Fire and Ice: OPPENHEIMER

Oppenheimer is a historical epic that largely keeps the epic off screen.The war is raging, but we don’t see it. High level conversations are happening, and we only sometimes hear pieces of them. Bold-faced names walk through, but as just a string of colleagues, allies, and foils. Its enormity comes from our, and their, understanding of its title figure’s accomplishments, and how the ramifications continue to reverberate. This is all about character—how one man moves through his life and, one step after another, brings about the possibility to destroy the world in an instant. That’s heavy. The film is written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who is good at affecting a popcorn seriousness. His films—Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight, a list of some of the more imposing blockbuster efforts in recent memory—move with portent, images that land with sturdy thuds and soundscapes that simmer and tremble and rumble. He makes enveloping moods of iced surface sensation, vice-twisting tension, and looming doom. For this new movie, he’s found a subject beyond space, beyond comic books, beyond sci-fi conceits that lets his skills expand into tough terrain that matches his moods. Like Dunkirk, his other film set during World War II, Oppenheimer is seriously serious. But unlike that movie’s relentless action focus on combat and survival, this is a brooding character piece through which the fate of mankind runs, and as such carries within it a heaviness that accumulates until the entire weight of the three hour runtime lands so hard in its finality that its effect is hard to shake. The movie, like the man at its center, looks upon his mighty works and despairs.

Nolan’s approach—a cold-to-the-touch sentimentalism, or sweeping high-concept pessimism shot through with messy stuff of human feeling—is here comparable to David Lean’s epics. Like Lawrence of Arabia, we can find in this new picture a vivid historical recreation writ large and small—major, world-shaping events that flow through the intimate experiences of specific people. Here, with Oppenheimer, we see a man whose scientific brilliance got him the job of overseeing the creation of the atomic bomb. Nolan sometimes fills the screen with cutaways to swirling electrons, arcing sparks, water drops and ripples. We get the sense the film, like its subject, can see to the whirling atomic heart of things, past the illusion of so many molecules tricking us into thinking we are on solid ground. Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer with a casual confidence in his intellect. He struts around deep into his theories, but struggles with putting them into practice. He’s willing to let others check the math and do the lab work. Though a womanizer—both his wife (Emily Blunt) and mistress (Florence Pugh) are drawn into his off-kilter charisma—and able to talk his way into contact with all the top scientific minds of his time from Heisenberg to Bohrs to Einstein, he can also be grindingly aloof, and unaware of interpersonal graces. He wants to sink into the deeper philosophical heart of science. That explains how haunted his gaze grows, as the implications of his ideas’ practical import grow all the more tangible as they escape his mind and enter the world.

In short scenes and snappy exchanges lensed with vivd filmic tones and chilly glow by Hoyte van Hoytema, and set against a Ludwig Göransson score in constant motion, we see a career on the rise. Oppenheimer’s academic work is on a collision course with a war, and a need to press his research into militaristic utility. There’s momentum hurtling things along, even as we see his personal entanglements—affairs, insults, Communist meetings—are vulnerabilities that may come back to haunt him professionally and emotionally. As his talents are requisitioned by the United States government, represented primarily by a no-nonsense general played by Matt Damon, a secret desert laboratory is assembled along with a team of the nation’s top scientific minds (a cornucopia of character actors at their best, recognizable faces that serve as quick-flash characterization and memory aid to hold onto in the lengthy swirl of activity). The movie picks up even more urgency from its propulsive process there. It’s behind-the-scenes of a bomb, with trial and error and jangling nerves from competing egos and ideas. The enormity of their project’s consequences is ever-present. There’s incredible tension on all sides. They feel they must succeed at all costs. And yet, what is that cost?

Adding to the sense of hindsight, and sorrowful retrospection, is the structure. We see the story flashing back from two post-war times: in color, Oppenheimer’s attempt to renew his security clearance, and, in black and white, a Senate hearing considering for a prospective cabinet position a bureaucrat (Robert Downey Jr) who clashed with Oppenheimer. Their responses to official questions guide us into the story of the bomb’s creation, a long, clear-eyed swirl of small roles and vivid impressions culminating in a fearsome test sequence. Nolan stages several heart-stopping moments, with bomb tests and other concussive effects masterfully manipulated sound and fury. But the fire and brimstone filter into other moments as well, as the film’s period piece pleasures of documents and interrogations and tense debates are filtered through the subjective perspectives—nightmarish sequences of fearful visions, quick flashes of paranoid suspicions or haunted memories mixed in with the forward momentum of historical reenactments’ inevitabilities and the scientific method’s rigid mix of theory and practice. It’s a movie about chain reactions, both the atomic forces unleashed by Oppenheimer’s work, and also the politics and people who collide and combine to form our world, or destroy it.

The Beach Front: DUNKIRK

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a logistical triumph about a logistical nightmare. The film tells the story of one of World War II’s nerve-wracking retreats. It’s 1940. British and French forces are repelled from the mainland, trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk with nothing but the water behind them. Off in the distance, perhaps, they can almost convince themselves England can be seen. Alas, it’s so close, yet so far away, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers sitting ducks for the Nazi bombers thundering overhead and the encroaching Axis ground forces held back by Allied gunners behind makeshift sandbag perimeters. As the film unspools, the desperate stranded men look for ways to help speed up their rescue, while we know that help is on the way agonizingly slowly. Nolan’s film has something of a Hemingway spirit about it. Dialogue is terse, to the point. The narrative is in the details, the soft surf of the tides and sea foam, the oil and explosions, the eerie quiet in the air and the dirt under fingernails, the wet hair and panicked expressions betraying stiff-upper-lip duty-bound effort. Nolan, operating at the height of his filmmaking powers, marshals his resources to not so much tell any single man’s story, but to orchestrate an experience that’ll do the real stressful cacophony justice.

He shows us this war story by land, by sea, and by air. With a deft structural trick, he weaves together three distinct speeds and perspectives with which to pass through this historical moment. By land, the soldiers (like those played by Fionn Whitehead, Cillian Murphy, and Harry Styles) and their commander (Kenneth Branagh) fret and plan and hope while under constant threat of enemy fire as they await evacuation, a story taking place over a week. By sea, we find British citizen sailors called in to help speed up the transporting of the troops (an event tenderly memorialized from the homefront’s point of view in William Wyler’s 1942 classic Mrs. Miniver) because the Navy’s destroyers can’t approach the shallows near the beach. We follow one of the boats (captained by Mark Rylance) as its crew makes its way into battle with a sense of dutiful patriotism and a solemn desire to help, a journey there and (hopefully) back again that takes a day. By air, we find the air force, strategically sending a small squadron (led by Tom Hardy) to provide cover in the final stretch of the rescue effort, a crucial dogfight taking place over the course of an hour. Nolan, with his usual crisp, precise, and confident cross-cutting (think Inception’s dream layers, Interstellar’s time change, or Memento’s backwards-and-forwards design), tells these three actions simultaneously, cutting between them to heighten suspense and danger, often in clever matches – floods of water, rat-a-tat guns, grim expressions. 

By the time the stories start to intersect, weaving details in and out, allowing us to see, say, a plane crash first as a moment from above, then floating next to it with another group of character’s later. Eventually, all three storylines converge, climax upon climax upon climax, every character’s peak danger and despair in the same moment of converging crescendos. This remarkably effective structure – experimental, but completely coherent in its logic and effects – is in service of an impeccably detailed recreation. Although the characters it focuses on are sketched quickly, fictional composite stand-ins for the masses of people involved and impacted, the overall sense of fastidious reenactment gives the film the historical weight under its immediacy. This is a lean, tense true-life thriller, every moment pulsing with the unforgiving tick, tick, tick of time running out (further emphasized by Hans Zimmer’s relentlessly simmering score). Shooting on film, and full IMAX film for many scenes, allows cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema to craft shots of remarkable size and scale, with tangible texture and detailed grit, expansively filling the frame with eerie pale light, foreboding blank beaches, cavernous clear skies, and vast expanses of ocean. The men huddled against the forces of warfare are arranged in patterns and lines, formations and orders, holding steady to rules and regulations even in these desperate hours. 

These groups of men are buffeted by elaborate and concussive suspense sequences, immersive effects and booming sound design building dread out of the roaring engines of approaching bombers, the slow smack of waves against a tiny boat, the sputtering propellers of a struggling aircraft, an unforgiving howling wind whipping at frayed nerves. The individuals involved are merely part of the crowd. They aren’t given lengthy moments of backstory and exposition, or made into easy heroes and villains. In fact, the enemy remains unspoken, barely glimpsed behind their weapons of war. Nolan’s focus is on the effect the situation has on the groups of people involved under the vice grip of unceasing peril. They simply do what they must, in every moment, in hopes to see the next. This is an extraordinarily well-made, exceptionally well-crafted film of beautifully elaborate detail building a work of startling simplicity: three straight lines concluding in the same inevitable. It’s a film about process and strategy, how they hold together and fall apart under tough conditions when survival instincts kick in. It’s about how even in defeat you can find dignity, even in fear you can find small acts of heroism. Best of all, it’s an experience that’s uniquely cinematic, overwhelming in its scale and power.

Live and Let Bond: SPECTRE

For all their reliably repeated elements – tailored suits, tricky gadgets, glamorous women, outlandish villains, M, Q, and Moneypenny – the oft-rebooted James Bond movies are one of our culture’s most reliable barometers. (Or should I say they are reliable cultural dipsticks, a more fittingly utilitarian and phallic metaphor?) The series is awfully good, for better and worse, at reading the zeitgeist’s mood and reflecting our current storytelling obsessions back at us. That’s evident in Spectre, the fourth to feature Daniel Craig as 007. His decidedly post-9/11 entries have viewed geopolitical dangers with dread and a greater interest in personal demons, threats in the business of wounding a more human Bond more closely. This latest one pushes further into the postmodern blockbuster’s main interests: being grim and dark, obsessed with backstory, and paranoid about surveillance but ambivalent about its necessity. And yet director Sam Mendes, returning from the last, terrific entry, continues to find a way to make a film both derivatively modern and classically Bond. It’s a tough balance, but he mostly pulls it off.

From the opening shot – a long, unbroken one dancing through a crowded festival, into a hotel, up an elevator, out a window, over a ledge, and across some roofs – it’s clear Mendes knows great cinematography can be as good as any dazzling special effect. With Hoyte Van Hoytema behind the camera (he who is responsible for the austere beauty of films like Interstellar, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Let the Right One In), Mendes crafts a movie with not a single misjudged image. (Call it cinema du “One Perfect Shot.”) The movie globetrots with Bond as he follows a series of clues on the trail of a mysterious villainous organization. Each stop is appealingly photographed, exquisite in its rendering of bright snow, crackling desert expanses, warm Italian villas, and chilly grey London streets. Handsome, expertly constructed frames find silhouettes and reflections, smooth glass and flickering flames. The movie is as well put together and aesthetically pleasing as a luxury car, a perfectly fitted tux, or a supermodel in high-fashion attire.

The look is all well and good, but what’s happening in this artful design? Well, it’s more or less a typical Bond film, but with its recent tonal habit of sustained seriousness. The super-spy is suave and flirtatious. His boss (Ralph Fiennes), assistant (Naomie Harris), and gadget supplier (Ben Whishaw) are alternately impressed and exasperated by his antics. A slimy villain (Christoph Waltz) hides in the shadows, pulling strings on an elaborate megalomaniacal plan. The antagonist’s brutish henchman (Dave Bautista) is lurking around every other corner. And two beautiful women (Léa Seydoux and Monica Bellucci) are tough, hold valuable information, and want nothing to do with Bond until he proves just too irresistible to not make out with for a bit. The plot develops in a controlled, subdued manner, the better to hide the grinding formula, I suppose. When the action arrives, it’s tough and smashing, flipping helicopters, flinging cars, smashing planes, and exploding buildings. The best is a close quarters hand-to-hand fight aboard a train, echoes of From Russia with Love.

It’s built around a need to draw connections, not just to traditional Bond elements, but most obviously to Craig’s previous outings. The screenplay (credited to John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Jez Butterworth) brings back a character from Quantum of Solace (Jesper Christensen’s Mr. White), references the events of Skyfall (Judi Dench briefly appears in a message from beyond the spoiler), and alludes to Casino Royale’s villains. This is supposed to make its conspiracy-minded plot more impactful because we can recognize threads from the last few Bond films. I like it in theory, but in practice it’s muddy and forced, full of loose ends and plot holes. Besides, it puts too much faith in Bond as a character instead of a construct. It’s one thing to groove on the franchise’s persona. It’s another thing entirely to care about James Bond the man, especially when there’s not a lot of evidence pointing to characterization worth caring about.

Craig’s Bond is best at projecting unflappable competence and wounded backstory while never dropping the strong mostly silent type act. The movie’s at its best when it sends him hurtling into wordless action – it’s unfailingly sharply staged and thrillingly paced – or poses him in attractive tableaus against striking scenery and painterly light and shadow. There’s not much depth here, which makes it hard to care when the movie pretends there is. The characters, though inhabited by great actors, are ultimately nothing more than sparsely developed types. And the political interests are strictly unserious despite the gravity with which it frets over the double-oh’s future in the face of a digital dragnet, amounting to nothing more than an argument for ditching cold computerized snooping in favor of artisanal spying. And yet, for all two-plus hours, it basically works. The look is impressive, and it slides along seductively enough on expert craftsmanship. As a delivery device for slick surfaces and fun setpieces, Mendes and crew give you your money’s worth.

To Boldly Go: INTERSTELLAR

Interstellar is a film out of time about a man out of time. It’s set in a future world in which climate change isn’t solved, leading to food shortages, dust storms, and economic collapse. In other words, it’s our world if we don’t get our acts together. It’s gotten so bad, a highly skilled engineer and pilot like Cooper (an earnest Matthew McConaughey) has found those jobs gone, forcing him to take up farming. There amidst the cornfields he, widowed, lives a frustrated life with his kids (Mackenzie Foy and Timothée Chalamet) and his father-in-law (John Lithgow), working the land and watching the skies, lamenting the lack of opportunity not just for himself, but for his children as well. They’re doomed to work the land for a starving planet losing habitable soil by the day. His father-in-law tells him, “You were born forty years too late, or too early.” How strange to hear that said about a future person, wishing himself back in our day.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan is a man out of time as well. His brand of pop seriousness, with the likes of The Dark Knight and Inception, may be in vogue, but his insistence on un-franchised tentpoles and shooting on film (full IMAX and 70mm, no less) make him an outlier. Sure enough, he, along with brother Jonathan who co-wrote, makes Interstellar an old-fashioned science fiction tale. It’s built out of bits and pieces of major sci-fi landmarks past, with the slow build of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the workaday travelers of Alien, the matter-of-fact procedure of Contact, the trippy leaps of 2001. There’s also some Gravity, Apollo 13, and The Right Stuff mixed in. And the opening sequence even has talking heads literally reappropriated from Ken Burns’ Dust Bowl, an odd choice.

The film steadily takes its time, gets its thrills out of the power and excitement of the unknown, and finally leaps beyond its reach into an ending as intuitively satisfying as it is both literal and baffling. Cooper is recruited by one of his old bosses (Michael Caine) to join a secret last-ditch effort to save humanity by looking to the stars. The plan is to travel through a wormhole near Saturn to a distant galaxy perched on the edge of a black hole and scout habitable worlds. Feeling the weight of the doomed Earth dying fast and taking his kids’ futures with it, he agrees to embark on this difficult and potentially indefinite mission. The film, which up until this point is appealing without being gripping, achieves liftoff at the same time the spaceship does.

The scientists (Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley, and David Gyasi) joining the journey are embarking on exploration meant to resist the prevailing earthbound public sentiment to merely manage decline. No, they’re out to discover a way to save mankind, a standard sci-fi trope here done slowly, seriously, and well. Nolan takes the opportunity to find the absorbing detail of scientific exploration, the majesty of awe as all manner of cosmic phenomena drift by.

Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes gorgeous images out of the interplay between the gunmetal grey ship and the gleaming, glittering panoply of stars, nebula, wormholes, and singularities lighting up the night sky. A host of talented artists conjure gorgeously rendered effects as beautiful as anything Douglas Trumbull cooked up for 2001 and The Tree of Life. Hans Zimmer’s score makes use of a pipe organ, making the connection between swirling space and spiritual reverence, the resonances of hope and progress as a light in hopeless darkness, the cosmos a cathedral of wonder and fear. It’s a film that’s reaching, and often thrilling in that reach.

That’s all in line with Nolan’s typical interest in concept over all else. His filmmaking is interested in process and rules, in films that constantly explain their preoccupations with puzzling over magic tricks, rattled memories, and layers of dream spaces. This is narratively his most straightforward film, thrilling to the step-by-step procedures that launch our team of astronauts (plus a Bill Irwin-voiced faceless box of metal robot who gets all the best lines) towards strange new worlds. There they find moments of peril and thriller plotting, including a late-arriving big name put to great use in a twist a lesser actor wouldn’t sell nearly as well.

The screenplay’s construction is clever in its use of the theory of relativity’s stretching space travel time to tell two connected stories on vastly different tracks. First, the tense interstellar mission spanning what feels to the characters like weeks. Second, a decades-spanning story for those left on Earth, like Cooper’s kids who grow up to be Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck, wondering if their father will ever return or if he’s lost in space forever.

This is the film’s animating anxiety, not the potential end of humanity, but a broken family trying to pick up the pieces. They’re separated by time and space, in need of reconciliation and reunion that may never come. That’s the big beating heart at the core of the film, for all its spacey wonder and eventual squishy mumbo jumbo conclusion. The stars are an impressive backdrop, and the tense spaceship maneuvers and equation crunches are gripping outgrowths of, moments as simple as a father weeping while watching his children grow up fast from afar. The people in the film are representations of ideas more than round characters, but the talented cast breathes life into them and the feelings shake through. It’s a testament to the level of craft on display that the film can routinely verbalize every idea, and then feel them, too.

It’s Nolan’s most humane film, building on the metaphors for grief that drove Inception, working towards greater heights of narrative tension as expression of character needs. In the end, these twin, sometimes fumbling, impulses towards scientific and emotional exploration lead the film into a resolution that’s partially an explosion of abstract images, but more often an overly literal explanation that actually doesn’t make much sense. But the journey there is often stirring and exciting, overwhelming and marvelous with powerful images and sensations. I couldn’t help but admire the overreach of the final moments anyway, as it turns sci-fi loops that resolve the story tightly where I might’ve preferred a greater sense of poetic ambiguity. It’s a film of great ambition, a big, uneven, intensely personal vision that sneaks up and overpowers my objections.

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: HER

Her is a film on parallel tracks. It’s a gentle and quietly chilling sci-fi film; it’s a fuzzy and empathetic romance. It’s interested in abstract philosophical ruminations on the implications of ever increasing entanglement with ever-smarter technology; it’s a sopping sentimental look into mankind’s yearning for a life of truly meaningful connection and beauty. That these tracks come together with something approaching coherence and cohesion, meeting sometimes convincingly in a sweet and whimsical middle ground between these concerns, is due to writer-director Spike Jonze’s ability to find and present the beating heart and core universal insights that sit inside what appear on the surface to be unwieldy and peculiar concepts. He makes prickly unpredictable, but deeply sympathetic and singularly strange stories – about a portal into the mind of a real actor playing himself, Being John Malkovich; about a case of writer’s block that rewrites before our eyes the very movie we’re watching, Adaptation; about a boy who imagines a storybook world in which his emotions are literal monsters to be ruled over, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are – so full of personal and evocative feeling.

With his newest film, he uses science fiction in what has become an increasingly rare use of the genre in its big screen outings. I mean, I love sci-fi about monsters, robots, superheroes, and space opera plenty, but that’s not all the genre is capable of, even if that’s increasingly the only kind that makes it into wide release. With Her, Jonze takes a real concept concerning How We Live Now – the nature of human intimacy in lives increasingly tangled up in smart phones and wearable tech – and layers on some metaphoric complications by imagining a world that’s much like our own, with current trends extrapolated outward. He takes a question one could ask about present day interactions – is cybersex any less an intimate act for being mediated by technology? – and adds a futurist complication. What if the person on the other end isn’t even human? This is no Catfishing parable. In Her, a man depressed in the wake of his divorce upgrades his network – a synced cloud between his computers, phone, and gaming device – to a new operating system and immediately falls in love. He’s not just happy with his purchase. He falls in love with the smart, funny, inquisitive, lively computer voice representing the cutting edge learning and evolving artificial intelligence of his OS.

The man is played by Joaquin Phoenix, often sitting alone in the frame as he talks to the voice of his computer, his eyes lighting up with unexpected energy. He has flesh and blood people to interact with, his neighbor (Amy Adams), his boss (Chris Pratt), and even his ex-wife (Rooney Mara), but still he’s lonely. Speaking to his new digital companion, he’s cautious at first, but the technology soon seems to win him over. It’s just so alive, speaking with the breathy, excited voice of Scarlett Johansson. You might wonder why a computer function would need to breathe at all, but it’s clear that the software is built to grow and learn and speak in a way that’s comfortingly human. No stiff Siri stiltedness here. There are long passages of the film in which the two of them talk, Phoenix and Johansson bantering or exposing their innermost thoughts, which could be lifted out of any film romance barely altered, and it’s startlingly easy to forget for a split second the nature of what is happening. That’s the chilly but humane point bubbling under their interactions. It’s sweet and scary, but tips so hard to the sweet side for so long, it’s all the scarier.

It’s a haunting form of intimacy. He throws himself into the relationship. It is a technological escape from depression and through the process he rediscovers his ability to feel. It’s productive in that way, and he’s increasingly happy with his situation, even shyly admitting to his neighbor that he’s “seeing someone” and “just having lots of fun.” But it was hard for me to shake the awareness that his love is a voice programmed to have all the signifiers of human interaction without anything signified. This is no long-distance relationship with a human. It’s all just bits of code zipping around, learning, evolving, behaving human. (The tantalizing question of how human must a program be before we say it has developed humanity remains hinted at, largely unexplored.) Jonze’s wonderfully humane tone, whimsical and twee without ever becoming too silly, seems to bury this central fact for quite some time, swooning with a twinkly (too twinkly) Arcade Fire score at the romance just as much as Phoenix does. How real is this output really? He rather geekily says research shows OS/human romances are rare, but maybe he’s in one because the input data of his life suggests to the computer that that is exactly what he needs.

Jonze paints the complications simply, subdued under the rosy romantic picture he paints, a soft and warm comfortable environment underneath which sits its colder questioning. It’s an oddity, at once hopeful and pessimistic, saying that even when we become too reliant on technology, it may in the end grow past us to the extent that it’ll know when to leave us. The cinematography suggests this funny futurist optimism, Hoyte Van Hoytema creating imagery that has a pale glow off of the soft pastel colors of shirts – the high-waisted pants are all earth tones that are even softer – and glistening city lights of a world cautiously and convincingly just a few leaps beyond our own. We live in a world of sleek, smooth, curved devices, much like the ones in this film. Everything from the iPhone to the Wii seems soft and appealing with light colors, dulcet tones, soothing beeps, intuitive functionality (some of the time). You can walk into any restaurant and are likely to find a couple sitting across a table from each other, staring deeply into their screens. Her takes infatuation with technology and design to the next level, reveals that, even with some strange and awkward new complications, it can be deeply satisfying and even beneficial for this character. And that’s exactly why it’s so creepy, too.