Christopher Nolan’s “cruel” movie made him admit his biggest failure: “That’s the only one where I see that”
For many filmgoers and critics, the cinematic sun does nothing but shine out of Christopher Nolan’s arse. While it’s undeniably true that the Academy Award winner is one of the modern era’s most talented, successful, and generally greatest directors, he isn’t without his flaws.
Even though he’s repeatedly justified his eardrum-shattering sound mixes, some folks just don’t like it. Nolan has his reasons for frequently drowning out the dialogue and going full Spinal Tap with the sound effects, but it’s not an artistic decision that everyone is on board with.
The celebrated auteur has also repeatedly been dragged over hot coals for his underwritten, underdeveloped, and largely forgettable female characters. At this stage in his career, not a single one of Nolan’s films has passed the Bechdel test, and at this point it’s hard to believe they ever will.
And for anyone who tries to play the Kitty Oppenheimer card, which landed Emily Blunt a well-deserved Oscar nomination, she was a real person, and he had factual research to inform the characterisation. Apart from his most recent picture, how many memorable women have played a prominent role in his movies?
Another recurring bugbear is the c-word, and no, it isn’t people thinking he’s a cunt. Instead, much of Nolan’s work has been branded cold, with his undoubtedly stylish, complex, entertaining, engrossing, and massively successful back catalogue sorely lacking in feeling, emotion, and heart, and feeling too calculated.
He confessed the script for Memento was looking that way until a combination of rewrites and Guy Pearce’s performances elevated it into a mini masterpiece, but that wasn’t the movie that made him hold his hands up and admit, for the one and only time, that he’d made a cold fish of a feature.
“Compared to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is a cruel, cold film,” he said. “People talk about my films as being cold, and that’s really the only one where I see that, because the Joker is such an engine driving that film in such awful ways. That’s all the film is, a relentless series of horrible situations contrived by the Joker, and that was always the intent.”
This being Nolan, the solitary entry among his list of credits that he copped to being cold earned over a billion dollars at the box office, is largely regarded as the best movie ever made in its chosen genre, and became the measuring stick by which most comic book adaptations have been compared ever since.
Ironically, it doesn’t feel like his coldest work, even if it’s the only one he’ll agree with. Then again, a lot of that has to do with Heath Ledger’s showstopping performance as the Joker, who creates a sense of urgency and energy every time he appears onscreen, and even when he’s not, the anticipation for what he’ll do next ensures the viewer never finds themselves growing bored with the story.
What is Nolan’s coldest contribution to cinema, then? It’s in the eye of the beholder, but it’s hard to look past Tenet. It’s got some nice visual trickery, but the narrative isn’t up to much, and having John David Washington’s one-note and unnamed protagonist anchoring the film didn’t do it any favours.
