→ February 25, 2024
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Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is an achievement. It’s a biopic, a deep character study, a thriller, a heist movie, and a Shakespearean tragedy (well, except the title character doesn’t die at the end), wrapped up into a three-hour movie that never lets up its pace. It’s incredible that a major studio bankrolled this and gave it such a long theatrical release, given its subject and its three-hour run time, but I hope its runaway success encourages studios to take more risks on prestige films like it. (It’s streaming now on Peacock, or rentable on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Based on the biography American Prometheus (which I have not read), Oppenheimer tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the physicist who led the United States’s effort to develop a nuclear weapon, known as the Manhattan Project. It’s framed by the events that came after the war, when Oppenheimer became an advocate for international control of the very weapons he helped to develop, leading to a sham hearing that led to the revocation of his security clearance and a subsequent public hearing that led to the downfall of his chief antagonist, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.). The movie itself runs from the 1920s, when Oppenheimer was still a student, meeting Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and studying under Max Born (mentioned but not depicted), through his time as a professor at Berkeley, his tenure in Los Alamos leading the Manhattan Project, and the post-war attacks on his reputation. The movie focuses on his professional efforts, but his personal life, including his marriage to the biologist Katherine (Emily Blunt) and his affair with the psychologist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), although the movie drags when the focus shifts away from the thriller at the heart of the film.

Writer and director Christopher Nolan packed Oppenheimer with dialogue, so there are very few moments of silence in the film, and any time the movie is focused on the professional arc, it flies. (If I were a more pandering sort, I might say it moves at the speed of light, but I’ll leave those jokes to the least common depunimator.) The script underscores just how massive the undertaking and how unlikely the assembled team of physicists and other scientists was. It’s easy to let hindsight make the development of the first atomic bomb seem like an inevitability, but it was a gigantic effort that required the participation of scientists from across the west, including some refugees from the Nazi regime, and coordination across multiple agencies and university laboratories. The physics behind nuclear fission was only discovered in 1938, and the plants refining the plutonium needed for the bombs didn’t even come online until 1943 and 1944. We know how the story ends, but the movie puts you into the action enough that you can feel the tension and the uncertainty among the scientists – who knew what was at stake, but had no idea if they’d succeed or when.

Oppenheimer’s marriage and infidelity make up the film’s secondary plot, and while it’s an important part of his story and is intertwined enough with his professional life – including his pre-war flirtation with the Communist Party – that it has to be in the film, but there’s so little development of Katherine’s or Jane’s characters that neither role amounts to much beyond one good scene apiece. There’s not enough screen time for either of them, since neither was involved in Los Alamos, and the result is that two Academy Award-nominated actresses are little more than props – which makes Blunt’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress more than a little surprising.

The two best performances are, unsurprisingly, the two that earned Oscar nods – Murphy for Best Actor and Downey Jr. for Best Supporting Actor. Murphy has worked with Nolan before in Inception and Dunkirk, and he gives a superb performance here as the title character, depicting the scientist as a sort of aloof genius whose determination and focus allowed him to lead the project to completion, while also showing his confusion at how his actions affect people around him, including his wife and his mistress. Downey’s career resurgence has been fun to watch, although if you’re old enough to remember his earliest work as part of the so-called “Brat Pack,” you probably saw how talented he was; I remember his supporting performance in the 1995 adaptation of Richard III, which was the first serious role I’d seen of his, and how compelling he was in every scene, often overshadowing other more accomplished actors. Downey isn’t known for dialing it down, but that’s what he does here, to great effect, so that Strauss comes across as an intense, ruthless, yet very professional politician, someone who often acts in his own self-interest but never out of emotion. As much as the movie puts Oppenheimer at its center, Strauss has his own story arc within the movie where Oppenheimer is often just a bit player, giving Downey the chance to be the lead actor in this film-within-a-film. Two outstanding performances in a gripping, wide-reaching story would put just about any film near the top of my annual rankings.

Oppenheimer was nominated for 13 Oscars this year, and I’d guess it’s going to win a slew of them, including Best Picture, Best Actor (for Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (for Downey, Jr.), and Best Director, although I haven’t finished all of the nominees in any of those categories yet and can’t offer an opinion on whether it’s deserving. Of the films I’ve seen from 2023 so far, though, it is the best, just ahead of Past Lives, which is a tighter and far more affecting film, but without as much ambition or as wide a scope. It did not receive a nomination for Best Visual Effects, however, despite the stunning scene where the first atomic test takes place in Los Alamos; perhaps that’s not enough compared to the other nominees, none of which I’ve seen.

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→ January 2, 2023
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Elvis.

Elvis Presley was anything but boring, as a person or as an entertainer, which makes it all the more criminal that Baz Luhrman’s biopic Elvis is such a dull, overlong mess. Even a game performance by Austin Butler, who’s doing the sort of impersonation that Oscar voters seem to love, can’t salvage this thing, which could have been 45 minutes shorter yet somehow misses some of the most interesting parts of the singer’s life story. (It’s free for HBO Max subscribers, or you can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Elvis tries to be a cradle-to-grave story, or at least an early childhood to death one, starting out with Elvis as a very young boy who moves with his family to a house in the white part of a Black neighborhood, where he was introduced to the gospel and blues music that he later used (or appropriated) in his own sound. The narrative then winds its way through his rise to stardom, marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu, stint in the army, the comeback special, and so on, until he gets addicted to drugs and dies, in connect-the-dots storytelling that might still have worked if Lurhman had any interest at all in telling the whole of Elvis’s story. Instead, we get a nonsense framing device of Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who is both the narrator and whose perspective is supposed to be our lens on the story, as Parker keeps trying to tell the viewers that he’s not that bad of a guy, and Elvis wouldn’t have been anything without him. It’s a pointless distraction and shifts the focus to a character nobody really cares about – or, if they did, maybe the film could have been called Parker and just put Elvis in the background. (Please, nobody do this.)be an

Presley’s actual life was far messier than the one we see in Elvis, not least of which is that he had several affairs while married to Priscilla, something the film glosses over almost entirely until the point where she announces that she’s leaving him and taking their daughter Lisa Marie with her. Among other sins of the script, such as the superficial treatment of his substance abuse issues or scant discussion of his appropriation of Black music or how his success may have allowed Black artists to follow in his wake, this amounts to a sort of hagiography that paints Elvis as a victim. Col. Parker did take advantage of Elvis financially and probably did so emotionally as well, but the story is so weirdly one-sided – even though Parker is the narrator – that the singer comes off as a pathetic man-child, and often not responsible for his own actions. I doubt this is accurate, and it’s certainly not interesting to watch.

Luhrman also plays loose with some key facts, which I suppose is par for the course in these music biopics, but his depiction of a race riot at an Elvis concert at Memphis’s Russwood Park is almost pure fiction. It plays into Lurhman’s ham-fisted attempts to tie Elvis’s career to the civil rights movement, which comes up again when Luhrman moves the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in time so that it happens during the taping of the comeback special, rather than some weeks before it, so that there can be a Big Moment backstage where Elvis and the producer decide the singer has to make a statement during the show and change the closing number. (There’s some good comedy in that whole sequence, though, as Parker sold the show as a Christmas special, and keeps insisting that Elvis close with a Christmas song and wear an ugly sweater.) A screenwriter can alter some timelines or small facts in service of the story, but here, Luhrman does the opposite – it holds the story back, makes the film longer, and adds no real interest. Even the comeback special, which was the most-watched TV program of its year and has entered music history for its impact on the culture and the way it opened up the second act of his career, is kind of boring in Elvis. I’d much rather watch that special three times, which would match the running time of this mess, than watch Elvis again.

Butler is a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor – Drama, with Colin Farrell in a separate category because The Banshees of Inisherin counts as a Musical or Comedy. And Butler is good, even if he looks more like Miley Cyrus than Elvis when he’s in his stage makeup. The oddsmakers favor Elvis getting a Best Picture nod, which would be a real travesty, both on its face (this movie sucks) and because it’s going to push out something far more worthy. It’s just a waste of a lot of time and money, and the only film I’ve seen this year that I’d rank below it is Amsterdam, which would also fit that same description.

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→ March 1, 2022
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The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

Jessica Chastain won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actress in a Film this past weekend for her portrayal of the title character in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, yet another in the ongoing series of crappy biopics churned out by Hollywood as Oscar bait. It’s especially unfortunate here, as Tammy Faye Bakker was a far more interesting person than this movie even considers, and wastes a solid performance by Chastain that’s more than the garden-variety impersonations that usually win these categories. (It’s streaming free on HBO Max.)

If you know of Tammy Faye Bakker already, it’s because she was the wife of televangelist Jim Bakker for most of her life; they met in college and she appeared on air with him for over two decades, helping him build a following and then an entire network, while also becoming a bit of a punch line herself for her excessive makeup and the way it would run when she’d cry. Their empire imploded when two scandals hit – Jim had been siphoning off donors’ money, and some of it went to pay off an employee, Jessica Hahn, who accused Bakker of raping her. The Bakkers divorced while he was behind bars, and Tammy Faye later married a business associate of theirs who himself later went to prison for bankruptcy fraud – she could sure pick ’em! – and died in 2007 of colon cancer.

That’s her story, at least the most public part of it, and that’s the story that The Eyes of Tammy Faye tells, when it bothers to tell a story at all. (Don’t even get me started on how much is made up in this film – pun intended.) This is a biopic, but not a biography. It’s not interested in telling us about Tammy Faye Bakker, the person. It’s a recitation of things that happened to her. She had an unhappy childhood. She married young. She helped Jim Bakker build his business with her puppets and her high, sing-songy voice. Her marriage crumbled, then fell apart. We get a few glimpses of her character, such as the various times she refuses to be the subservient wife when Bakker’s colleagues Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are around – Jerry Jr. isn’t depicted, as he was busy with the pool cleaner – but those are scant, because a script this perfunctory has to play the hits. (Vincent D’Onofrio is unrecognizable as Falwell, although you might pick up his voice behind the clipped speech.)

The script does show the most important anecdote from Tammy Faye’s public life, at least: her on-air, live interview with Steve Pieters, a gay pastor who was diagnosed with HIV in 1982. (He’s still alive and gave a wonderful interview with Religion & Politics about the experience and the new film.) It was a compassionate, non-judgmental conversation, one that was consistent with Tammy Faye’s view of Christianity, showing love and compassion for everyone without judgment, but not Falwell’s and Robertson’s. Even today, it’s hard to imagine an evangelical TV show airing such a segment. In 1985, though, it was revolutionary – and Tammy Faye remained a supporter of the LGBTQ+ community for the rest of her life, even serving as the grand marshal of a pride parade at one point. This illustrates a lot more about the person she was than a series of vignettes, like the nonsense one about how they first ended up on television after their car was stolen (never happened), shows us.

Instead, The Eyes of Tammy Faye paints by numbers – this happened, and this happened, and then this happened, and then she took a bunch of pills, and then it all fell apart. (As far as I can tell, she never appeared intoxicated or stoned on air, either.) It is a series of unfortunate events, with no attempts to connect any of them, or give the audience any understanding of the people behind them other than painting Jim in broad strokes – which may be all he deserves, as both a philanderer and a fraud – and Tammy in only slightly less broad ones.

Chastain and Andrew Garfield expend so much energy trying to sound like the Bakkers that their work feels more like mimicry than acting – which is probably unfair to them both, but more to Chastain, who also has a lot more to do than Garfield does. Garfield’s Bakker is wooden, ambitious, single-minded, and if his faith was real at some point, it loses out to his desire for money and power. That transition occurs off screen, although you could argue its impact on Tammy Faye deserved more explanation. Chastain’s performance is more central, given that she’s the protagonist of the film, yet her imitation of Tammy Faye’s voice and mannerisms, as well as hair and makeup that make it hard to recognize the actress beneath, is hard to separate from the performance. She’s probably better than Nicole Kidman’s in Being the Ricardos, but there is no way on earth I’d vote for her over Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers or Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter, and I think Alana Haim was better in Licorice Pizza as well. The Eyes of Tammy Faye also got a nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling; I’ve only seen one other nominee, Dune, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this one win. It’s just not a very good movie, despite, or perhaps because of, all the emphasis on making it look right.

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