Oppenheimer‘s director Christopher Nolan has always been interested in the fractured man and their search for penance within his filmography. Inception took a man into a dreamworld tailspin desperately seeking retribution for his own actions in order to be with his family again; His Dark Knight trilogy featured a version of Bruce Wayne traversing various debilitating routes in the hope of personal acceptance; Even The Prestige is a sly indictment of male hubristic grief. Nolan’s use of scale and adept ability at creating blockbuster entertainment has kept this mostly obscured in the undercurrent of his films.
If society was less patriarchal, perhaps Nolan’s inability to split away from diving into the male psyche would be called out on as a trope of his more, not unlike how social media bemoaned Greta Gerwig’s supposed lack of POC representation when she was only two movies into her filmography. That Nolan’s powerful but tortured protagonist are always underneath the fictional spectacle and the spellbinding technical achievements of his filmography is what makes Oppenheimer, a scorchingly volatile, searing biopic about the real life creator of the atomic bomb, such an interesting outlier within Nolan’s career. Not because Nolan as a filmmaker has decided to change his ways or that his singular vision on the broken males that populate his films has pivoted, but because Nolan makes Oppenheimer, and thus himself, unable to hide from the cold truth of objective reality.
This article was posted on July 30th 2023. Full article linked below.
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