Christopher Nolan is riding high. Oppenheimer, Nolan’s biopic about the famed nuclear physicist, was (rightly) one of 2023’s biggest hits, critically and commercially. It continued his impressive run of thinking man’s blockbusters: popular films with some degree of intellectual sophistication.
But on one particular ride, Nolan was laid low. Accepting the New York Film Critics Circle award for best director for Oppenheimer, the director recounted a dispiriting interruption of one of his Peloton workouts: His instructor turned out also to be a critic. Per the New York Post:
“Directors have a complex emotional relationship with critics and criticism,” the “Interstellar” and “Inception” director said in his Jan 4. acceptance speech for “best director,” after winning that prize from the New York Film Critics Circle on Thursday.
While standing at the podium to accept his award, he told an anecdote about [Jenn] Sherman — who he referred to as “the instructor” — bashing him as he sweat and followed her instructions.
“I was on my Peloton. I’m dying. And the instructor started talking about one of my films and said, ‘Did anyone see this? That’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back again!’” Nolan said, laughing.
“When (film critic) Rex Reed takes a s – – t on your film, he doesn’t ask you to work out!”
As the Post notes, Nolan did not initially name “the instructor” (shades of “the Protagonist“), but social-media sleuths figured out who she was. And found her precise remarks:
In the resurfaced footage of Sherman’s class from 2020, she said, “Someone’s got to explain this. Yeah I’m not kidding, what the f – – k was going on in that movie?” she said at the time, referring to “Tenet,” starring Robert Pattinson and John David Washington.
“Seriously, you need to be a neuroscientist to understand. And that’s two and a half hours of my life that I want back!”
Sherman, upon learning that she had been identified, accepted it with equanamity, and persisted in her criticism of Tenet. She has a point: Tenet was an unnecessarily confusing disappointment from Nolan. While I was glad to see it in theaters (at a time when many were closed by Covid restrictions), and found some of it entertaining, I had decidedly mixed thoughts overall:
Characters’ motivations are uncertain, the dialogue is unclear (sometimes literally hard to hear, at least in my showing), and the plot seems to be something of an afterthought. Unlike in other Nolan movies, such as Inception, the “trick” of the movie doesn’t really line up with its ostensible emotional core. Indeed, my overall impression of Tenet is that Nolan spent a great deal of time and energy trying to figure out a way to have time travel — sorry, “inversion” — make sense, and then, once he did that, hastily constructed a movie on top of it.
Sherman did stress, however, that she enjoyed Oppenheimer: “I have seen ‘Oppenheimer’ twice and that’s six hours of my life that I don’t ever want to give back.”
All in all, it’s an amusing story. Sonny Bunch was right (this time) to observe that it’s “something you could see happening in a Coen Brothers movie but probably not in a Christopher Nolan movie.” Ride on, Nolan.