Christopher Nolan is unquestionably the most powerful director working today. He’s a rare creative force who dominates the box office, wins countless awards, and was recently elected DGA president. He’s also elevated mainstream cinema for the better, making complex set pieces, non linear narratives, and heady, metaphysical themes digestible for broad audiences. I’d argue Nolan is the closest successor we have today to Steven Spielberg, a masterful technical director.
Yet paradoxically his strongest films, the works most likely to stand the test of time, succeed despite the director’s tendencies instead of because of them.
This paradox exists because Nolan is a flawed writer. His screenplays have too much exposition and characters tell us how they feel rather than show us. Dialogue tends to be direct and analytical. Women characters lack dimension; many serve as little more than plot points that motivate the men driving the story forward. Most are dead (Memento, Inception, The Dark Knight, Oppenheimer), in peril (The Odyssey, Tenet), or bland villains (The Dark Knight Rises.)
Nolan’s cerebral writing style paired with his complex narratives and bombastic setpieces can make his films feel emotionally distant. Function leads; form follows. It’s like a master watchmaker showing off the intricacies of their designs. You walk away dazzled by the craftsmanship, yet unmoved.
Still, the right actor cast with the right material is able to add a level of emotion and warmth that transcends Nolan’s writing. One of my favorite Nolan films, Memento, serves as a great example.
Memento follows Leonard (Guy Pearce), a former insurance investigator trying to find who killed his wife and caused him to develop a condition that prevents him from forming long-term memories. That’s already a novel premise for a psychological thriller, but Nolan takes it much further with a fragmented narrative: Short sequences alternate between black and white and color: the former show in chronological order, while the latter run in reverse. The sequencing helps puts the audience in the disoriented headspace of Leonard, yet makes it a challenging to sustain individual character arcs. Yet the three main actors at the center of the story rise to the occasion.
Carrie-Ann Moss’s Natalie is the “femme fatale” of this warped neo-noir. We meet her early in the film when she appears as a bartender that offers to help Leonard in his investigation. Moss balances her character’s sympathetic back story with a hard, tough screen presence that immediately calls into question her trustworthiness. Her performance heightens the moral ambiguity and paranoia of the film, even with her scant minutes of screen time.
Joe Pantoliano plays Teddy, a copy and another mysterious support figure who provides an emotional counterbalance to Natalie. While Natalie is reserved and often hard to read, Teddy is gregarious, friendly, and prone to cracking jokes. Pantoliano adds warmth and humor that makes an otherwise pitch black story more palatable. Teddy’s demeanor also deepens the tragedy of the film’s final twist.
Pearce is also strong in a handful of small yet critical scenes. My favorite comes when Leonard lies in bed and remisces about his wife in the context of losing all sense of time: “If I could just…reach over and touch…her side of the bed, I would know that it was cold, but I can’t.” The way Pierce slowly delivers his dialogue while reaching his hand out to the void is deeply disturbing. It feels like a man numb to the world, locked in a nightmare he can’t escape.
While Memento’s fragmented sequencing is the obvious initial draw, the more times I watch it, the more I’m haunted by the characters’ actions. They suggest our memories are deeply fallible, and that we’ll readily embrace falsehoods to shield ourselves from awful truths. It’s one of Nolan’s bleakest screenplays, enhanced by actors who understand their characters well and execute on them beautifully.
Memento’s rumination on deception and revenge is also a big focus of The Prestige, albeit from a very different perspective. The film’s lavish production design, Victorian London setting, and fantastical elements marked a deviation from Nolan’s prior work. Many viewed this as a palate cleanser, a minor entry to Nolan’s filmography that would bridge the gap between his far more popular Batman films.
Yet twenty years since its release, The Prestige has aged well. It’s currently one of Nolan’s highest ranked films on Letterboxd and a consistent favorite among critics. Having recently watched the film again I wholeheartedly agree.
Critically, it also conforms to my Nolan paradox: an ambitious plot, devoted more to literal and figurative slight of hand than a purely non linear narrative, is hampered by pedestrian writing and forgettable women characters. Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall are capable actors, yet are underwritten with minimal screen time. Every appearance serves as little more than a reminder that the male leads have lives beyond work.
Still, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are so magnetic and locked in that practically all flaws are forgiven. Playing rival stage magicians competing over increasingly elaborate illusions, they anchor the movie with their chemistry.
Admittedly, Bale’s working class magician Alfred Borden is the kind of gritty and understated role that the actor can play almost on autopilot. It’s Jackman that is the real acting revelation.
At first, Jackman’s casting as aristocratic showman Robert Angier feels almost too obvious given the actor’s extensive career in theater. He’s also an actor audiences root for: Jackman’s filmography before The Prestige was spent mostly playing Wolverine or romantic comedy leading men. When Angier suffers the first major tragedy of the film’s narrative, the death of his wife Julia in a magic show accident, the audience’s sympathy for him only deepens.
However, as the rivalry between Borden and Angier deepens, Angier’s obsession with outpacing his rival takes him into exceedingly dark territory. Without revealing the twist, Angier’s horrific “solution” to his teleportation illusion is only hinted at late in the film, with its full implications revealed in the final minutes.
Jackman brilliantly weaponizes his natural charm and sympathy against the audience. Jackman’s acting in the quieter moments reveals an increasingly erratic and unhinged character. Yet whenever Jackman appears onstage, Angier’s sociopathic tendencies seem to melt away. Tonally it’s a tricky subtle acting challenge to balance both public and private personas, but the effect is profound: the audience senses Angier’s desperation, yet may ignore the signs of how far he’ll go to defeat his rival until it’s too late.
For all the greatness in The Prestige and Memento that stems from excellent acting, the converse to also be true: Nolan’s weakest films are where his labyrinthian plots and excessive exposition suffocate his actors. The result is a dutifully well executed story that feels weightless. You might remember the film for a cool set piece, but the rest evaporates from memory days after watching it.
Tenet is the obvious poster child for this phenomenon. John David Washington and Kenneth Branagh, playing the hero and villain respectively, are utterly miscast. Nolan’s most incoherent plot ever falls on their shoulders. Defenders often argue this is more of a “vibes” movie, Nolan’s time warped James Bond film. Forget the structure enjoy the film for what it is, they say. Yet it’s the most memorable spy films always rely on the charms of their central cast; 007 wouldn’t be the same without a Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. This is a problem when the audience struggles to buy into the central characters, doubly so when so few of them seem to act like normal human beings.
Inception has one of Nolan’s strongest ensembles — Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, and Marion Cotillard are all Oscar nominees and established box office draws — yet they feel oddly anonymous in their actual roles here. The plot’s multi-layered, dreams within dreams structure doesn’t give an inch for any of the actors to deepen their characterization beyond the broadest strokes. DiCaprio, in particular, is often magnetic as a lead, but here seems to spend more time listening to other characters explain the film’s world to him than expressing genuine emotion himself.
Interestingly, Nolan’s paradox suggests the gap between a great Nolan film and a merely average one may feel minor. The most notable elements of any Nolan feature, the ones we strongly associate with his work — narrative, setting, set pieces — matter less than we might expect. The right actor and their ability to resonate emotionally with the audience matters more. Matt Damon does it with The Odyssey as much as Leonardo DiCaprio does not in Inception. For every success story like Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, there’s a miss like Liam Neeson in Batman Begins.
Ironically, the paradox helps explain some unevenness to Nolan’s output, even as his budgets escalate and overall filmmaking ability matures. It’s a fascinating fatal flaw in the work of one our most famous directors. Granted, Nolan’s unquestionably reached the height of filmmaking with little more to prove. But it remains to be seen if his characters can consistently impress us as much as his imagery and labyrinthian narratives.