Oppenheimer

OPPENHEIMER   ***

Christopher Nolan

2023

IDEA:  A biography tracing physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's early academic work, involvement with the Manhattan Project, and postwar security hearing organized by his colleague and rival Lewis Strauss.

BLURB:  In Oppenheimer, as in many of his films, Christopher Nolan’s mode of filmmaking is to bombard the audience with exposition - delivered dourly, breathlessly, and in non-chronological order - while a booming soundtrack blares relentlessly in the background. His technique is at once brute and convoluted, less that of an artist than a wannabe engineer smashing pieces together to see if they fit. Despite his precise technical attention to film stock and practical effects, Nolan remains lost at sea when it comes to composing an interesting image, and his fragmentary narration and nonstop crosscutting often feel more like pompous formal affectations than necessary designs. While these pitfalls are present in Oppenheimer, especially in its first hour, the film is in other ways served by Nolan’s hectic, pile-driving style. His script, which shuttles chaotically between multiple timelines and events within those timeliness, aptly captures the myriad collisions of historical forces that led to the advent, use, and aftermath of the atomic bomb. Nolan’s structure becomes one of dialectical materialism, or “Fission” and “Fusion” as he labels his timelines, and his endlessly fractured scenes become like the bustling atoms and molecules Oppenheimer keeps envisioning in his nightmares. Nolan’s abilities as a filmmaker come into sharpest focus at the film’s turning point, the Trinity test, when he harnesses editing, and particularly sound, to orchestrate a visceral, tension-filled sequence that convinces us of a Rubicon-crossing moment. It’s during and after this showpiece that Oppenheimer begins taking needed breaths, crystalizing as a deliberately unwieldy portrait of the follies of mankind - from scientific hubris to partisan politics and nationalist tribalism - that seem to reach their logical endpoint only in the world’s literal annihilation. 

Stromboli

STROMBOLI   ***

Roberto Rossellini

1950

IDEA:  Denied a visa to immigrate to Argentina after WWII, an Eastern European woman marries an Italian fisherman in order to be released from an internment camp. She travels with him to his home on the volcanic island Stromboli, where she feels immediately out of place.

BLURB:  Stromboli centers on a simple but forceful allegory for the societal subjugation of a woman: being trapped on a remote volcanic island with an abusive husband, her every action judged with hostility and skepticism by the provincial villagers. Rossellini makes her alterity on this island palpably felt in his casting of Ingrid Bergman in the role. The Hollywood star’s tall, glamorous, cosmopolitan appearance is an incongruity Rossellini plays up within his signature neorealist framework; whether wandering through crumbling, maze-like pathways, witnessing the ritual communal netting of massive tuna, or staggering up a volcano, Bergman clashes productively with her environment, underscoring her character Karin’s geopolitical dislocation and spiritual isolation. While the topography serves as an outward manifestation of her psyche, Karin’s crisis remains mostly internal, and Bergman is tasked with conveying the character’s profound anguish and desperation in long, often wordless scenes in which melodrama comes to the forefront. The actress is a pro, but Rossellini sometimes doesn’t give her enough variation to play, the thinness of his story and characterizations forcing the scenery and milieu to do too much of the heavy-lifting. Rossellini achieves his greatest effect in time for the denouement, when Bergman’s star persona and the physical reality of Stromboli both reach their limits, facilitating a spiritual breakthrough for Karin that’s at once a reassertion and a question of faith.

Asteroid City

ASTEROID CITY   **1/2

Wes Anderson

2023

IDEA:  In 1955, a television program presents a production of the play Asteroid City, about events occurring during a Junior Stargazer convention in the titular Southwestern desert town.

BLURB:  Compared to the visual-semiotic overload and frenetic pacing of his last two features, The French Dispatch and Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson has gone positively austere with Asteroid City. At least aesthetically, anyway. The images here exhibit all of his signature, exactingly geometric compositions and attention to detail, but they have an uncluttered clarity and directness that feel, if not new, then refreshingly pared-down for a director who’s been trending toward increasingly grandiloquent, byzantine mise-en-scènes. Asteroid City presents the eponymous fictional desert town as an instantly recognizable yet uniquely distilled vision of a retro-futurist postwar America; all sumptuous pastel hues and sleek gadgets, it's an inchoate capitalist Space Age utopia in the shadow of Cold War paranoia. With the invaluable contributions of Robert Yeoman and Adam Stockhausen, Anderson maps the locale through swiveling pans and lateral sequence shots, giving it both a spatial legibility and tactility befitting of its status as a stage play within the film’s diegesis. Unfortunately, Anderson’s astuteness as a visual designer is not echoed in the construction of his plot, a laboriously overwrought nesting-doll meta-text that convolutes and undercuts the film’s rather simple ideas about the power of storytelling to organize life’s chaos. How can chaos be controlled if it scarcely seems to exist in the first place, either beneath Anderson’s fussy surfaces or the characters’ unremitting stolidness? The director can convince us that Asteroid City is real, but the interiorities of its actor-inhabitants remain purely theoretical.

Past Lives

PAST LIVES   ***1/2

Celine Song

2023

IDEA:  Nora and Hae Sung, former childhood friends from South Korea, negotiate their evolving relationship after reuniting 24 years later in New York City, where Nora now lives a married life.

BLURB:  The problem with mental games of “what if?” is that there’s no way of knowing how any unrealized opportunity might have affected one’s life had it been pursued. To follow the thread of speculation is to become consumed by an endless and ultimately unproductive process of ruminating about events that can never be changed. Celine Song’s Past Lives is such a profound and poignant rendering of this scenario not merely because of the “what if?” at its center, but because of its acknowledgment of the existential truths that underly the question: that making any choice entails the narrowing of others, and that life is a stochastic thing no-one can mastermind. Would Nora be questioning her marriage to Arthur if Hae Sung hadn’t reentered her life? Does she really desire this lost friend, or the nostalgic ideas of childhood and country he represents? Can those things even be separated? Song’s nuanced script rejects the monistic, teleological Western concept of “one true love,” embracing instead a kind of Buddhist circularity that opens room for multiplicity and emotional ambivalence. She elegantly articulates the asymmetries inherent between any two people, suggesting geographic, psychological, and affective distances via long panning shots and pregnant pauses. Past Lives often evokes Ozu and Edward Yang in both its patient filmmaking and its generous attitude toward life’s bittersweet compromises; like many of their works, it’s a melancholic tone poem that refuses to be a tragedy.