Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan in 2023, is nearly as great as everyone has been saying, especially in terms of acting, direction and all aspects of mise en scène. But it has two noteworthy problems that rather irreparably hobble what is otherwise a strikingly impressive piece.
As screenwriting “ticking time bomb” story devices go, this one has the tickingest and bombiest in the canon of dramatic historical thrillers, or arguably in the history of cinema itself. Robert Oppenheimer, portrayed outstandingly here in an exquisitely sensitive performance from Cillian Murphy, is responsible for leading the team that must beat the Nazis in a race to develop an atomic bomb. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and they are more compelling for Nolan’s painstaking historical verisimilitude and thoroughly convincing sense of period accuracy.
But after Oppenheimer and team accomplish their goal of outpacing the Germans and the U.S.A. drops the big one(s) on the Empire of Japan, history leaves Nolan, Murphy et al with a narrative conundrum. They have no choice but to try to scare up a dramatic third act out of questions about Robert Oppenheimer’s political loyalties and attempts on the part of contemporaries to destroy his career and reputation that emerged amidst the tension and paranoia of the Cold War. While these are by no means uninteresting topics, what this amounts to cinematically is a third hour of a three-hour film consisting almost entirely of people talking around tables in various conference rooms and government chambers.
As people-talking-to-one-another cinema goes, I found the last act of Oppenheimer less involving than, say, My Dinner with Andre or Locke, to cite the first two such talkies off the top of my head. Nolan does make one remarkable contribution to the genre: during a sequence depicting a tense and history-altering meeting that involves Oppenheimer and others whom he has reason to distrust sitting around a lavish hotel table, Nolan introduces the ingenious visual metaphor of an opulent decorative plant in the middle of the table that keeps getting in the way of everyone’s respective lines of sight and needs constant and still-ineffectual rearranging. This subtly induces for the viewer the feelings of uneasy miscommunication, of influential people figuratively and literally talking past one another, that Oppenheimer and his illustrious but sometimes doublespeaking colleagues engender in this scene and throughout the picture.
My other complaint is that a necessary scene at the very end of the film, in which Oppenheimer gets his belated recognition from his country and a tacit apology for the shitty treatment he received (and to some degree invited upon himself) after World War II, requires a number of the great actors in Oppenheimer including Murphy and Emily Blunt to be done up in old-person movie cosmetics. Frankly I would have thought that we could expect this practice in studio filmmaking to have advanced by now, especially under the auspices of one of the medium’s premier visionaries (which Nolan unarguably is, even if most of his films these days fail to cohere into something more than the sum of their arts). The old-person makeup just doesn’t work as well as I would have liked in this scene, as well as I needed it to in this critical denouement so as not to be so distracted by how the actors look that I couldn’t appreciate the narrative significance of the moment.
So, all that being said, while I think Oppenheimer comprises two-thirds of a brilliant movie and is very much worth three hours of one’s full attention, I now keenly understand what Jeremy P. Bushnell meant when he obliquely told me that “Oppenheimer is Nolan’s Mank.”
Speaking of Gary Oldman, his brief appearance as President Truman in Oppenheimer, especially taken alongside his performance as Mank in Mank, is still further proof that there appears to be no sort of role Oldman can’t excel at as an actor. His several minutes of screen time are another worthy reason to sit through Oppenheimer in its entirety, even the less-interesting last act.
The Mysteries is a 2023 picture book with a story by Bill Watterson and pictures by John Kascht and Bill Watterson. Watterson’s seminal newspaper strip Calvin and Hobbes is one my favorite works of art ever and is a significant part of why I am a working cartoonist today. Nevertheless I find myself wonderfully enthused by what a departure The Mysteries is from his newspaper comics work, characterized by a grave, contemplative narrative tone and quiet visual aesthetic situated hauntingly somewhere between German expressionism and a claymation diorama. Watterson retired in his late thirties as the author of one of the best comic strips in the history of the medium and has the financial security to remain the dignified, hardworking and intensely private individual he’s always been, so when he raises his head over the cultural parapet to issue new creative work, one needn’t be surprised when it possesses the weight and gravitas that The Mysteries does.
I’ve read through this book thrice now to see if I have a grip on what it’s about, and I’m still not entirely sure I do. I think I’m close, though. As Watterson wrote in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, a “political cartoon does not have to have labels written across everything, or make its point with a sledgehammer,” and that sentiment seems useful for grappling with The Mysteries. Like all good works of art with a message, The Mysteries manages to exude meaning without debasing itself as propaganda: the “point,” such as it is, is not given greater prominence than the elegance and craftsmanship with which it is transmitted.
That point, which blossoms methodically throughout and looms spectrally over the book’s last several pages, has to do with fear of the unknown and the subsequent hubris that eventually results in thinking that we humans have decoded the various “Mysteries” of this universe in which we suffer and strive. As a fable, The Mysteries has a sage and knowing reverence for all of the things about life and existence that we don’t yet know and will never run out of opportunities to investigate if we choose to play our civilizational cards right; as allegory, The Mysteries appears to have a head-in-hands exasperation and contempt for the current vogue for political bullshit artists, populist loudmouths and our seemingly limitless human capacities for boredom, narcissism and self-obsession.
Names needn’t be named to get a rough feel for the types of present-day figures and over-evident pitfalls of human fallibility to which The Mysteries has just barely enough patience to allude, and Watterson is too disciplined of an artist to limit the appeal or scope of his work by taking sides in any screechy controversies du jour. Watterson and Kascht would seemingly be relatively unbothered and contented if we could all stop wanting to know everything or pretending we already do and, in the immortal words of Iris DeMent, simply “let the mystery be.” What makes The Mysteries a fine piece of latter-day fable-making is that its concluding note, satisfying and soul-chilling in equal measure, suggests that whether we fear and/or belittle the Mysteries of existence matters not at all. Mysteries have always been fine with or without us, and whether or not we utilize them to destroy one another or ourselves won’t change that.
But then again, it’s possible I have The Mysteries all wrong. Hopefully if I read it more I’ll begin to understand it less.