Barrel of Distension

Last weekend I went to see Oppenheimer and Tuesday I was at the Hollywood Bowl to hear George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. I love the Bowl in the summer since it's home to the LA Philharmonic. It made me think about identity.

I loved the concert, but didn’t care for the movie as much. It wasn’t a bad film per se, but I absolutely hated the way it was executed. And Nolan was the wrong Director. His genre is action films. Oppenheimer should have been directed by Oliver Stone, who knows how to give us a Biopic where we actually leave learning something and yearn for more.

For the majority of the film, I sat with my fingers plugged into my ears. The theater was on a quest to break eardrums and when they get lawsuits it will serve them right. Loud is not better, loud is painful!

Here’s what I didn’t like. The first 2 hours are shot in short vignettes without any flow. Short scenes that are jam-packed with explosives going off, although that makes for good cinematography it doesn’t enhance the storyline. After a few times, we get it already.

A Biopic has to have a strong narrative. It’s a life and about choices made not tidbits of a scene without adequately developing an arc.

Then there’s the score. There is so much sound (note how I don’t say music) that sometimes the dialogue is inaudible, especially when the women speak. And there’s the portrayal of them, they are grossly underdeveloped. Florence Pugh's character exists to lust after Oppenheimer and hates flowers. Every time he gives her a bouquet she dumps it in the trash right in from of him. Why? We never know. His wife played by Emily Blunt (who I think is a terrific actress) spends her entire day drinking, lecturing her husband, and glaring with vague disapproval. Her drinking gets in the way of her motherly obligations and we never find what is at the root of her inebriated state.

For those that don’t know history, they will be lost. Oppenheimer lived during a time when most educated Jews were liberals and therefore labeled as Communists.

The FBI was run by J. Edgar Hoover who waged war with homosexuals, blacks, and communists. Although it was rumored that he was gay, his alleged homosexuality at the time would have destroyed him, so he took out his repression on others and came across as a model of purity. He used the department to preach the notion that the political left was responsible for all manner of perceived evils. He would have made an excellent Nazi.

Back to the film. There is a race against time to complete a bomb before the Germans do. That is effective; even though history tells viewers the United States won that race. The political discussions of which cities to target, and the philosophical rationalizations for doing so, are compelling.

In the last hour of the 3-hour film, Oppenheimer is struggling to grapple with his hand in the deaths of so many innocent people start to emerge, That’s when I started to get my hopes up. Horrific physical reminders of the atom bomb's destruction manifest in the world around him, his psyche failing him. For me, it was one of the most impactful and emotional parts of the movie. A terrified man, wrestling with his inner demons rather than the detached and knowledge-hungry scientist we'd seen thus far.

And there’s a hearing. Oppenheimer is against the hydrogen bomb and when he vocalizes his discontent at what he feels responsible for creating he gets investigated. A man that should have won a Nobel Prize in Physics comes under attack. But the resolution of the hearing involves men in suits talking really fast at each other, and their dialogue does not have any flair.

In the end, the government that rushed him into making the bomb paints him as a traitor now that he's served his purpose.

The film has facts on its side, but there's no real conspiracy. While the attempt to humanize the creator of the atomic bomb is valiant, technical prowess alone proves insufficient.