REVIEW: OPPENHEIMER/BLUR
Saw Oppenheimer. What a schlep. Could have been brilliant if they took out at least an hour. Someone has to stand up to these men making three hour films. Cut stuff out. The audience won’t miss what they never knew. You don’t have to cover every single second of Oppenheimers life. And if you do want to cover every major base of his story, then handle each sequence with brevity. Get each point across in fewer moments. That’s enough to create narrative threads with emotional and intellectual impact and which can be interwoven for a larger cumulative purpose. It’s possible to create a work of emotional and intellectual grander succintly. It can still simmer with the sensation of a slow burn. Not only does attempting to cover every single interaction Robert Oppenheimer had in his life create tedium and repetition, it diminishes the brilliant bits because you’re art fatigued. They also no longer land in a rhythmically sweet spot. They land within a loose and floppy structure. Tighten your drums. Get those beats landing sharp and snappy.
It’s a shame because there are genuinely brilliant moments. There are sequences where the physicality of image and sound are manipulated to create strong sensory reactions. The bomb test scene is almost panic attack inducing. If you want a comparison you may have seen, the Normandy Landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan is a well known example of this sensory manipulation being used. The extraction or injection of sound, and the slowing down and speeding up of footage, can create a tunnel vision that grabs hold of your breath, guiding you into a state of supreme focus where the entire cinematic universe is condensed down to a small detail or noise. It can be deeply affecting emotionally. The bomb test scene captured the terrible magnitude of the event by focusing on tiny details. Perhaps that is the only way to capture something so unfathomably large.
There are also skilfully edited sequences where fantasy bleeds into reality with ghoulish effect. Oppenheimer’s speech to an enthusiastic auditorium, after the bombing of Hiroshima, is one such scene. The technique physically drags both character and audience into an altered state of consciousness. Let’s give another comparison of this device, perhaps seen by fewer people. John Schlesinger’s 1969 movie, The Midnight Cowboy, is excellent at drifting us imperceptibly from reality to daydream. But whereas the Midnight Cowboy pull us into the escapist fantasies of it’s tragic characters, Oppenheimer pulls us into waking nightmares. What was biography momentarily becomes horror.
But going back to the length of the film: an audience are less likely to experience the full impact of that horror if you’ve sedated them first...
By contrast I really enjoyed the brevity of the new Blur album, The Ballad of Darren:
Running at 36 minutes it loses no grandeur or emotional impact for its short length. Each terse song creates a mood and moves on. There’s nothing to be gained from lingering around for repetition. What more can be added to the heart-ache of each track? You get it. The dude is sad. By moving swiftly on from one track to the next none of the mood evaporates, (it doesn’t have the chance), and all feeling is kept on a rolling boil.
The album isn’t full of many songs you could sing acapella or belt out in a Wembley Stadium sing-along. What it does have is a masterful unity. It’s power exists in the album as a whole rather than it’s singles. It’s a coherent album of songs cut from the same cloth and which work together to create a restrained melancholy. There is nothing too melodically ostentatious that deviates from the pack.
One could say it makes no sense to eschew having overt pop “bangers”, but it’s potent to see the overall mood given supremacy and avoid tracks that might throw the album off-balance. Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline comes to mind as a similarly short album where the songs hang together perfectly in mood and sound.
All that said, this is still Blur, and so hooks and melody remain foundational to their song-writing. There are some delicious, localised moments of crooning melody and instrumental ornamentation to be savoured - even if the album largely pulls back from anthemic, sing along choruses.
Why has Blur’s appeal been so enduring? How do they fill up Wembley Stadium for two nights and have the entire crowd elated from start to finish? There’s one word that insistently comes to me: ROMANCE. Their music is so bloody romantic. And not just their love songs. Be it songs about middle-aged breakdowns such as Tracy Jacks - or songs capturing the parochial details of British life - such as the Radio 4 shipping forecast structure found in This Is A Low - their music is romantic. And I can only conclude that deep down everyone is romantic because, (apart from one or two psychopaths), everyone has a heart. Blur write songs from the heart that appeal unashamedly to the heart, and they do so with sufficient complexity and particularity to stave off anything that could be described as saccharine or trite.