Lucy 🏳️⚧️ 🏳🌈’s review published on Letterboxd:
Nolan is a filmmaker that I have a complicated relationship with.
I've gone back and forth on him and his style too many times to count over the recent years and it's a bit frustrating. Sometimes I think he's incredibly mesmerizing, epic, intelligent, audacious; filming things and achieving things cinematically that should not be possible and delivering unbelievable spectacle. And sometimes I think he's egotistical, cold, too self-important; complicating emotions and stories and turning them into mathematical equations. Even his more humanistic pieces like "Interstellar" have to turn deeply imperfect human emotions like love into quantifiable data.
I was hoping that "Oppenheimer" could turn me back to Nolan once more and make me see his strengths again. And I think it might have.
I found this absolutely riveting. People *understandably* talk about Nolan's weak character writing all the time and was a very valid concern for many when it was announced that he was taking on a Bio-Pic of such a nuanced and emotionally complex man. But, for me at least, it worked wonders.
This is an incredibly reflective and traumatized film. And it's very interesting because a lot of that reflection and traumatization derives directly from the looks and gazes of Cillian Murphy. I have no idea if this was anywhere near as strong on the page, but Murphy's understanding of Oppenheimer as a person, as well as Nolan's direction of him, paint such a devastating portrait of a man who had everything and nothing.
It also helps that Nolan's directorial camerawork, the editing, and the sound design here are undeniably some of the most striking and potent he's ever done. There are images and sounds here that are startlingly subjective and surrealist for a Bio-Pic. And how the two often interact is, at times, stirring to the bone. I couldn't count how many times I found myself glued to the screen purely because of how something looked or sounded or was edited into a sequence.
"Oppenheimer" was a hit for me and I'm glad that it was. Maybe a bit overlong (I definitely felt that length) and I think Nolan will always remain elusive to me as a filmmaker that I can wholeheartedly love, but, man... when he gets it right, he gets it fucking right.
