Oppenheimer (2023)

 

Christopher Nolan makes complex films, with complicated story about conflicted characters. It’s no surprise that he chose to make a film about the Father of Atom Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, controversial figure in history. I wouldn’t say that Nolan is no stranger to controversies, he had mostly been in the safe territory and in fact, have been steadily gaining fans, some fierce defender of his complex, abstract and sometimes confounding works.  Yet, Controversies have already started, especially on whether the character has been lionized, and the use of that verse from Bhagavad Gita.

Yes, that verse: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of world”.

Offended many Hindus, it did. Well, let me say having brought up in that culture (they call it Sanadhana Dharma, though my birth certificate says I am a Hindu.) I have understood in the early days that Hindus are mostly very “open minded” (yes, the quote marks are very intentional) and have been taking punches, kicks from those belonging other faiths with smile and blood trickling down their lips (like Rajini in Baasha).

But as I grew up older, there’s this whole generation of folks who went on to gleaning and garnering “facts” and pointers from books and other mediums (yes, medium here also refers to some dudes who do a lot of sitting around and spouting philosophies that usually never get challenged by the so-called followers, who would jump to another guru as soon as the offer is a lot more appealing to their self-ish needs).

So, I was surprised that Hindus got their knickers twisted over this. My parents are Hindus, my brothers are Hindus, I know friends who named their pets Hindu names, instead of the usual Johnny or Whiskers and we would least be affected by a filmmaker who made films about a man dressed up as a bat,

I digress. The use of the verse, ticked many off by those whom I believe have digested the Bhagavad Gita in its entirety. I have only read the Tamil version of Mahabaratha, and that moment was probably in Act 4, scene 35.7b, and I missed it. Damn me for being an insufferable fool for having not taken note of that.

But I watch the film as a fan of the medium, for the entertainment value more than the messages, the jibes against non-religion religious folks, and it worked for me. The presentation was immense, the experience derived from it is something that will stay with me a long time.

It is an experience and I watched it in an ordinary theatre, and would be seeing it on IMAX next week, hopefully. It is very talky, yak, yak, yak and Nolan is, I am afraid, not David Mamet or Quentin Tarantino, for that matter, in the dialogue department. It can frustrate you when you can’t penetrate the words exchanged throughout the three hours runtime, and Nolan knows that. This is where the man also remembered the rest of us poor semi-literates.

The music. The background score was there almost all of the time. I have complained about how this device was overused in Tamil films (with exception of those scored by Ilaiyaraja, who knew how to play with silence too). But here, the music helped us to understand the gravity of the situation. I bet Nolan was telling Ludwig Göransson, who also composed Nolan’s Tenet, “Dude, suspense here….more suspense there….intolerable suspense for this scene”. His previous collaborator Hans Zimmer may have been hiding under the bed when Nolan came looking for him for Tenet, if you know what I mean – how much suspense can that poor German born composer take.

Nolan, clearly a contender for best Hitchcock’s “visual participation shtick” heir after de Palma, also got himself a bevy of heavyweight casts and none of them disappoints. Robert Downey Jr finally gets to kick himself out of the comic book world and prove why he had always been in the A-List for a long time (remember Chaplin, yeah, he knows a biopic when he sees one), and Mat Damon gives a welcome presence, as, at least, we get a bit of humour from him.

And Cillian Murphy. What a casting coupe, to use the cliché. He has always been around, usually in the second class carriage in the train of Nolan’s casting, and this time he was pushed forward as the leading man. It’s as if, Nolan had been waiting for this film to happen to finally give Murphy that break. And the actor never wasted a single moment. If you have watched the clips of actual Oppenheimer you can tell that, though Murphy does not look like him at all, but he nailed the stoicism with that glazed eyes, staring over the horizon. He’s almost in every scene and he commands attention. I send a message to a friend saying that this is an Oscar bait film, and especially in the acting department. Murphy, RDJ and the (sigh, this is frustrating) completely unidentifiably Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman. I have said that before, the latter should be banned from any award list…he’s too much for the competitors, leave them alone willya Gary?

The presentation. The one film that came to my mind for comparative purposes, not that it needed that, was Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), the biopic of a much maligned historical figure. It is not so much the character but the way the story was told, jumping from flashbacks to flashbacks, use of colour, grainy images that Stone has known for deploying to keep the audiences at the edge of the seat. Here, flashbacks are told in colour and the contemporary setting in colour. This is not exactly path breaking story telling technique, it has been done before, but Nolan was again being kind to us. With the story jumping from past to a nearer past, then back to present, the switch of colour among others really helps to keep us on the page.

The cinematography has always been Nolan’s biggest strength and he doesn’t fail us here. It glides through from one moment to another, to that explosive section two thirds and yet kept us firmly interested as the following proceeding could have bored the heck out of the attention impaired.

This has to be the movie of the year, as I gauged even before the trailer was released. There’s something about the subject and the director’s credential that told me that this is gonna be huge. And it is. It’s gonna garner lots of notice come awards season next year. The whole Barbieheimer “fight” was not for nothing. The heaviness of one complements the simplicity of the other, and the filmmakers of both films were sporting enough to play along with the “competition” and by the look of it, both films are really reaping lotsa moolah it in… and most importantly, bring more and more folks back to the movie theatres.