With roughly one-tenth of the film truly and poignantly unforgettable, it holds great promise to be great, but to be sure it is not, because Nolan unforgivably makes the other nine-tenths as dry as a Balzac novel.
Perhaps a simple tale could be made better when told in a sophisticated way, like in some of the best works by Faulkner, but an already confusing or vague figure could only be made more confusing and vague and less adorable, if not altogether absurd, when polluted by a fashionable though well-intended narrative (just think, for example, is not As I lay dying much more powerful than Absalom! Absalom!).
Another curious aspect of that film is its obsession with drawing-room-political-chats, which strangely echoes the most tedious part in novels from the 19th century French realism canon. Apparently the director expects the audience to know a lot about politics and splits and factions and disputes during the Second World War, like Stendhal (quite unreasonably) demands a solid understanding of the Restoration Period to be not at a loss to what is discussed in ‘The Hotel de La Mole’. I happen to be the ignorant reader who is firmly against any sort of prerequisites in art, and perhaps that is why my admiration for Joyce stops at The portait of artist as a young man and refuses to entend into Ulysses, and whenever marine knowledge is presumed in Moby Dick, it serves as a very effective sleeping pill for me.
With a slight fever and a cloudy head, there are moments during the three-hours sitting which are barely bearable for me, in spite of the alluring effect of the sparkling IMAX screen. I am particularly irritated by the following: the sickly sweet caramel popcorn sold at the EmperorCinemas which caused me a fit of embarrassingly irrepressible coughs, dull legal phrases such as ‘burden of proof’ and ‘dissenting opinion’ that are becoming unfamiliar to my ears after I walked out of law school, our dear womanish scientist and his hopelessly babyish ways with women (which makes his presumed charisma as a public figure all the more unconvincing), and the impossible cries of his impossible kids in his impossible household.
