By Eamon Raftery-Sweeney | Staff Writer
The undeniable king of Hollywood for the past decade is Christopher Nolan. A critical darling with commercial appeal, the public is convinced that he is a genius filmmaker. His gritty reboot of the Batman movie franchise set the tone for the following decade of superhero movies. On top of this, many of his works are some of the highest grossing and most celebrated movies of all time, especially online, where his movies chart high on the IMDb Top 250 list and in the Letterboxd community. People can’t get enough of Nolan.
But is he really worth the hype?
Nolan fans seem to have come to the consensus that his movies are “clever”, filled with complex themes and surprising twists that keep the viewer guessing. There’s no doubt that Nolan’s movies are complex, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re clever. His signature move is to manipulate time; Inception, for instance, takes place in a dream, where time slows down relative to real life. Even when he doesn’t manipulate time, he has clever twists and turns that make his movies fun to watch. Looking closely, however, neither of these are true. The Prestige, for instance, ends with a twist that feels cheap instead of clever. No clues were given, so the audience had no way to see through the con and guess the movie’s ending before it was revealed. People have analyzed the ending to Inception for years, despite there being nothing to talk about: the top clearly falls, but Cobb doesn’t care about his old life anymore, so he doesn’t witness it. They project a deeper meaning onto this ending because the rest of the movie is so complicated. Surely the ending must also be another puzzle? This constant complication of the plot in his more complex pieces, such as Interstellar and Inception, also creates pacing issues. Characters spend many scenes explaining to each other (and thus the audience) what exactly is going on. If Nolan truly were a clever filmmaker, his characters wouldn’t need to explain everything; he could simply show what is happening.
Because so much expository information is needed to tell Nolan’s stories, most of the dialogue in his movies feels oddly stilted and direct. Characters often say exactly what they’re thinking at any given moment, or begin to give lectures on what the mission is. While this issue is especially present in movies like Inception, even in his less complex movies the dialogue is still rough. The Dark Knight Rises has some of the most boring and awkward expository dialogue I’ve ever heard - I’m remembering an early scene where Catwoman attacks a fleeing businessman, and when she asks where a device is, he gives a quick monologue about everything it does. The stories are usually compelling; it’s the delivery that’s awkward.
The stilted dialogue means that Nolan’s movies rely heavily on the actors to breathe some life into them. Unfortunately, the actors don’t always live up to the task, and this is Nolan’s fault. As director, it is his job to direct the actors, to coax the best performance possible from them. And while Nolan often chooses talented actors, their performances are often very middling or forgettable. Despite the hype, I always thought Christian Bale was a so-so Batman. The choice to make his Batman voice a low growl is frankly ridiculous, and Bale’s performance as Bruce Wayne was just ok. He’s turned in far more powerful performances than this. And while The Dark Knight is admittedly a stellar film, people do not praise it for its story or Bale’s performance - they praise it mostly for Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. If it weren’t for him, The Dark Knight would not have been as highly praised as it is.
While I’m not generally a fan of Christopher Nolan, three of his movies strike me as far above the rest: Memento, Insomnia, and Dunkirk. Each of these movies remove dead weight from his overbearing style, and produce enjoyable movies in the process.
Memento was the movie that put Nolan on the map as a promising young director. In many ways, the movie embodies a lot of the issues of Nolan’s work: the overly complicated plot, the awkward dialogue and somewhat stilted performances are all here in spades. The difference, though, is that the complication is actually clever. The gimmick of the movie is that it is presented in reverse order, which simulates how it feels to have short-term amnesia, an affliction that the main character has. The audience experiences the film the way he experiences life. While it is sometimes difficult to watch, at least the rules of the time skips are clear. Plus, the movie ends with a clever twist, one that Nolan has failed to replicate since.
The most recent Nolan film I’ve seen, Dunkirk, is another one of the less intensely Nolan movies in his filmography. While it does tell three separate stories on different time scales - something that can be confusing to watch - the movie wastes no time explaining to the audience what the rules of the film are. Indeed, the script is one of Nolan’s shortest. For the first fifteen minutes, hardly a word of dialogue is spoken, and the attention is placed solely on the stoic performances of the actors. There’s no room for bad dialogue if a large part of the movie is silent. The movie allows Nolan to show off his eye for dramatic action sequences, something he admittedly excels at. While it’s not a perfect movie, the harrowing scene on a sinking ship is still fresh in my memory years later.
Insomnia, for me, is Nolan’s most underrated film. Whereas most of his non-Batman films manipulate time in some complex way, here he keeps it simple: the movie takes place during the summer solstice in northern Alaska, when the sun never sets. A detective, played by Al Pacino, must find a killer while dealing with the effects of insomnia. I think the movie impresses me so much because the writing is noticeably better than most Nolan movies - indeed, it’s one of only a few movies not written by him or his brother. The pacing is much tighter, the suspense and action are much more affecting thanks to a powerful performance from Pacino, and the bold choice of casting Robin Williams as a murderous pedophile surprisingly pays off very well. The many things that usually bog down a Nolan movie are not present here at all.
The exceptions prove the rule. Nolan’s movies generally present themselves as intellectual action movies, when in reality, they’re just needlessly complex, and the characters use big fancy words to describe their actions.
So, no, I’m not going to see Tenet. Even if we weren’t in a pandemic.
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