the odyssey (w&d nolan)

Random Thoughts on the Odyssey

Throwback to the seventies. Waiting for Burt Lancaster to pop up. 

Damon is playing a man who is in exile and far from home. However, he always comes across as someone, in every scene, who is completely at home. With himself, with his surroundings, with his colleagues. Of course, he is at home because he is on a film set, which is where Matt Damon, the person, rather than the character, feels at home. But this works against the character he is supposed to portray, and strips the film of much of its tension. 

Like Scott’s Napoleon, one can imagine a teenage film buff dreaming of making a big budget movie of one of his favourite texts. Don’t we all do that? Filmmakers or not? Dream of making a film of a text we love? Only Nolan has the chops to make it happen on a budgetary scale that can allow him to realise his vision. The trouble is that the film comes across like an adolescent vision: lots of noise, battles, pretty girls and clunky dialogue. 

Rhythm - the film casts the rapper Travis Scott as a variant on the blind Homer (who was an enigmatic invention too). He beats out his song to the rhythm of the hexameter. Nolan was always a master of rhythm, the way in which a film is constructed out of carefully edited beats and the manipulation of time. Momento, Dunkirk, Inception, all benefitted from this vision, capable of translating complex ideas into the language of cinema, with its impatient rhythms - you only have an hour and a half to three hours to fit it all in. But here, as for me, in Oppenheimer, he seems to have lost his touch. The rhythm is off. Odysseus’ return journey takes seven years or more, but events in Ithaca can’t keep pace with this and remain trapped in the present day. The timelines, which gelled in such a Borgesian manner in the other named films, don’t quite seem to click together. 

Finally - what is this film actually about? When Damon talks to Hathaway at the end, expressing a jaundiced regret for the genie of war he has let out of the bottle, we flash back to the dreadful pillage of Troy. And yet, over the course of this past decade, we see things far worse on our phones, day-in, day-out. When they used to sing of war, those who listened thankfully had a disconnect from its realities. Nolan is singing of war; but we no longer have the privilege of that disconnect. Modernity, the smartphone which the director famously shuns, means we carry the realities of war around in our pockets. The film’s recreation of war feels like a pale, sanitised imitation. As ever, the barbarity of another middle eastern conflict, Gaza, overshadows everything. Hollywood exists in such an escapist bubble that it really has no right to pontificate about civilisation and war. Or if it wants to, it should do it consciously and overtly. Metaphors feel cowardly. The message of this movie has all the punch of an instagram post. 

oppenheimer (w&d nolan, w. kai bird, martin sherwin) / barbie (w&d gerwig, w. baumbach)

Along with my co-writer, we did a double bill of Barbie and Oppenheimer at the Picturehouse. The audience for Oppenheimer was serious. The audience for Barbie was clearly there for a good night out. There was fancy dress and bottles of bubbly being taken in. Whoops and cheers, not such a British thing, greeted the opening titles. From the audience demographic it would have looked like these films had nothing in common. However….

Talking with my co-author’s partner after Oppenheimer, we came up with the term ‘intellectual popcorn’. Nolan has long been a prime purveyor of this, alongside, perhaps, Tarantino, Fincher, etc. Whilst the term sounds sniffy, it’s not meant to be. Cinema is a pretentious art. A  film has two, in this case three, hours to compress its intellectual discourse, whereas a book can play out over much more time, permitting a more nuanced exploration of the themes the author wants to tackle. Nolan is something of a master of the exploration of time, and he has explored this with a certain verve, investigating the aesthetics and physics of time in a way that is entertaining, luring a paying audience in to not only sit back, but also to think. The theme of physics is of course central to Oppenheimer, and the ambition of Nolan’s film can only be applauded. Who else is managing to make big budget films about dead physicists?

Gerwig has been criticised for selling out, as Barbie is a film about a toy manufacturer’s product, which is also financed by said manufacturer. On paper this sounds awful, and when said manufacturer’s logo appears in the titles, it’s even more disconcerting. However, Gerwig and screenwriter, Baumbach, are more than smart enough to be aware of the feminist discourse around Barbie, and dolls in general. They turn this into the meat and drink of the film itself, which is a softcore intellectual thesis on contemporary feminism, the patriarchy and also, slyly, the crisis of masculinity in the late patriarchal age.

As such, both films feel a bit like being given a lecture on their respective topics by a trendy professor. Gerwig’s effort is far more aware of this, and therefor more playful and ultimately, to this viewer, effective. Both seek to drown the discourse in aesthetics. In Nolan’s case, the key drivers are the frenetic edit and the relentless score, along with the use of slightly mannered cameos from the likes of Oldman and Affleck, C. In Gerwig’s case, the key driver is art design: the cheesecake tones of the Barbie aesthetic which is then contrasted with the washed out tones of ‘the real world’. (Is California really the real world?) Both employ a device at the start of the movie which they soon drop: Oppenheimer using abstract visuals to represent the complexities of the physicist’s brain; Gerwig using the acid tones of Mirren as a narrator, who soon largely disappears, save for one acerbic and on-point zinger, a zinger that perhaps highlights the weaknesses of Gerwig’s neo-feminist standpoint, when Mirren pops up to comment on the fact that Margot Robbie’s almost artificial beauty is in no way representative of the ‘normal’ female.

Neither film is particularly good at what might be described as emotional intelligence. Gerwig introduces some ‘normal’ people to seek to root her story in a more mundane reality, which half-works, half-doesn’t. (The cheesy husband cameo being the best example of this). These aren’t real people, they are ciphers in an intellectual argument, who are there to do exactly this, as both mother and daughter articulate with great clarity the apparent feminist thesis of the film, hitting nail effectively, if heavily, on head. Nolan’s Oppenheimer remains an aloof presence. Supposedly a bon viveur and a loose cannon, attributes which lead him to flirt with communism and therefore become his Achilles heel in the McCarthy era, he becomes ever more sphinx like as the film progresses, almost drifting into the background of his own story. Robert Downey Jr, as his supposed antagonist, starts to take over, despite having been a secondary character in the first two acts. (Act 1, Oppenheimer’s development as scientist; Act 2, Los Alamos; Act 3, post-war vilification.) The intriguing story of Oppenheimer’s relationship with a suicidal Communist party member feels like a contrived attempt to humanise the distant scientist, and her character, played by Pugh, is brushed off lightly. More than anything, one comes away with the sense of a film trying to bite off more than it can chew, with the manic edit supposed to be a propulsive force but ending up giving the film the feel of a never-ending montage sequence, punctuated by one little Atomic bomb.

On balance it felt as though Gerwig’s intellectual popcorn exercise was more effective than Nolan’s. In a way both films are just as laudably pretentious, but Gerwig shows more self-awareness, wearing her discourse on her sleeve, and this permits her film to feel less heavy-handed. Nolan’s film feels as though it is striving to achieve a transcendence which it will never attain, and the underlying issues of the film, the heavy shit which audiences don’t want to share with their popcorn, (nuclear war, the arms race, the possibility of mass destruction) are roller-skated over. In spite of myself I couldn’t help but think about Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, another film which addresses the horror of nuclear war in a roundabout way, which one suspects Nolan watched and borrowed from, but one which achieves an altogether more harrowing and emotional bond with its public, even if that public is unlikely to be watching the film whilst munching popcorn. In a similar way, for all the ingenuity of Gerwig and Baumbach’s film, one doesn’t come away feeling as though the patriarchal order has been shaken by its roots. One comes away thinking that this is a nice enough film which little girls will enjoy as much as the adults and will help to sell merchandise which is the prime reason for the financiers to have sought out Gerwig to direct a film about their product. This is where high-end Hollywood is at: making films which seek to find a way to infiltrate mainstream society with some kind of intellectual discourse, but, recognising this is a Sisyphean task, veer towards smart, sassy or bombastic filmmaking that they hope will please the crowd, as both of these films clearly have done.

dunkirk (w&d nolan)

We went to watch Dunkirk in a cinema on Ejido, which was nearly full. People here don’t know much about the Second World War; the film has no major stars; but the grinding wheels of the publicity machine had worked and Montevideans had come out in force to see Nolan’s curious change of direction. Dunkirk is a visceral film. If the ending of Inception is one long action sequence which somewhat undermines the (relative) subtlety of that which has gone before, this film announces itself from the very first as an action picture, designed to bludgeon the spectator into submission. It’s loud. It’s in your face. It’s heart is more interested in the sound of its own beat than reaching out to find another. 

On some levels, at the time, it succeeded. For example: my grandfather was a fighter pilot who was shot down, so the story goes. On the Eastern Front, fighting for the Luftwaffe, but all the same, his fate had much in common with Tom Hardy’s journey through the sky to the coast of France. Or, at least I can imagine that it did. I don’t know how many war films I’ve watched in my life, but none has made me associate so readily with his, my grandfather’s, fate. Again, it was the sheer viscerality of the film which achieved this. It didn’t give me time to reflect. The connection occurred and it stuck. Not that I particularly cared what happened to Hardy’s character. Or any of the characters, come to that. They were figures on a battlefield, statistics. Any attempt to personalise these figures felt half-hearted. The sentimental twist of the boy who died getting his moment of glory in the local paper seemed tacked-on. As, indeed, did the whole last 10 minutes, as the troops returned home. Because it’s fairly clear that Nolan isn’t interested in the history; he’s interested in the dynamics and the logistics. He wants you to have some idea of how it feels to be stuck on a beach knowing that the sands of time are running out. The short-termism of war, the way you live for the next ten minutes, or hour, or, at most, day. In which regard, of all his films, this one has more in common with Memento than any other. 

Which is also how it ties into his wider oeuvre. Above all, Nolan is interested in time. What it means to live within edited time, when the value of a second, a minute, an hour, becomes radically heightened. Cinema narrative is about all kinds of things, love, peace, war, betrayal, you name it. But it is always, no matter what, about time. Nolan relishes this. The great attraction for the filmmaker of Dunkirk wasn’t that it was a valiant moment in British history. It was that there was a fixed time permitted to get the troops off the beach. The enemy wasn’t just the Nazis. It was time. 

inception (w&d nolan)

It's always interesting to read the critical reaction to films, particularly those that are ostentatiously clever. When that occurs, the tendency of the clever critic appears to be resist the attempts of the clever filmmaker to demonstrate his or her cleverness. The very word 'clever' becomes something of an insult. Hence, in the media I read, and the comments that are appended to that media, the better half is using words like 'pretentious', 'emperor's' 'new' 'clothes', and so on. As though there is some debate over the cinematic merits of the film, and its ambition. Christopher Nolan, you're no Stanley Kubrick, seems to be the jist of things.

So what? That's like telling Tendulkar he's no Bradman. The carpers create a mental logic which accords with a vision of the world they seek to project. Which would no doubt delight Nolan, who if he does anything in this film, demonstrates an ability to explore the concept of phenomenology. There are flaws a plenty in Inception. The snow-dream lacks the poetry it aspires to; the explosions go on for to long; some of the dialogue is unintentionally comical (although there are hints of humour in the film, something one doesn't normally associate with the director, and there may be a tongue in cheek aspect to some of its more grandiose lines); and finally, and perhaps most pertinently, there's a distinct lack of what some would call 'emotional depth.' This is not the Dardennes brothers neither, and it would be true to say the Gondry/ Kaufmann film covered similar terrain with more emotionally verve.

Do these problems matter? Is not every movie susceptible to the accusation that is in some way lacking? Of course they are. Casablanca lacks a good car chase. The Conversation lacks Ingrid Bergman. Performance lacks social realism. And so on. On the other hand, if one looks at Inception in terms of what it does...

There seems to me little doubt it's a film that will become embedded in people's dream of what cinema can achieve. It will provoke an absurd number of PhD theses. It will be talked about over chapatis or cream teas or masitas for years to come. Because what Nolan succeeds in doing is stimulate the mind. He pulls off a seemingly hyper-complex premise. (Incidentally, even if he has apparently been working on the script for a decade (which is not as long as it sounds, in dream time), I suspect he might also have been influenced by the equally bonkers but slightly less comprehensible Primer.) He makes his audience not only think, but enjoy thinking. By which he reminds us of the pleasures of the mind, something we are all to prone too forget.

As The Prestige showed, Nolan knows he's a showman, and it's all trickery. In reality he has less pretension than many seem to want to attribute to him. Like another master-spinner of tall tales, Borges, his work aims to seduce the mind rather than the heart. But his facility for achieving this reminds us, if this is not too pretentious, that the mind is an organ of the body, like the heart, one that craves stimulation and love, without the gift of which we are in danger of festering. Nolan does all that cinema is capable of: he wakes us up, and reminds that even if it's all a dream, we are, indeed, alive, waking dreamers, blessed by our capacity to perceive the world around us.

the prestige

Coming out of the Peckham Multiplex I call Mr Blue, filmmaker, and tell him I’ve just seen Nolan’s film. Why? he cries, the critics all said it was Rubbish!

I have thoroughly enjoyed the film, and all of a sudden I’m wondering if it wasn’t hokum after all. The wool has been pulled over my eyes, I have fallen for the oldest trick in the book, the flashing bulbs of Hollywood.

The revelation, the ‘prestige’ itself, is not exactly astonishing. I guessed it sometime after Michael Caine did, but got there nonetheless. Admittedly much of the acting seems as old as the sets are supposed to look, creaky, undercrafted. The pace is sometimes erratic as the narrative flies from trick to counter-trick, from Colorado to London. Ah, I think for a second, losing my nerve, rain falling on the Rye, maybe I’ve been suckered.

Nolan knows a thing or two about dazzling an audience. His first film, Following, is heart-free but cleverly constructed. His second, Momento, was breathtaking. Thereafter Insomnia was a pale imitation of the original and I missed Batman. The Prestige has him back where he belongs. Which is messing around with plots. Demonstrating his cleverness; keeping us guessing.

Messing about with plots. At one point Bale’s magician says to Jackman’s magician – you have to be prepared to get your hands dirty. Nolan seems to know that in order to create something that looks clean and calculated, you have to mess around. He’s willing to flip between past, present and future, between Colorado and London, timelines all of a muddle, pretty girls coming and going, David Bowie scattering some cheese on proceedings. Does a pile of tophats in a glade really mean something? When we see them a second time do they mean something else? Do they mean what we think they mean or do they mean nothing at all? Is magic all pretence? Is there such a thing as the truth?

In the end, all is bound to be revealed. The ‘prestige’ is the final revelation of the magic trick, when the disappeared reappears, the audience applaud. Nolan can never quite hope to match the effectiveness of a great magic trick on screen. Film is not quite magic, which thrives on an audience’s physical participation in the deceit to generate wonder. But he can emulate a magic trick, he can lead us through the pathways of a magician’s chicanery. To my mind it seemed appropriate that the ending failed to match the complexity of the plot. Even if the finale is anti-climactic, we’ve still been treated to a dazzling show. To be taken through the machinations of a plot is in some ways more entertaining than to be seduced by it. The very principle of The Prestige seems to be to reveal rather than deceive, in so far as the filmmaker can, meaning that disappointment is embedded in its enterprise.

All the same, I now wonder if the filmmaker realised this, or if he thinks he’s pulling one over on his audience. In which case the film fails miserably. But if he doesn’t it’s clearly a great success. It all depends where you’re looking. The very fact you can’t be quite sure implies the film’s doing something right. Or perhaps it really is a load of old hokum. Still raining in the Rye.


NB – The one character who has the ability to glean the truth which underpins the magician’s innate deceit is Bale’s wife, who can tell by the way he says he loves her whether he means it or not. Only later do we learn how right she truly was, but in another way the revelation matters not at all. Because in her actions and her words lurk the notion that there is a deeper truth that cannot dissemble no matter how hard it tries, a truth which is tied up with our understanding of love. Perhaps a braver film would have followed this further, for the wife, recognising there is little place for her understandings in a Hollywood blockbuster, hangs herself.