Helga without the H

Every year* I attempt (with varying degrees of success and effort) to watch as many of that year’s Oscar nominees as possible. For the past few years* I’ve posted reviews of these movies here on this blog. At some point before the awards ceremony, I usually write up some sort of over-analysis and maybe some predictions, but we’ll see if I run out of steam before then. In the meantime, today we cover…

*Except 2022, when I was too burned out from 2021’s binge to give a crap.

Oppenheimer

[13 nominations for best picture, actor (Cillian Murphy), supporting actress (Emily Blunt), supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.), director, adapted screenplay, cinematography, editing, production design, costumes, hair/makeup, sound, and score]

IS IT SALTBURN? No. But it would be with an hour shaved off.

Okay, yeah, so… I know this is the frontrunner in every category and everyone loves it. So if you’re new around here, you might expect me to give a glowing review here.

But… also, I have a complex relationship with Chris Nolan and his movies, and I fully admit I have a bias against him (see my review of Tenet, as well as The Official Helga Without the H 2021 Oscar Awards when I named Tenet “Worst Movie.”) The basic gist is: I loved Memento, and every movie of his since then gets worse and worse as his arrogance increases (your dream/time-bending concepts aren’t THAT clever, dangit! And stop DEMANDING that all we ignorant peasant can ONLY appreciate your great masterpiece in the world’s most hi-tech theatres! Argh!) There’s some stuff he’s great on, but it’s always overshadowed by my desire to punch his movie in its figurative face. So it’s tough for me to be entirely open to the glow of the Oppenheimer experience.

And yet, I found myself, like half of America, buying my very first post-covid movie theatre ticket to go see Oppenheimer in the fancy theatre with it’s comfy seats and decent sound system (still not the super-duper sound system Mr. AudioDouche prefers, but whatever.) I legitimately did want to see this film. It looked good. And it looked like something where, and it pains me to say this in case Nolan ever reads this, shelling out for the big screen experience is totally worth it. And I was right. I heard a rumor that the Oppenheimer folks asked the Barbie folks to move their premiere date so it wouldn’t eat into their profits (to which the Barbie folks responded go pound sand, we ain’t moving), which is insane because let’s be real; nowhere near as many people would have gone to see this movie if it hadn’t been for the whole Barbieheimer thing. Truth be told; I mostly wanted to see Barbie, and the only reason I started with Oppenheimer was because the folks with whom I went to see the movie had already seen Barbie.

What (beyond Barbieheimer) motivated me to repress my Nolan-induced rage to see this particular movie? And why did I not hate it? Mainly, because it actually had something to say. If executed correctly, the combination of Nolan’s film skillz with this particular story could be magical. That is, if he didn’t get in his own way. And I was right; there was plenty to love here. For one, I read that the author of American Prometheus said it was 100% spot-on in terms of historical accuracy, which I’m a big fan of. In terms of Nolan’s filmmaking style, I found it particularly impactful the way in which he messed with sound in ways that I did not see coming. Things were suddenly silent, then suddenly loud, and there was a strange eerie hum the whole time. The one award I do think this film definitely deserves is for sound. The story itself, the craziness of how close we all came to potentially blowing up the entire planet (there is still time!), the moral dilemmas of working on the ultimate killer, all of that is heavy stuff, and it was conveyed pretty damn well; it was finally an appropriate application of Nolan’s arrogance, because he finally had a story worthy of this sort of reverence and terror.

BUT….

It’s not perfect. Not that anything ever is. But while I admit that Oppenheimer was very good (I admit it, ok!), I have complaints. My number one complaint, and this is a big one, is that this movie was a whopping hour too long. I know I sound like a broken record constantly complaining about movie lengths, but that’s because it’s legit. This movie had a three hour runtime. If you’re doing 3 hours, you’d better have some sweeping epic. You’d better be adapting a book that’s so chock-full of essential plot points that it would be a travesty to cut it down any further. Does Oppenheimer qualify? NO. There was EASILY an hour’s worth of totally non-essential useless content that did nothing to add to the film. EASY. Chop off an hour, and I could totally forgive my remaining complaints, and maybe even consider this deserving of the top prize (which it is not.)

My remaining complaints: One is my classic Nolan complaint; buddy, you don’t need to mess with the timeline in EVERY movie! The good news is that, for this film, Noland kept the time-jumping to a minimum (at least by his standards). We basically had two primary timelines: 1. Oppenheimer building the bomb, and 2. Robert Downey Jr prosecuting him in the senate a decade or two later (my memory on this is fuzzy; that’s what 3 hours of timejumping will do). This makes sense. This is classic storytelling. Good stuff. And if I remember correctly, he had the later timeline be the black and white one, and the older one be full color, which I kinda liked. But we didn’t leave it there. There’s more timejumping, especially within the Robert Downey Jr timeline, that was unnecessary and frankly just confused me. I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening at certain points. It didn’t help that the b/w timeline was also exponentially more boring than the bomb-building timeline, and most of the extra fluff that could have been cut was in the last 30 minutes or so. By the end, I was just thinking “enough already, let’s go home.”

Finally, I hated the female characters and their plotlines. The actresses were all totally fine and I am a fan of all of them. But I dunno, I guess I’m just sick of watching movies where dudes have stressed-out wives and fuck a bunch of mistresses (here’s some foreshadowing for my Maestro review). To a certain degree the filmmakers can’t really alter anything here, because these were real women who were a big part of Oppenheimer’s life story. But on the other hand, maybe we don’t have to spend quite so much time in the atomic-bomb movie staring at Florence Pugh’s naked tits, or watching actors with a 20 year age difference depicting romantic partners who only had a 10 year age difference. Meanwhile, how much screentime did any of the female scientists on the project receive? That’s a WAY more interesting topic, and it’s a shame this film did jack-all to highlight them anywhere in this 3 hour slogfest.

Or maybe they were in there somewhere. I don’t remember, frankly, because this film also had a gajillion characters. Just now in looking up the actor ages I opened the cast list and went “Wait…. Rami Malek was in this? Oh yeah! Oh and Josh Harnett! Forgot about him; he was great!” A couple weeks ago when I saw the film had a best-supporting-actor nomination I was trying to guess for whom, and my husband mentioned maybe Matt Damon. “He wasn’t in that, was he? Oh wait… I forgot, he’s one of the biggest dang characters.” Now I thought all of the actors in this film did a great job, so don’t get me wrong there. And I understand why there had to be quite a few, given the subject matter. So I’m not complaining, exactly. But I am observing that when you have a 3 hour movie with 8 billion characters, that leads to information overload, and when someone is stuck writing a review 6 months later for their useless blog that nobody reads, pretty much the entire otherwise-lovely film becomes one big giant blur (so maybe we could chop it down a little, yeah?)