The latest film from writer/director Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer, continues to be a money maker at the box office. Earning $174 million domestically and $400 million globally, after just two weeks Oppenheimer is estimated to be the biggest Nolan film of all time. Nothing baffling about that, still it seems that part of the movie going public is having a difficult time with the three hour plus opus stating that the film’s structure is “confusing” and “hard to follow.” There are at least four different timelines—which, in typical Nolan fashion, are all out of order, with no clear way to distinguish between them—each depicting a different, complicated chapter of the physicist’s life.
Now, Christopher Nolan is quite possibly the most literal big budget director we’ve ever had. His movies are at their best impressive and well-constructed crossword puzzles but his movies leave zero room for ambiguity and the puzzles always, always have an answer.
It seems like there are at least four different definitions of “confusion” in regards to movies. Let’s break it down…
The movie is incompetently made on a fundamental level, and the director is failing to convey information or make sense of events that were supposed to be clear. Jokes and the odd plot hole aside, this doesn’t really happen in major studio releases anymore. Too much money goes into them to release something that even the lowest common denominator can’t understand or appreciate.
The movie’s plot is explicitly explained, but it’s using a premise that is different enough from other movies that if you miss the wrong five minutes or are on your phone while you watch it, you could conceivably miss enough information that the rest of the plot will be hard to follow. This is where a lot of the Nolan movies live. Inception or Memento are all laid out as long as you’re watching closely, but if you’re missing the set-up or transitions between states, things can go off the rails pretty fast (as opposed to, say, most romantic comedies or revenge thrillers, where you can skip 10-90% of the plot and still basically understand what’s going on.)
The movie’s plot is so complicated or asks the viewer to infer so much of it that there’s little chance a normal person is going to fully understand what’s happening on the first run through. They don’t make a lot of these and they’re usually bad, but something like Primer would be an example of a film that does this and arguably pulls it off or is at least deliberately using the viewer’s confusion to make its point.
The movie has abandoned traditional narrative rules of cause and effect and is instead using symbolism, abstract imagery, or dream logic to tell a “story.” This is what Meshes of the Afternoon, The Color of Pomegranates, the end of 2001, and Lynch’s most famous movies are doing.
I think that two through four are stylistic choices that aren’t inherently good or bad, but none of them are really the same thing. In the same way that Nolan’s puzzles might be complicated, or in some cases convoluted, but this is just not a particularly complex filmmaker.