Hiroshima, non amour

Ticket Stubs #9: Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is back in the news, which reminded me that I didn’t like it, which in turn reminded me that I didn’t like his “Interstellar” either.

Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #9, and comes a mere 17 months after Ticket Stubs #8. (I love writing about movies above all else, but it doesn’t pay the bills, hence the gap.)

Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan, 2023

Interstellar

Christopher Nolan, 2014

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James Cameron, who is in pre-production on an adaptation of the Charles Pellegrino book Ghosts of Hiroshima, recently told Deadline that he considered Christopher Nolan’s treatment of the subject ‘a bit of a moral cop-out’.

The Avatar director says Nolan ‘dodged the subject’ of Japanese suffering in 2023’s Oppenheimer. Amid the laudatory wave for that title, there were flotsam and jetsam of inanity from Bluesky-addled sociopaths. The movie doesn’t give due deference to Imperial Japan. (What a wee shame.) The movie is all about privileged white men. (It’s actually about a group of Jewish men building a bomb originally intended for the country that was marching Jews into gas chambers.) The movie fails to centre the experience of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (I refuse to collude in the trafficking of the verb ‘to centre’ into the grammar of grad school psychobabble.)

This third objection, the one Cameron is voicing, is morally compelling but dramatically incoherent. Harry Truman’s decision to atom-bomb two Japanese cities, though it prevented further killing on a much larger scale, was nonetheless a premeditated act of mass murder. A necessary evil, but an evil all the same. It has no place in Oppenheimer, however, which is a movie about the man who birthed the bomb and the birthing process. Beyond the searing white flashes Julius Robert Oppenheimer imagines at the point of impact, Nolan doesn’t tarry on Japanese suffering, and nor should he. That is its own movie, not a day or two of filming to check a politically correct box.

No movie could adequately tell the story of Oppenheimer, the development of the bomb, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the human toll that day, and all the other tolls taken in the eighty years since, or at least no movie could do so without rivalling the running time of Heimat. When Cameron accuses Nolan of dodging the subject, what he is really saying is that Nolan should have had a different subject. Which is not to say that Oppenheimer isn’t a flawed movie. For one, it’s far too long. Not Heimat-long, of course, but more than is necessary. Oppenheimer runs to 187 minutes. In 2022, the median length of the top ten movies at the US box office was 138 minutes, so Nolan is pushing it. There are scenes — entire sequences, indeed — that would have benefited from being shot differently or not at all. If you can’t tell your story in ninety minutes, it’s a book, not a movie. There is leeway with a biopic, and especially a good one. Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982) ran to 191 minutes, Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992) 202 minutes, and Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) a bum-numbing 227 minutes. Even so, Oppenheimer lingers longer than it needs to.

A surfeit of self-indulgence in the editing bay is the least of Nolan’s sins. The movie’s chief flaw is reverence. The director compiles a forensic account of Oppenheimer’s life, a rendering of the man and his work that has a documentarian’s ambition but lacks a dramatist’s insight. As the anguished, pipe-smoking genius, Cillian Murphy is an impressionistic encyclopaedia of the subject, capturing every tic and foible, but he does that thing Meryl Streep does when she portrays public figures: a pinpoint impersonation that presents the subject as a composite of established facts, plausible suppositions and reported behaviours, amounting not to a performance of a character but an objectification of a persona. He takes the mythos of Oppenheimer and enlarges upon it, so that instead of a flesh-and-blood person we get an archetype, the tortured genius too decent and conscientious for a corrupt world.

In treating Oppenheimer in such grand terms, Nolan distances us from his hero. We never get to the real Oppenheimer: the director is too busy building up his martyr to let us glimpse the man. This is a movie that allows us to see its lead in his birthday suit but seems to want to keep him away from us otherwise. This weakens the picture considerably. When Oppenheimer deposits his son with family friends, the scene carries all the emotional resonance of handing a bundt cake in next door. Oppenheimer is too in love with its genius to let him be anything else.

The movie suffers in particular from its need to exonerate Oppenheimer of communist sympathies. A string of scenes are allotted to explaining that Oppenheimer was a progressive, an anti-Nazi, a supporter of democratic republicanism in Spain — but not a communist. It’s a futile exercise, not least because Oppenheimer very likely was a communist at one point in his life. In Brotherhood of the Bomb, his 2002 book on the men who worked on the Manhattan Project, the historian Gregg Herken credibly accused Oppenheimer of having been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, based on his researches. The futility goes deeper than that, right into the confused soul of the movie. In its determination to prove Oppenheimer wasn’t a red, Oppenheimer grants oversized significance and unearned legitimacy to the process by which he was stripped of his security clearance. It was a traumatising experience for Oppenheimer, the security apparatus to which he sacrificed his moral reasoning turning on him with bureaucratic vindictiveness, but the movie becomes captive to a plaintive proceduralism that saps its dramatic force, even if Robert Downey Jr. is rivetingly villainous as Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s McCarthy. Nolan has made a three-hour movie about one of the most consequential men of the twentieth century and one of those hours is about his access to filing cabinets at the United States Atomic Energy Commission.

Only in a rare light moment does Oppenheimer handle the red issue deftly:

GROVES: You’re a dilettante, womaniser, suspected communist—

OPPENHEIMER: I’m a New Deal Democrat—

GROVES: I said suspected.

Groves is Leslie Groves, an Army engineering chief who oversaw the Manhattan Project, played here by Matt Damon. It’s a modest role, one of those supporting parts Hollywood creates for Damon when it wants him in a picture but doesn’t want to put him in the lead. Because Damon struggles to give a bad performance, these side gigs tend to make bad movies tolerable and good movies better, and his brusque, crew-cut contempt for Oppenheimer’s pious handwringing leavens some of the devotional stodginess. Another solid performance comes from Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, a conservative-minded physicist who respects Oppenheimer’s genius but disapproves of his radical politics and disregard for authority. Hartnett has worked hard to escape his late-Nineties heartthrob reputation and while he doesn’t half pick some stinkers Lawrence is a role that falls on the right side of the pensive/brooding fault-line in his acting style.

Even when a Nolan movie doesn’t wholly work, there is still much to admire in its visual storytelling. Here atomic particles and sound waves splash and crash across the screen, and a chromatic line is drawn between official narratives, typically depicted in greys (e.g. the AEC proceedings), and dramatic re-enactments based on the statements and writings of those involved, which glow with sincere, human colour. History is written in monochrome but the truth contains many hues. Nolan is so eager to light his moral savant in authentic colour he neglects the black and white facts of his life.

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Interstellar is that film where Matthew McConaughey is stuck behind a bookshelf. There’s more to it than that, quite a bit more in fact, but that’s how I distinguish it from The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015), which starred Matt Damon, who has a supporting role here, and Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), another science fiction head-hurter release around the same time.

Before we get to the multidimensional Barnes and Noble, first we must meet McConaughey, who plays Joseph Cooper, a NASA scientist turned farmer who lives in a dystopian future in which life on Earth is becoming impossible, and so he travels through a wormhole to find a replacement planet, then everything goes wrong and he ends up shouting at his daughter through a row of hardbacks.

The daughter is Murph, which is a stupid name for a girl, and is short for Murphy, which is still a stupid name for a girl. Played by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn at various stages of her life, Murph starts out bratty, becomes tolerable and by the finish up is endearing.

I tried to like Interstellar on its release. Nope. Tried again this week. Nuh-uh. I’m not the intended audience for a movie like this, in that modern science fiction is too much like homework. I don’t mind that a lot of research goes into a screenplay like this; I mind that it all ends up on the screen, preening in its cleverness. It’s a movie for the sort of person who got to the word ‘wormhole’ above and tutted: ackshually, it’s a tesseract. Sci-fi pictures should be dumb fun — hokey plots and hokier sets. If I need an advanced degree from MIT to get your movie, I’m not going to get your movie.

That’s very much a minority view but I hold many minority views when it comes to movies: most musicals are annoying, Tom Hanks is dull and unlikeable, and The Godfather Part III is underrated.

Interstellar also suffers from a heavy air of deja vu. The movie doesn’t just invite comparisons with Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997), it sends out embossed RSVPs. Interstellar: A jaded scientist, Matthew McConaughey, travels through a wormhole in search of a new planet to sustain human life and is eventually reunited with an elderly woman said to be his daughter. Contact: A jaded scientist, who is dating Matthew McConaughey, travels through a wormhole in search of life beyond this planet and is eventually reunited with an alien said to be her father. And Interstellar doesn’t even have Jodie Foster going for it.

Many directors suffer from talentless studio executives or opinionated investors forcing cuts on them that hurt their movies. Nolan suffers from no one being willing to frog-march him into an editing booth, log him into Avid, and barricade the door until he turns in a rough cut somewhere south of two hours. Interstellar is 169 minutes and while there is much on the screen to take the viewer’s breath away, there is only so long you can watch Matthew McConaughey yelling in an intergalactic library.