Nolan’s trademark opacity to characters works to his benefit. We never understand the inner heart of Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer, but that seems intentional and appropriate for a person defined by contradiction and paradoxes. J. Robert Oppenheimer is an intellectual with a complicated past, whose invention has shaped and continues to shape the history of mankind. Any attempt to understand him beyond his observable behaviors seems too momentous a task.

Nolan finds an amazing actor to play this role. Cillian Murphy understood the assignment. He focuses on the most basic moments of drama to convey complicated level emotions. Oppenheimer in this movie gets frustrated with bureaucracy, becomes fascinated with scientific discovery, and becomes haunted by a relationship of which he seems to have taken advantage. But none of these dramatic points cumulate in any particular moment to create a gist for the character. Indeed, the meaning of Oppenheimer’s life is a mystery, and all other aspects of his life are incomplete jigsaws. Murphy’s eyes always hint at a deeper answer, but never reveal all of it. That is why this is an Oscar-worthy performance.

The fact that Oppenheimer’s life never cumulates into a single moment of revelation is also important in the sense that it allows Nolan to play with narrative subversion. Switching events around has long been Nolan’s M.O., but when used in a biographical film, it takes on a new life. Nolan makes Oppenheimer’s life fragmented and difficult to understand. In this sense, he grasped upon a historical truth of a sort – that there is no grand narrative to any given life. He makes his audience into historians who must try to piece together a man’s life and draw out its implications.

Nolan’s unique talent as a historical filmmaker has been revealed before, specifically in the film Dunkirk. That film, I recall, was one of my favorite films from Nolan when I first saw it. It provoked an intense debate between my friends and I. The argument against the film has always been that there is no character progression, no one person to which you can latch on. But I find that to be precisely why it’s an excellent historical film. The main character of Dunkirk isn’t any single character, but the event that is the invasion of Dunkirk.

(Image credit: The New Yorker)

Likewise, the subject of Oppenheimer is strictly J. Robert Oppenheimer, but rather his life, seen through a patchwork of documents. The main character in Nolan’s historical film is always us. We are the historians, presented with bare facts and concepts, not deeper emotions. Those are things for us to find on our own.