Immediate thoughts on Barbenheimer
Part I: Oppenheimer
(Spoilers ahead—although I don’t know if I can techincally spoil a biopic)
Alright, today we’re doing Barbenheimer (not back-to-back, thankfully) and I wanted to get some thoughts down before I forget my initial impressions. Oppenheimer was first.
The Good:
Acting: On the whole, I thought the acting was very strong from the entire ensemble cast. As much as I don’t generally like their ouvres, Robert Downey Jr. and Matt Damon did a fantastic job as Lewis Strauss and Gen. Leslie Groves respectively. And, of course, Cillian Murphy was wonderful as Oppenheimer. Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh were also quite good, but, frankly, it didn’t feel like they were in the movie enough to flex their acting talents as well as they do in other films. Emily Blunt has a wonderful scene in the third act during one of the security clearance hearings, but, on the whole, her character was pretty underdeveloped and amounted to “chronic drunk.” The rest of the ensemble cast was also quite good and enjoyable to watch (honorable mention to Jack Quaid, playing Richard Feynman, just going nuts on the bongos).
Practical Sets, Effects, and Sound Design: I’m not actually sure how many of the special effects were practical and how many were CGI, but, in my book, not being able to tell is a good thing. Of course, some of the fanatastical scenes were obviously CGI, but I suspect that a lot of the explosions were real, and the set design and costumes (which were not CGI, of course) gave the whole film a real weight. One really gets the feeling that they’re seeing what the places looked like, how people dressed, what the nature of their work looked like, and so on. It’s easy to buy into the world of the movie and that’s always a good thing.
I also thought that the sound design was great, and, in particular, I thought the repeated use of the foot-stomping/train-gathering-speed motif was used very effectively. I thought that small bit was so good at bringing to mind both the idea of a chain reaction which starts out small and builds up to something exponentially larger and larger, and the idea that once events are set in motion, they can take on a direction and magnitute of their own beyond our intentions.
Another part where I thought the sound design was really effective was in the scene where Oppenheimer tells the team that the bombs have been dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the majority of that scene all the audience can hear is Oppenheimer’s words while the raucus sounds of the celebrating crowd are purposefully muted. However, at one point—and as a way of highlighting Oppenheimer attempting to process his trauma—a single scream comes through just briefly. The effect is immediately frightening since one can’t immediately put together whether what they heard is a scream of joy or a scream of agony.Moral Ambivalence/Central Message: There’s a lot of really, really dumb Twitter discourse over the most superficial elements of the film and its ethical implications. I’m not going to comment on that other than to express my continued surprise at the incomprehensible (to me) desire for people to see sterilized one-to-one representations of their own moral vision in film. Rather, I want to briefly say that I thought the central moral message of the film was done quite well.
The first thing to note in that respect is the development of the tension between so-called “Great Men” and “The Cunning of Spirit” frameworks of understanding history. On the one hand, the film hits hard on the fact that the Manhattan Project would not have proceeded the way it did if Oppenheimer didn’t take a part in it. Maybe it still would have continued in a similar fashion under someone else’s direction, but the film makes it apparent that a lot of the way in which it did proceed was due to the choices that Oppenheimer made. On the other hand, it also makes it abundantly clear that the choices that were made were ones made in the context of much bigger forces operating in the background and which no single person or persons could stand. This isn’t exactly breaking new ground—this is an old trope—but I thought the dialectic here was quite nice.
The second thing that I thought Nolan did quite well was show how one can get, as it were, “swept up” in something strictly through a kind of inertia. As an illustration, I have in mind the scene set during one of the hearings when the proscutor is grilling Oppenheimer about his moral objections to the Hydrogen bomb and how that’s at odds with his having no such objections to the development of the original atom bomb. The scene does a great job in convincing the audience that there’s something odd about this change of heart in a way that doesn’t absolve Oppenheimer of any blame or engender any deep sympathy for him (did he not help pick out the targets for the original bombing?!), but which nevertheless plays on the fact that we’ve been following him through the process and have, subconsciously, at least, been invested in his success. In a way, we can understand (without endorsing, of course), the moves he made in the process to distance himself from his “leftist leanings” and to be brilliant, and that tension is brought to a head when, at the moment in which he is trying to do “the right thing” (i.e., limit the further development of nuclear technology), we are reminded of just what that means concretely. The connection that we’ve built with Oppenheimer qua protagonist is exploited nicely at that point in the film to produce some real tension in the audience.1
The Bad:
Editing/Pacing: The editing of this movie is abysmal—everything is crammed in so quickly and so much ground is covered that one gets the feeling that one is watching a super long movie trailer or montage for the first two hours. I was yearning for an extended conversation or something to slow down the pace of the film and give some space for character development to happen, but it just didn’t. I supsect this is an artifact of the movie’s already massive runtime, but it wasn’t good. To be fair, the pacing ends up working for the third act of the film when it becomes a kind of tense legal drama, but it was really bad in the first act and pretty bad in the second.
Some Just God-Awful, Corny Writing: I can’t remember all of these examples, but there were quite a few parts in the film that just had me rolling my eyes and groaning. The one that sticks out as the most eregious offender, however, is Murphy and Pugh’s first sex scene. After having a really tortured (though mercifully brief) conversation about Freud, Pugh picks out a Sanskrit copy of the Bhagavad Gita, opens it to a random page, and while stradling Oppenheimer mid-coitus, makes him read it to her. The line he reads? You guessed it: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”2 Barf! There were a couple of other moments when things were so melodramatic or on the nose that it felt insulting, but, as I mentioned, I can’t recall them precisely. I had the full expectation that at one point Cilian Murphy would look straight down the barrel and say “I, J. Robert Oppenheimer, am a complicated fellow!” I guess, on the whole, Christopher Nolan isn’t known for his stellar writing, but it was really apparent in some of the dialogue in this film. That, coupled with some of the over-the-top melodrama (c.f., poisoned apple, throwing glasses, Emily Blunt’s drunk antics) was just too much for me.
On the Whole:
3.5/5 (and two bags of soda). Really strong third act, decent second act, abysmal first act. Strong acting, pleasant to look at and listen to, some interesting psychological exploration, but, on the whole, nothing to get super worked up about.3 Didn’t regret seeing it, won’t see it for a couple of years.
I don’t know how much this needs to be said, but I don’t have any sympathy for the developers of the atomic bomb, nor do I think that the dropping of that bomb was anything more than an act of terrorism perpetrated by the American government in order to send a message to the Soviet Union. I also think that the interpretation of Nolan’s film as lionizing or honoring these folks, though not without grounding, is perhaps the thinnest, and most boring critique available. I also think that the tension I mention is completely lost on someone who is so pure of heart as to exclusively focus on that critique.
That quote, for what it’s worth, is, I think, deeply misunderstood by most people, since they think its reference and especially Oppenheimer’s use of it is supposed to indicate that Oppenheimer himself identifies with the speaker. Things are much more interesting if read within the context of the story, but that’s something I’m working on putting together. As a preview, I think it has much more to do with consigning oneself to fate and doing one’s duty than the standard “oh no, I’m responsible for people’s deaths!” More on that soon.
That being said, I’m sure it’ll sweep the Oscars.