Monthly Archives: August 2023

Afire (2023): A German Summer Movie a la Rohmer

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Christian Petzold is a filmmaker I was introduced to over a decade ago, and I would consider myself a passionate fan. I’ve seen every one of his films since then, and I would gladly share him with anyone who might listen. There’s some pleasure in championing a director who’s not as much of a household name as one might hope. 

The other wonderful thing about Petzold is what an ardent cinephile he is, but he’s also quite loquacious and charismatic. Obviously, English is not his first language, but he always does wonderfully candid and thoughtful interviews all across the festival circuit. I can imagine he would be quite the person to grab a coffee with. He’s shared on multiple occasions how he crossed paths with Abbas Kiarostami in New York City under such circumstances. 

Forgive me for burying the lede, but I appreciated Afire because, like many of the director’s earlier films, it does feel like it’s deep in conversation with the vast annals of cinema. 

This one in particular feels like a paler, pudgier version of an Eric Rohmer movie. Something in the vein of La Collectionneuse, Pauline at the Beach, or even A Summer’s Tale. I felt vindicated hearing that Petzold was in fact consuming some Rohmer films during the pandemic, but that was only part of his inspiration. 

Reading an interview he cited a significant reference point for his latest effort in People on Sunday. It’s not a film I would have considered in a million years because it’s well, almost 100 years old. But in regard to this allusion, he makes a fascinating observation. 

Unlike Hollywood, Germany doesn’t have a lineage of summer movies about the last day of school or hanging out at the beach with no adult supervision. There’s also no Summer with Monica or Eric Rohmer. 

With men like Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak — all creative collaborators in People on Sunday, they were forced to leave Germany. And when they moved to Hollywood in the wake of the Nazi scourge, their work got harsher with the likes of Detour, Lost Weekend, and more film noir.

The summer had vanished not only from their filmographies but from Germany as a whole. The nation rarely got this opportunity with the ascension of the Nazis and this historical backdrop gave rise to many of the specters which have haunted most of Petzold’s oeuvre.

If you wanted to make a case, Afire is actually Petzold’s most comedic film to date and his closest to romantic comedy. Leon (Thomas Schubert) is staying at his friend Felix’s idyllic summer home out in the forest near the Baltic Sea. They think it’ll be a great place to get away: Leon needs to finish a manuscript and Felix (Langston Uibel) has an art portfolio to complete though he seems far more at ease and prepared to make the most of the tranquil surroundings. 

It starts out as the vacation from hell we might all be familiar with to different degrees. First, their car breaks down, they get lost taking a shortcut, and it looks like Leon might be stranded out at night in the forest with no cell signal. Felix goes off to make his way to the family cabin. 

Eventually, they get there. Except it turns out they won’t be alone. A co-worker’s daughter has set up shop; we don’t know for how long or why. We just know Leon’s plan for an uninterrupted getaway is catastrophically ruined. Strike two. 

The walls are thin and you can hear everything…It makes sleeping very hard and Leon’s even grouchier than he was before. The incessant bugs and the impending fires don’t do much to lighten the mood. 

Leon also seems genetically predisposed to be a moody, pretentious misanthrope of the first degree. Felix is good-natured and thoughtful. He would never think to impose himself on others or make a stink. It comes naturally to Leon. 

The camera takes on his surreptitious gaze which makes me uncomfortable as he spies on their housemate out in the yard before ever officially meeting her. Still, nothing he does can negate Paula Beer. In her work with Petzold, she always comes off as such a charming and intelligent performer who gives so much to the camera. 

Between her last film Undine where she played a modern-day mermaid, and Afire with its landscape ablaze, there’s this pervasive sense of the classical elements permeating the collaboration. It’s this lovely amalgamation of the deeply modern with the primordial. It makes one wonder where Petzold and Beer might go next. 

In the previous film, she was a docent focused on Berlin’s history of urban planning. Here Nadja works at an ice cream stand doling out flavors of “Smurf” sherbet. She’s disarmingly straightforward, cutting through any pretense. It makes her immediately attractive as a personality.

Whereas Leon’s a perpetual excuse machine. He never swims or takes anyone up on anything. He’s the kind of person you try to be nice to by inviting them to stuff even if you don’t want to, and then they decline so many times, you feel exasperated. They’re too blind to recognize you’re trying to do them a favor.  

Leon should be a lost cause, and yet even if we don’t particularly like him, we can empathize with him, and I think all his acquaintances in the movie make us appreciate him a little more. 

Later, at an open-air dinner, he lashes out at the rescue swimmer Devod. He feels like a stereotypical beefcake, and yet belies the image making Leon all the more uncomfortable. Because their new acquaintance was sleeping with Nadja, but he seems like a genuinely nice guy. These don’t have to be mutually exclusive. 

At first, Leon’s defensive about sharing his work; I recognize what a private and vulnerable thing it can be, and still, I wouldn’t give him that much credit. After Nadja asks to read Club Sandwich, he eventually relents. One suspects it becomes a mechanism to try and get closer to her and into her good graces — a way of covering his growing insecurities.

Leon’s also made a big deal of setting up time with his bespectacled editor (Matthias Brandt) to review his new work. He’s an older veteran, not unkind, but extremely busy. It turns out the full weekend they were meant to have together has been whittled down to one full day and some change. After Nadja invites Helmut to dinner, Leon grows jealous when it seems like everyone else gets a piece of him too. 

He takes great interest in Felix’s art portfolio – the one that Leon either didn’t get or totally disregarded. Then, Helmut trades poetry with Nadja; she recites her favorite poem, “The Asra.” It comes out she is working on a Ph.D. in Literature on Heinrich von Kleist’s The Earthquake in Chile (What she terms the “quake of representation”). 

Leon’s pettiness feels like a symptom of his own making. He knows Club Sandwich is crap. Nadja was honest enough to tell him as much. But he tried to dismiss her criticism; she’s only an ice cream seller. 

He never thought to ask her about what she might be studying. And now with the recognition that not only is this girl better looking than him but also perhaps smarter as well, it’s more than his fragile ego can take. 

Everyone else seems casual and comfortable, enjoying the throes of what summer has to offer. He’s the only one in obvious crisis, slowly imploding until the world around him joins in. 

The fire which was always hinted at continues to rage ever closer. Ash falls over their world like a ruinous dusting of snow. The boys go to tow their car with a tractor. Helmut starts to convulse on the lawn and Nadja takes charge to rush him to the hospital.

I noticed one particular jump cut in the editing involving Leon. He realizes he’s made a huge mistake; he’s been selfish and incapable of doing almost anything. What’s more, what will Nadja think of him? 

The raging conflagration brings with it human tragedy that strips away any remnant of sun-soaked vibes and focuses our story on its purest elements. As we should expect, it goes darker, but there’s another turn in the story. Our perspective changes subtly.

Nadja and Leon are called into the hospital again. There’s pensive voiceover narration to go with the images, and we realize intuitively even as the actions happen in front of us, somewhere in the present or future Leon is writing a new novel. 

I’m led to question if it’s still callous that he seems to be writing the story as the events seem to be happening or is it the most authentic thing he’s ever done? I’m not sure.

Later, he sees Nadja again from a distance. Some time has passed. We’d like to think he’s changed, and we know he’s wracked with guilt. Their eyes lock in recognition. Petzold cuts before there’s anything else, and it feels like the quintessential ending. We can fill in the rest with whatever we want.  

I’m still trying to get my feelings in order, but it delivered like Petzold always seems to. It’s deeply observed and engaging with its perceptive vision of humanity and interpersonal relationships. But what makes it richer comes with how the writer-director takes a simple premise and simultaneously imbues it with all this intertextual meaning. 

His references are not always overt, but couched within his stories are the echoes of his nation’s films as well as literature and mythologies – many of his projects over the years have been adaptations of much older work. In our current age of cursory knowledge and vapid fads, he’s a refreshingly thoughtful filmmaker. I’m still holding out for that coffee someday, preferably at Berlinale. 

4/5 Stars

Past Lives (2023)

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A version of this review was published on Film Inquiry.

I’ll admit that in our modern world and hyperactive lifestyles full of constant distractions and competing spectacles, I’m thankful I was able to watch Past Lives the old-fashioned way. I sat there in the dark with other strangers uninterrupted by the chaos of the day. It was an uneventful weekday after work with no baggage or preconceptions. And I sat there prepared to imbibe what it had to offer.

The movie is the epitome of contemplative, meditative cinema. In a different context, under different circumstances, I can see the spell of the movie being neutralized and the surrounding chaos. As is, I was met head-on by what it had to offer.

The opening scene almost feels like a mini Godfather moment a la Gordon Willis. The golden hue of the lighting, the camera slowly moving toward a subject in the foreground as voices offscreen speak so we can hear them. It’s a brilliant device to set up the scenario. A male and a female voice chat back and forth. They’re people watching from the opposite side of a bar as a Korean man, a Korean woman, and another white man sit together in quiet conversation. What a strange trio they make.

It’s true that in such moments there are so many stories you could draw up to try and justify the scenario. Celine Song takes an entire movie to explain it to us. The heart of her story opens with two young kids in South Korea. They’re competitive when it comes to their grades, always dueling between being 1st and 2nd in their class. Hae Sung makes Na Young cry by beating her out one day, but regardless, they always walk from school together. They haven’t quite figured out what romance is, but there’s a closeness between them. They’re fast friends.

However, when her dad decides to immigrate overseas, “Nora” must relinquish this friendship for whatever the future holds. In camera, we watch their diverging paths as they trudge their separate ways. She will go first to Canada, and then America to seek out her dream of winning the Nobel Prize. He will stay behind in Korea.

Song’s use of time is self-assured and brazen. She’s loose and elastic with it bravely allowing her story to cut 24 years into the past before fast-forwarding 12 years and then 12 years again. But these jumps in time feel subtle and right with the perfectly applied sense of space and context. We never feel like we’re being rushed. The elliptical nature of a single cut is imbued with so much power.

They reconnect by chance 12 years later, thanks to Facebook, and rekindle a friendship over Skype. This specific moment in time feels intentional. Long-distance friendships or even relationships are hampered by the shoddy technology. What we have now cannot totally replace in-person interaction — we all know that — but it’s lightyears ahead of what we had even 10 years ago.

Nora’s life is taking her into the literature circles of New York including a writer’s retreat for up-and-coming talent. He is attending a good school in Korea. They’re amazed to see each other: they’re changed and yet nothing has changed. If you’ve ever had a similar experience you know this paradox to be true.

Song conjures up this idea of In-Yun or destiny which infuses Korean culture and implies something between people in their past lives together. In modernity, it might only be utilized as a pickup line, but for sincere, starry-eyed lovers it might just carry some weight and lend a sense of comfort. Any interpersonal connection may apply.

There is a sense that Hae Sung and Nora are in their very specific orbits and they are not prepared to fight the inertia around them. Nora takes the first step and asks to stop their online rendezvous. It’s too painful to live in the uncertainty with little hope of change. She takes a leap of faith in her career meeting fellow writers with similar ambitions. One of them is named Arthur (John Magaro). Their orbits are leading them in the same direction and so eventually they get married.

Lying in bed together having one of those late-night conversations on the edge of consciousness Arthur asks her one of those what-if questions about where she ended up. She responds matter-of-factly, “This is my life.” She seems satisfied with that. Her husband admits something else to her. Sometimes he hears her talk in Korean while she’s sleeping. It’s heartbreaking to hear him admit that she dreams in a language he can’t understand…It’s not wrong nor does it mean they can’t make their way together, but it matters to him. Because he wants to know her intimately. It’s important to him.

I have issues with Lost in Translation, but there is something about that film that sticks with me — the loneliness and malaise — as much as the Tokyo streets I dearly love. As best as I can describe it Past Lives, is born out of this same tradition. There’s a delicacy and dignity to these people. It could bend so many directions — choose so many roads — and in the end, somehow it chooses the bravest one.

In another film, in another world, maybe in a past life, there could be a passionate love affair between two people who seemed to be destined to be together. These are the stories our culture seems to eat up because they make us feel good and vindicate our desires to live out our best lives — the lives that make us feel the most validated regardless of others. Or it could be a sordid melodrama where the Korean couple cross time and space and the white spouse is cast off like the cultural patriarchy readily pulling them apart. The movie wryly acknowledges this narrative trope. Of course, none of this is true.

Past Lives foregoes all of these ideas while simultaneously tapping into the longings many of us have deep in our hearts and still allowing them to play out in meaningful reality. It feels true and right, like things are meant to be. We can see this story occurring naturally with genuine people. And the emotions engendered feel beautiful.

Of course, 12 years after they broke off their internet relationship Hae Sung finally comes to the U.S. — to New York. Ostensibly it’s for some rest and relaxation, but everyone knows his only reason for being there is to see Na Young again. Their reunion is pregnant with all sorts of import, and they visit the Statue of Liberty together surrounded by a sea of couples. Just imagine how it is when he finally meets the man Greta ended up marrying. Uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to describe it. There’s so much more here.

I could write a whole exploration of code-switching and cross-cultural communication, international dialogue, and subtitles in film. However, I will only say Past Lives replicates the joys and genuine struggles of existing in this world in-between cultures and languages.

Greta Lee is such a phenomenal conduit of this drama, and she takes every scene with a self-assured composure full of warmth and feeling. Teo Yoo has a forthright candor morphing from a boyish heartthrob to a man still grappling with unresolved feelings.

John Magaro could easily be a whiny-voiced annoyance — the white evil of the movie — and yet it’s a credit to his humanity that we like him and even empathize with him (especially if we don’t speak Korean like this viewer). It’s almost like we’re there sitting at the bar in what feels like a private conversation that we don’t understand. It feels a bit awkward, but there can also be a connection there. If you will, it’s in-yun.

Nora cries at the end of the movie. Her husband takes her in his arms as they walk back up the steps to their apartment. The perceptiveness of this moment cannot be simply attributed or articulated. I don’t have the capacity to totally explain what emotions have come to the fore. All I know is that they are there. It’s perplexing, but in the way I like my movies to be.

In Lost in Translation, I’ll never know what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johannson. Here we’ll never know what could have happened or why she’s crying exactly. Maybe she doesn’t even know herself. But living out that ambiguity feels key and ultimately true to the human experience.

We’re always looking to discern what our future will be. Religious people question God’s plan for their lives. And often we have the nagging thoughts of what-ifs and how things could have been. Perhaps I’m the only one who thinks like this. But Past Lives seems to suggest this is not the case. I’m still mulling over the movie, but I’m glad I saw it. Hopefully, you will be too.

4.5/5 Stars

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Nevers, and Casablanca

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“Like you I know what it is to forget.”

Recently I’ve been meditating a lot on the impact of the atomic bombs in part because of the resurgence of the life and work of Robert Oppenheimer; he will be inextricably tied to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for posterity’s sake. Thanks to Alain Resnais’s film, Hiroshima and Nevers will always have a connection in the minds of cinephiles everywhere. 

Although I have walked the streets of Nagasaki and been to the memorial museum there, most of what I know of Hiroshima is gleaned from John Hersey’s journalistic account. The documentary footage from this film never ceases to scald my senses. I have to avert my gaze when the images grow harsher than any horror film imaginable. 

Hiroshima, Mon Amour gets much of its thematic resonance out of filming in Hiroshima itself because it comes with an abundance of inbred meaning; it will be ground zero of devastation and a beacon of peace for perpetuity now, ever since that day on August 6, 1945. 

This lays the groundwork for the film’s first half as we consider Hiroshima – the images primarily being juxtaposed with two bear bodies of a couple intertwined. 

It slaloms so effortlessly through time and space like few films before or after. Although as it progresses, the way the film and its characters are set adrift by the editing is increasingly unnerving. This in itself feels honest to where our characters find themselves. 

There’s something rhythmic, repetitive, and still poetic about their questions and responses conjured up by the voiceover penned by Marguerite Duras. It builds this contrast between the French actress filming an international movie in Hiroshima and the Japanese Architect that she’s having an affair with on-location. They only have one day together before time and space will pull them apart, potentially forever. 

In truth, once you know a little bit more about Resnais, it gets harder and harder to separate his film from this kind of relativism of the age where truth seems to be subjective and everything we seemed to take for granted before, from absolute truths to morals, seem to have totally eroded around us. 

Even with this perplexing development denoted by Resnais’s fairly oblique style, brought to even greater fruition in Last Year at Marienbad, it’s hard to discount the swaths of beauty in his film. And if it is mostly an agnostic film, one cannot totally dismiss this point of view in a world coming to terms with carnage and the brutality of the atomic bomb. Because this disillusionment does have an amount of warrant, arguably more than any other time in modern history. 

The movie becomes this roving portrait involving a want of intimacy and closeness in a world ravaged by so much pain and suffering. Is it any wonder that in the post-war years plagued with the atomic threat, the world hit its baby boom. Couples coming together to start their nuclear families as a balm to the hysteria in the world at home and abroad. 

They both say they are a happily married man and a happily married woman, but even this I read almost ironically seeing the connection they form. If they are culturally worlds apart, somehow they share in the same traumas of a post-war, post-atomic generation coming to terms with all that entails. 

He has the specter of Hiroshima to contend with and she was castigated for loving the enemy during wartime: imprisoned, her head shaved, while also seeing her lover die in her arms. They’re different experiences and still share something endemic to both their realities. Thus, they gladly share a real-world romance on the edge of the apocalypse as time is slipping away from them. For now, they have tangible passion and meaning that they can caress in their arms. 

There is a passage in the movie that felt reminiscent of the jaded pessimism of the ancient wisdom literature of Ecclesiastes: 

He: Maybe it’s possible for you to stay.
She: You know it’s not. Still more impossible than to leave.
He: A week
She: No.
He: Three days.
She: Time enough for what? To live from it? To die from it?
He: Time enough to know which.
She: That doesn’t exist. Neither time enough to live from it. Nor time enough to die from it. So I don’t give a damn.

There’s a fluidity to the night and their relationship as the clock ticks and they know they will be pulled apart. Eventually, they make their way to a late-night cafe called Casablanca. The name carries with it all these connotations: Rick & Illsa, “As Times Goes By,” “La Marseillaise,” and even bits of your favorite dialogue.

Of course, one of the finest remembrances is “We’ll always have Paris.” Nothing can strip these memories away from the Casablanca couple regardless of sacrifice. Somehow there’s something honest about Hiroshima, Mon Amour in that it recognizes all these things are transient – these memories of love will pass away. They are already dissipating, and not as eternal as we would like to believe. 

More and more I see the shared vision of Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte and Hiroshima, Mon Amour – finding their form as part documentary, part romantic treatise. It’s the blending of the two giving them body and making them sublime. 

Here the performers also work wonders. Emmanuelle Riva has the most vibrant eyes in the cinema. They are a delight to look at in the light of the camera both glassy and at times equally melancholy. It’s her film debut and you would never know it. She’s youthful and lithe, yes, but there is so much depth to her. Call it self-confidence with the prerequisite vulnerability. 

Eiji Okada seems ruggedly handsome, but not without the capacity for gentleness. It feels as if he’s experienced an entire lifetime during the war years which in part was true. The only reason he foregoes the horrors of Hiroshima is that he was off fighting in the war with the Imperial Army. 

I read that all his French dialogue was memorized phonetically and if that is the case, although I don’t always have an ear, it came together splendidly, never pulling me out of the story. It felt real and believable to have these two people relate in such a way. 

What’s more, as someone who grew up in a culturally mixed environment, Hiroshima, Mon Amour stands as a groundbreaking depiction of a couple who plow through the societal conventions of the times.

When I watch this film it’s about so much more than the bomb. On the surface, it’s about an illicit affair that cannot be, it’s about two people coping with the fallout of war, and one woman’s struggle to hold onto her memories and cling to the love that’s still there in her life before it evaporates before her. How she cannot forget this man in Hiroshima or that man in Nevers because they are tied to emotions and specific moments in time – times when she felt something.  

Somehow it parallels what the film itself represents. Because it is a document as much as a piece of art. It came out about 14 years after the bombs were dropped. Somehow still fresh and a minor lifetime away from the fallout. These people have living memories to contend with. 

Someone like me does not and so the film is as much about these character’s memories as it is the visual representation of the film itself so we might never forget what those places represent in the cry for universal peace. 

Watching it in a theater I could sense a level of perplexity in the air. It’s not an easy film. Not everything makes sense, and there’s some troubling conclusions that you can come to. Also, one earth-shattering slap in a cafe is hard to deal with. Still, in the wake of all of this, it’s hard to reject the moments of beauty present here. I don’t think this is a mere justification. 

Rather I watch a movie like Hiroshima, Mon Amour where not everything is summed up or painted in full. We must leave with the impressions, the maddening anti-literalism of the piece that has no point-for-point attributions we can easily plug in. Nothing comes out in a nice bow nor do we get a true emotional resolution. It just kind of hangs in the air for us to consider in full.

But sometimes this hard work when something is perplexing feels all the more worthwhile because it provides something worth going back to so we might cull for something new. I’m never going to understand every grain of this film, and that’s okay. 

The distinction is having something to fall back on. When memories fade and we forget and the world seems to be fragmenting around us, it helps to have some standard or reference point outside ourselves to mediate the chaos. 

Otherwise, what’s the point if there’s no time to live and no time to die? What hope is left in such a debilitating landscape? On top of that, there’s a bomb that might just easily blow us all to smithereens. We require something more. 

4.5/5 Stars

Oppenheimer (2023)

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Being a history aficionado I pored over American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, which provided the inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s latest film on J. Robert Oppenheimer.

So many ideas were swirling around my brain when I entered the theater, but the first is obvious and it’s where Nolan begins: In Greek mythology, Prometheus took fire from Zeus, gifted it to humanity, and then was castigated for it.

Obviously, it’s easy to cast Oppenheimer as one of the most important figures of the 20th century since he was the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” but he was also one of its greatest tragedies. There’s a scale and scope to this narrative woven right into the very fabric of history.

My other thought is a far more intimate detail but equally telling. Although he spent much of his time teaching at Berkeley and Cal Tech, Robert had a deep abiding love for the wide-open New Mexico territory where he kept a ranch and often went horseback riding. It was the first time I realized that Los Alamos and the outpost for the Manhattan Project was not some arbitrary place chosen by the government. It held such deep ties to who he was as a human being and what he held dear.

American Prometheus is a vivid and fascinating historical tome, but one can imagine the difficulties in adapting such a massive work. Nolan comes at it ferociously turning the historical details laid out before him, into something unequivocally cinematic.

A whole movie could be borne on Cillian Murphy’s face and it is. Between his vivid eyes, gaunt contour, the porkpie hat, and pipe, there’s something instantly iconic about him. He’s haunted and profound even before he says or does much of anything.

It’s dizzying watching Nolan develop the rich world around Oppenheimer packed with substance — a real world of real people and events we get to experience firsthand. This immediacy is key and although I’ve read the book, I don’t think you’re required to keep it in your back pocket.

The movie creates a complex constellation of relationships. These include important people in his life personally like Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and his future wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) or his intellectual heroes such as Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) living before us. I appreciated how we are thrown into his existence without true introductions or pretense.

He also punctuates the drama with mid to minor cameo parts taken on by notable actors like Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Gary Oldman, and Rami Malek. This punch of celebrity does yeoman’s work in creating recognition in his audience regardless of historical knowledge.

Oppenheimer’s early life comes whizzing by us with so many stimuli and swirling jumps in location and setting that it feels like the cross between a globetrotting action movie and the roaming panoramas of late-period Terrence Malick. Nolan trusts the audience and expects them to pick up the pieces.

What differentiates Nolan’s work from his source material partially comes down to the visual flourishes at his disposal but also the ingrained structure he uses to mold it to his own vision. He effectively creates a narrative tension between fusion and fission as denoted by the alternating scenes of color and black & white framed by the two contrasting hearings.

The director has noted Amadeus (1984) among his reference points for his latest project because it is a character study functioning in a kind of duality. Mozart’s exasperating genius is framed by the point of view of his rival Salieri. Albeit our “Mozart” feels far more sympathetic, and our “Salieri,” well, you must make up your own mind.

Nolan does something narratively brilliant by providing us Strauss’s perspective juxtaposed with our protagonist. Lewis Strauss was a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and played a crucial role in Oppenheimer’s government clearance being stripped in 1954.

I read the book and despised Strauss as well as the prosecutor Robb (Jason Clarke) because of what they had done to Oppenheimer. But Nolan for a time strings me along even with this pre-existing knowledge so I begin to empathize and even get inside the interior life of this man. The doubts set in. Perhaps I misconstrued the facts as I remember them. He’s not all bad.

And yet when the vindictive pettiness that was there the whole time comes out again, it was somehow a shock and also an affirmation of everything I thought this man to be. Still, Nolan was able to encapsulate and still obfuscate this strange dynamic between these two men.

Robert Downey Jr. also must be given credit in a role that relies on his acting chops more than his wry charisma. I’m not always a fan of actors aging into roles like this, but I’m sure he’s going to surprise more than a few folks in the audience.

As the movie hurtles toward the apex of the Trinity test with the race against the Nazis at full tilt and Oppenheimer shouldering this massive project alongside General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), we all know innately where we are going. These moments speak for themselves. I wouldn’t dream of trying to distill this suspended moment in time with a few inadequate lines. You must contend with it yourself.

However, with all that happens in Oppenheimer, I’m still trying to figure out if the structure works exactly because we spike with the Trinity test and still must witness the hearings and Oppenheimer’s gradual martyrdom.

It certainly maintains a breakneck pace that kind of overwhelms you in a way that’s never boring. The lengths of scenes, the cross-cutting, and the non-linear jumps through time and space are probably the writer-directors greatest attributes.

Ultimately the meeting between Einstein and Oppenheimer that Strauss only caught the tail-end of becomes a kind of lynchpin moment plucked out of time. In some ways, it does feel like a continuation of Dunkirk and Nolan’s deep commitment to the manipulation of time. Chronologically this is relatively early in the story and yet he somehow builds it to be the beginning of the end exploding into our current modernity.

There they stand on Princeton’s campus together meeting again. Oppenheimer reminds his elder of his biggest fear: That the construction of the bomb would conceivably set off a chain reaction destroying the world.

“What of it?” Einstein asks.

Oppenheimer responds, “I believe we did.”

It’s a sobering ending as nuclear imagery engulfs the screen once more. Because as an audience in the 21st century, we must reckon with a changed future imparted to us by Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Although the atomic bomb didn’t actually blow up the world as some feared, it birthed a reality in the wake of The Cold War and McCarthyism hysteria we are still coming to terms with today.

The film feels more grotesque and shocking than I’m accustomed to in Nolan’s oeuvre or perhaps I just blocked out the grimmer corners of his work. He’s certainly not squeamish about the darkness.

When “Oppie” is beset by a gymnasium full of cheering people and the horrors building up around him or he faces interrogation and his intimate trysts with Jean Tatlock merge and all but play out for everyone to see, I was perplexed, even disturbed. I didn’t want this and I go so far as to say I didn’t need the explicit nature, though Nolan probably has his reasons.

I’m not sure if it can be hailed as his magnum opus, but in some ways, Nolan has done the unthinkable by making a potentially stodgy historical piece into a gripping blockbuster. In the age of superhero movies, studios have mostly assumed historical genres are dead. Likewise, by shaking up a prosaic biopic form, the director alights on something that’s narratively audacious even when it falters.

That’s why he’s remained one of our most beloved filmmakers over the last decades. He makes big movies for thinking people, and if nothing else, I hope Oppenheimer acts as a clarion call for more thoughtful tentpoles in the industry. The audience seems to be more than rewarding his efforts.

4/5 Stars