Oppenheimer
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When I reviewed the new Mission: Impossible a few weeks ago, I rather lamely called it “a whole lot of movie.” I should have saved that description another week or so for Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer is an accurate title. Despite the big budget, world-historical sweep, and powerful story, it’s fundamentally a character study tightly focused on J Robert Oppenheimer. Fortunately, its subject, by virtue of his unique role in American history and the course and conduct of World War II, gives the film both scope and depth. And though the film’s marketing leaned heavily on the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, and the Trinity test, the film encompasses a huge swath of its protagonist’s life.
The film is told through a pair of overlapping and interweaving flashbacks in the 1950s but begins, chronologically, with the American Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) studying at Oxford in the 1920s. He bounces around through the rarefied world of quantum physics, from Oxford to Germany and back to the US, where he introduces this strange new subject to American universities in California. Study of quantum theory grows rapidly. So does Oppenheimer’s noncommittal involvement with radical leftwing politics—supporters of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, labor organizers who want to unionize laboratory assistants, overt Communists. He develops an unstable, on-and-off sexual relationship with the Communist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) but moves on and marries Kitty (Emily Blunt), a divorcee with an alcohol problem. He also butts heads with other scientists at his university, who object to his tolerance and occasional endorsement of Communist projects, especially when such projects intrude into the classroom and the lab.
The war comes, and Oppenheimer is approached to head the Manhattan Project. His contact with the military and government is General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), a bullheaded tough who gets Oppenheimer everything he wants, most specifically a brand new lab complex and supporting town in the remote New Mexico desert. This third of the film shouldn’t need much explanation—it is the literal centerpiece of the story and leads to the film’s most stunning, exhilarating, and terrifying sequence.
The final third covers Oppenheimer’s postwar life. Recruited by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) to work at Princeton and given a key role on the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer’s past threatens to ruin him when the US military detects the Soviets’ first atomic test. Every every former member of the Manhattan Project comes under scrutiny. This event, Oppenheimer’s caginess and seeming indifference to the security of the Manhattan Project, and personal conflict and callousness toward Strauss, a former admirer, cause Strauss to turn on him. After Oppenheimer is denounced as a probable Communist agent, an AEC tribunal unearths all of his former sins and picks them over minutely. Even former close associates like Groves and Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who vigorously assert Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States, make damning concessions about his unreliability and strange behavior. Oppenheimer loses his security clearance and his job.
But Oppenheimer, indirectly, has his revenge. When Strauss is appointed to President Eisenhower’s cabinet and sits for senate confirmation hearings, his scapegoating of Oppenheimer and underhanded manipulation of the AEC costs him his cabinet position.
That’s the story of Oppenheimer in chronological order. But this being Christopher Nolan, it is not told so straightforwardly. It’s easy to get hung up on the structures of Nolan’s films, and in my original draft of this review I labored through how Oppenheimer works and why it works so well, but that’s spending too much time on how the story is told. The real strengths of Oppenheimer are its masterful technical execution and its performances, especially the central one by Cillian Murphy.
Oppenheimer looks brilliant. Much has been made, quite rightly, about the film’s IMAX cinematography.* Nolan and DP Hoyte van Hoytema use IMAX’s resolution and shallow depth of field to maximum effect, capturing everything from an atomic explosion to the irresolution and doubt on a man’s face with startling immediacy. Oppenheimer is also beautiful—New Mexico landscapes, the stately traditional architecture of old college campuses,** and the black and white of Strauss’s sequences are all stunning to look at. Additionally, the costumes, sets, and props are all excellent. If “immersion” in an “experience” is what brings you to the movies, Oppenheimer’s 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s are as immersive as Hollywood gets.
I’ve seen a few people complain about the wall-to-wall score, especially in the first half, but I honestly didn’t notice that. Ludwig Göransson’s music, like the intercutting flashbacks, helps establish and sustain the film’s dramatic momentum early on. It’s also a good score, not nearly as punishing and concussive as previous Nolan film scores. And unlike, say, Tenet, I could hear all of the film’s dialogue, so no complaints with the sound design and sound editing here.
My one technical problem is with the editing, which reminded me of some of Nolan’s earlier films, especially Batman Begins. Conversations often play out in unimaginative shot-reverse shot style and it sometimes feels like all the pauses have been cut out of the dialogue. Some scenes barely have room to breathe. I noticed this especially clearly with the handful of jokes and one-liners in Nolan’s script, where timing is crucial. Fortunately this evens out by the middle portion of the film concerning Los Alamos, but it gave Oppenheimer an odd, rushed feel in the first third.
As for the performances, Oppenheimer rivals those crazy CinemaScope productions of the 1950s and 60s for its huge cast. Nolan, not unlike Oppenheimer himself, built a small army of amazing talent for this movie, with even small roles played by well-known actors. Perhaps my favorite is Gary Oldman as Harry Truman, who appears for one scene that can’t last more than three minutes. And Oldman is excellent, turning in a rich, complicated performance despite his limited screentime and Nolan’s understated writing.
The same is true of everyone else in the film. Robert Downey Jr is excellent as Strauss, playing him sympathetically but still as a clear antagonist. Downey has said that he understands where Strauss was coming from and so didn’t play him as a villain, and it shows. His performance is the perfect counterbalance to Murphy. Other standouts include Benny Safdie as H-bomb theorist and engineer Edward Teller and Matt Damon as Leslie Groves. Groves’s and Oppenheimer’s odd-couple working relationship is one of the highlights of the film. Emily Blunt makes the most of an underwritten role as Oppenheimer’s difficult, morose, alcoholic wife—who nevertheless comes through when it counts—and Josh Hartnett and David Krumholtz were especially good playing two different kinds of colleague to Oppenheimer. I also enjoyed the many, many historical cameos, including Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), and, in a slightly larger role, Tom Conti as Albert Einstein.
But as I hinted above, this is Murphy’s movie. He appears in almost every scene across all three hours and remains continuously interesting. He plays Oppenheimer as a cipher; as we watch, we feel we understand him from scene to scene, but—as becomes especially clear at the end—our impressions don’t add up in any satisfactory way. What we get is an unpleasant character full of flaws: a resentful outsider, an arrogant insider, an adulterer, a recklessly naïve and self-regarding political do-gooder, a man with astonishingly bad judgment and enormous blind spots, who can devote himself to a project that will inevitably result in mass murder and celebrate its completion only to reverse himself later, who chooses the wrong moments to stand on principle and whose one moment of keen self-awareness comes when he realizes he is being approached with an offer to spy for the Soviets and refuses—a good decision that he still manages to bungle. And yet he is undoubtedly brilliant at what he does, people as different as Einstein and Groves like him, and he sees a crucial project through to completion.
This tension is never resolved, and Oppenheimer only becomes more inscrutable as the film progresses. When Edward Teller wishes he could understand him better, he could be speaking for the audience. As one of Oppenheimer’s rivals in the race for the Bomb might have suggested, the more we see of him, the less we actually know. No wonder he rubbed people the wrong way.
The film opens with an epigraph explaining, in brief, the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods as a gift for mortals and was punished by being chained to a rock where birds would peck out his liver all day, every day, for eternity. This myth is apropos—especially since Nolan’s source material was the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus—and I found myself reflecting on Oppenheimer as a Greek tragedy. Oppenheimer is a hero who has achieved great things for a thankful citizenry but is undone by his own past sins. He has no one to blame but himself. In this way, Oppenheimer also becomes a human metaphor for the entire project to split the atom. The film’s final moments make this clear in a genuinely chilling way.
I’m struck that, of Christopher Nolan’s twelve films, three are Batman movies, three are contemporary thrillers, three are near-future sci-fi action adventures, and three are historical films. Of the latter, two concern World War II. After seeing and thinking a lot about Oppenheimer, I can see the attraction of the period for Nolan. What other modern event offers such a variety of combinations of the technical, theoretical, and personal—and with such high stakes? World War II is ideal Nolan country. I hope he’ll return soon.
In the meantime, Oppenheimer is a great film—excellently produced, powerfully acted, and thematically rich. I strongly recommend it.
*As of this writing I still haven’t had a chance to see Oppenheimer in IMAX, because the one screen near me has been jampacked during every showing except the one that gets out at 2:00 AM. I hope to see it as it was intended soon and will amend this review if seeing it in IMAX alters my judgment in any way.
**If Nolan wanted to make a spiritual sequel to Oppenheimer, another period film about amoral Communist-adjacent theorists and their world-destroying experiments, his next project could be Bauhaus.
