Has the director revealed his personal cinema leitmotif
Like legends, the more open movies are to ongoing interpretation, the longer they linger in our cultural consciousness. And few filmmakers’ films are as ripe for rewatching as those of Christopher Nolan, whose final magic trick was adapting a 700-page biography of a theoretical physicist into a blockbuster that won Best Picture. Oppenheimer‘s success was representative of Nolan’s unique ability to combine complex thought experiments and labyrinthine narratives into a jaw-dropping, IMAX-worthy spectacle.
But while plenty of ink has been spilled extolling the formal and technical aspects of Nolan’s work (his devotion to celluloid and on-set practical effects), just as much has been written about his film’s characters, and that’s where reviews aren’t always so kind. For starters, each new outing seems to reignite the on-again, off-again discourse surrounding its often problematic female characters (they’re “dead wives”; they’re barely there; when they’re there, they’re scripted plot devices that serve the men’s narrative needs).
But one trope that Nolan generally manages to avoid is the suspicious wife trying to dissuade her husband from an all-consuming quest (see: JFK, Zodiacequal Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Although overly symbolic, Nolan’s female characters represent the exact opposite; not an obstacle their husbands must overcome, but something they long to return to: family.
Inside Memory (2000), Guy Pearce’s insomniac Leonard Shelby sifts through his fragmented memories to avenge his wife’s death. Inside Beginning (2010), Leonardo DiCaprio’s dream thief Dom Cobb takes on one last job for a chance to reunite with his children, infiltrating the subconscious of a wealthy industrialist and wrangling with the memories of his long-lost wife. Inside interstellar (2014), Matthew McConaughey’s NASA pilot-turned-farmer (and did I mention widower?) Joseph Cooper travels to a distant galaxy and the mouth of a black hole to get one last glimpse of his daughter’s childhood.
Emily Blunt’s long-suffering wife Oppenheimer (2023), Maggie Gyllenhaal’s victim prosecutor The Dark Knight (2008), even invisible women on the margins Dunkirk (2017) – Either way, there’s a family waiting at home for all of Nolan’s scientists, soldiers, and superheroes, if only they weren’t so attached to greatness.
Despite the puzzle-box structure and enigmatic reputation of his films, Nolan often wears his heart when discussing this prevailing motif in his work. “I wrote a lot of dead wives, that’s true,” he admitted when pressed by the press. Beginning “But you try to put your relatable fears into these things,” he said in 2010. “You take the things that you’re really worried about in real life, or the things that you care about in real life, and you come up with this: [something] universal.”
Elsewhere, he has spoken at length about the double-edged sword of his success: creative carte blanche, but at the expense of watching his children grow up like an ordinary father. “The tension in a lot of my movies is between family and wanting to be with the family and taking on responsibilities outside of that, being pulled outside of that,” Nolan said in a recent interview. GQ. “This is something I relate to very strongly.” Lucky for us, he managed to squeeze hundreds of millions of dollars from Hollywood to explore this very personal suffering on the largest cinematic canvases imaginable.
Anyone who has been in therapy can attest to the fact that it often takes the longest to get to the simplest truths. Similarly, the most fundamental thematic concerns of many filmmakers lucky enough to work for decades tend to crystallize with age. We saw this recently in Steven Spielberg’s movie. Disclosure Day (“aliens are real”) and Martin Scorsese Killers of the Flower Moon (“money is the root of all evil”).
Thirteen films later, it’s Nolan’s turn (“I miss my wife”). With Homer’s ancient epic OdysseyHe focused on a text so uniquely suited to his own concerns that it’s surprising how long it took him to get used to it. After all, who is the hero Odysseus, who spent 20 years away from home, fighting wars and challenging the gods in order to return to his family, if not the man? And what is it? Odyssey Unless it’s an emergency for workaholic dads around the world who are stuck in rush hour traffic and missing their kids’ school recitals?
The only question now is the man who made superheroes brave, nuclear physics cool, and Harry Styles an actor.Dunkirk) could also reignite global audiences’ appetite for a very specific genre of cinema. In the mid-20th century, sword-and-sandal epics were Hollywood’s bread and butter before going the way of the western and the musical. Samson and Delilah, Quo Vadis, Ten Commandments – From the ’30s to the ’60s, these historical, often religiously-centered epics delighted audiences and critics alike (not to mention the hugely popular Italian “peplum” films that were the forerunner of the “spaghetti western,” a localized knockoff industry that produced twice as many films for a fraction of the price).
Watching these old movies now means witnessing the peak of Hollywood’s power. Ben-Hur (1959) was the most expensive film ever made at the time, using over 300 hand-built sets built at the legendary Cinecittà Studios in Rome. The famous car race’s 18-acre (seven-hectare) arena was carved into a rock quarry by a thousand craftsmen before being filled with up to 15,000 extras during the 10 weeks of filming. The following year Stanley Kubrick Spartacus he upped the ante with 50,000 extras, including almost 10,000 infantry borrowed from the Spanish army for the desert battle scenes. The film earned US$60 million from its US$12 million budget; That’s almost $700 million in today’s money.
The genre hit rock bottom around 1963 CleopatraA lavish four-hour epic directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Three times the cost Ben-Hur only three years ago it cost, Cleopatra Although it was the highest-grossing film at the American box office that year and received nine Oscar nominations, it struggled to meet its budget. Such astronomical costs, combined with changing audience tastes in the nascent 1960s, saw the decline of Hollywood’s golden age of Greco-Roman fantasy; Dennis Hopper at the end of this decade Easy Driving For less than half a million dollars. The rest is cinema history.
By the 1980s, the dogged historical precision of Kubrick and Mankiewicz had given way to all-out fantasy. Sword and sandals became sword and sorcery. Spartacus transformed into Excalibur. Cleopatra became Conan. in the 90s The Last of the Mohicans And Brave heart It reminded audiences of the joys of practically made historical action epics, but it wasn’t until 2000 that Ridley Scott completely revitalized the genre with its Best Picture winner, Barnstorming. gladiator.
It feeds into the basic premise Spartacuswith a little Ben-Hur car action thrown in for good measure, gladiator It felt like a compilation of the greatest hits from a bygone era being presented to a whole new audience. Its success led to a 21st-century mini-renaissance of wildly varying quality. For every semi-regular Alexander there was one Scorpion KingONE Exodus: Gods and KingsA. Egyptian Gods or a painfully miscalculated remake Ben-Hur.
It took more than twenty years for us to obtain an official document gladiator sequel, starring crazy-eyed, mini-mullet-wearing internet boyfriend Paul Mescal as the bloodthirsty killing machine (your mileage may vary). Never forget: There’s a world where Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe don’t object to Nick Cave’s proposal gladiator “follow-up written under the working title” in the 2000sJesus Killer” – and in that world, instead Gladiator IImixed The Force Awakens-In Lega-sequel fashion, we see Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius pillaging in the purgatory afterlife, then returning to Earth on a mission to kill Jesus before time-traveling through millennia of gunfights and taking a desk job at the Pentagon.
Immediately afterwards, two films stand out.gladiator years: the first was 2004 TrojanHere’s how it plays today: Odysseyunwitting preface. The second one was in 2006 300Directed by then-up-and-comer Zack Snyder. As a young boy in the late 2000s, I can personally attest to the fact that it was nearly impossible to attend a social gathering without another young man kicking you in the chest and saying, “This is Sparta.”
However 300‘s legacy extends far beyond Gerard Butler’s famous catchphrase. It laid the groundwork for much of today’s all-digital cinematography and evolved Snyder’s maximalist, hyper-masculine aesthetic just two years after Nolan brought Batman down to earth with his gritty franchise reboot. Batman Begins.
When Snyder became the caped crusader’s keeper in 2016, he gleefully jettisoned Nolan’s naturalistic house style; Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice It shows the struggle of the lead characters in what can only be described as a gladiatorial fight. Apparently this was also Sparta.
The founding fathers of DC Comics’ cinematic universe remain a yin and yang of style and intellectuality. Nolan clearly believes that for myths to appeal to the masses, the gods in those myths must be relatable; fallible. Meanwhile, the biggest emotional payoff during Synder’s tenure in the DC-verse was the climax that Superman and Batman’s mothers share the same name (I think there’s a whiff of Greek myth in that). His superheroes are gods in the ancient Olympian sense: cruel, six-way ciphers to be feared or worshiped but never fully understood.
So what about director Nolan, who prides himself on his realism and rejects the concept of magic in a feature-length manner with his 2006 film? Prestige – tackling an ancient tale filled with gods, sirens and Cyclops? on paper, Odyssey It fits better into the Snyder school of filmmaking, where the ever-present glow of green screen is a feature, not a bug.
I believe the answer lies again in Nolan’s characters. It is worth noting that the permanent image is remarkable. Oppenheimer It’s not the film’s photorealistic atomic explosion, just an extreme close-up of Cillian Murphy’s guilt-torn face, shot in razor-sharp 65mm.
If Odyssey If it proves to be Nolan’s masterpiece, it won’t be because of the period-appropriate craftsmanship used to craft the Trojan Horse, or the thousands of extras on the beaches of Ithaca, or the billions of dollars it will likely earn at the box office. That’s because it has once again managed to do what all enduring myths and the best movies do: take something personal and turn it into something universal. A lost love; a longed-for childhood; A life you could have lived but didn’t. Each a very different type of kick to the chest.
Odyssey It opens on July 16.
