No Movie For Old Men

I saw Oppenheimer the other day. I hope to recover in a few weeks. My eyes and ears are still jangling. The higher the decibels the more pity I felt for the filmmaker, Christoper Nolan. Apparently, he didn’t believe in his own movie. Why else pulverize us with hundreds of decibels over and over. 

Somewhere in the third hour the visuals of the beautiful, horrific, fiery, mushroom burst appeared yet again but this time without sound and I cheered silently from the depths of my battered being. I had a vision of Munch's screaming woman running out of the theater.

Notably lost in his assault on our senses was any depiction of the human toll of 150,000 incinerated Japanese civilians plus others dead from the radiation. He couldn’t find room for that in this three-hour biopic made into a genre movie. The subject has multiple tributaries but melodrama is not one of them. Perhaps  it is better told as a documentary.

The face of Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) showed torment throughout yet his anguish was a given and I cannot recall any dialog to support it. For those whose knowledge of history doesn’t reach that far back I would imagine much time was spent trying to sort through the needless editing cuts. The movie begged for continuity. Instead, we were served a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces.

The side show of Louis Strauss was a red herring; an inconsequential drama of petty revenge. Somehow it became the centerpiece where it didn't belong as anything more than an asterisk in history books. Nolan lost his way.

That episode served only to take us out of the claustrophobic room where Oppenheimer’s name was being muddied by cold warrior congressmen. Even there the overblown bombast had the whiff of bad theater. 

Am I alone in feeling that amplified music is intrusive to one's sensibility? Nolan, I submit, would do well to trust the power of understatement. 

The magnitude of the event is not well-served with magnanimous cinema. The subject matter is both large and small. Too small for a director of blockbuster movies. I don’t want my block busted.  And it is too large for him to master obliquely, so that nothing was revealed other than what was already well-known.

There is certainly another story to be told of those days when the Cold War had its beginnings. Let it happen in the hands of  another filmmaker who doesn't feel it necessary to literally create a seismic shift in order to evoke an upheaval in geopolitics. 

It needs to be said, with all its flaws, the movie should be seen if for no other reason than to recall those fraught times in our history. The hysteria aimed at so-called subversives is alive and unwell as it has always been. Choices made then set off a chain reaction whose ripples became waves. There is no separation between science and society or technology and the fabric of our lives. Human complexity, morality, and a vision for consequences, are some of the issues stirred by this film. They all should give us pause.

I expect I’ll hear many dissenting voices for all this suggesting pistols at dawn. My preference is water pistols at noon. I may oversleep; my ears are still ringing.