oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a biopic that, ironically, is best approached as if it’s not actually a biopic at all. Ostensibly the story of its titular figure, theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project during World War II and father of the atomic bomb… the film would - perhaps - be more accurately described as Nolan’s own sober-eyed deconstruction of that inevitable and distinctly Promethean moment in which humanity willingly sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Oppenheimer would come to bear the weight of that burden, but we carry the fallout inside each and every one of us - a collective sin that continues to be passed on from generation to generation. 

The early stages of the movie have a disorienting quality. Nolan touches on key, formative moments in Oppenheimer’s early life with the harried rhythm of someone scribbling physics calculations in the margins (a peevish attempt to poison his professor in Cambridge with a cyanide-laced apple speaks to Oppenheimer’s tendency to act without fully considering the repercussions). The scenes are juxtaposed against testimonial excerpts - both from Oppenheimer’s own controversial security hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, and the Senate confirmation of former AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss as Secretary of Commerce in 1958 (did I mention this is a film primed to gross almost a billion dollars?) - and the cross-cutting often feels not unlike hydrogen atoms smashing together, forcefully yet inelegantly. Oppenheimer is played by the great Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who conveys the lean, sharp-angled intelligence of his features, the probing and penetrative intuition of his gaze… and, eventually, the hollowed-out gravity of his haunted visage during the ensuing post-war years. Murphy keys in on Oppenheimer’s less flattering traits - his arrogance, his wandering eye, his self-absorption - and lives within the character’s crevices of complication. His piercing cobalt stare holds a 70mm IMAX screen unwaveringly - arguably better than any special effect. It’s a remarkable performance. 

The narrative jerkiness solidifies once Matt Damon arrives as General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project… and his character’s military-honed gruffness generates a pleasingly frictive rub with Oppenheimer’s smugly unerring confidence. In spite of his potentially troublesome flirtations with the Communist party (which includes a brief fling with Florence Pugh’s troubled Jean Tatlock), Oppenheimer eventually gets the gig and sets up shop in Los Alamos, assembling a scientific dream team that includes the likes of Benny Safdie’s Edward Teller and David Krumholtz’s Isidor Isaac Rabi. Nolan has little interest in canonizing his subject - if anything, he makes a deliberate point of portraying Oppenheimer less as a practical, hands-on genius and more as a wily and efficient project manger (his field of expertise was theoretical, after all). The Trinity test on July 16, 1945 is the movie’s centerpiece, and it’s a showstopper. Nolan, perhaps, overthinks how to dramatize the actual detonation, which takes a slightly abstract slant (we don’t get the immediate, inescapable horror of an IMAX screen awash in nuclear fire)… but the buildup to the button being pushed is some of the year’s most rigorously gripping filmmaking (calculations indicate there’s an infinitesimal chance of the explosion triggering a chain reaction that ignites the Earth’s atmosphere… which obviously didn’t occur, but still lends the sequence an aura of apocalyptic dread. Like any great showman, Nolan casts a spell that makes you believe - in the moment - that the worst *could* still happen).  

Nolan packs the film with A-list talent, which might seem like a self-indulgent flex, but there’s a stark logic to the approach - it’s by far the simplest cinematic hack when it comes to tracking the story’s dense network of characters (it’s unlikely secondary figure David L. Hill’s key testimony near the end of the movie would fully land were he not helpfully played by Oscar winner Rami Malek). Several make the most of their limited screentime (Casey Affleck is chillingly good in his lone scene, while Kenneth Branagh is excellent in his brief turn as Niels Bohr)… though the obvious standout, other than Murphy, is Robert Downey Jr. A generational talent who nearly threw it all away, he earned the comfort of serving as the face of Marvel’s billion-dollar Avengers brand - though seemingly at the cost of his incisive edge as an actor, which has steadily eroded over the past decade. It’s been a minute since Downey Jr. has done, well… anything really beyond riffing on his Tony Stark persona, but as the petty, conflicted Lewis Strauss he rediscovers his acting fire; there’s still an abundance of fuel left in that tank.​

Some have suggested the film slackens slightly during its third hour, as Oppenheimer - tormented by guilt - begins to advocate against further nuclear research (others have complained that the movie doesn’t actually show the bombs fall on Japan - as if the scene in which Oppenheimer addresses the cheering throngs in the Los Alamos gymnasium like a high school pep rally, only to see it all turn to nuclear ash before his very eyes doesn’t adamantly get the point across - a rather depressing commentary on how people expect literal spoon-feeding in place of critical thought these days). The aforementioned sequence is a harrowing standout; it’s like watching Oppenheimer’s psyche splinter in real time. He may have declared himself “Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” in the aftermath of the Trinity test, but this is the actual moment those words sear into reality. The rest of the movie does seemingly downshift into familiar scenes of men sitting in rooms, talking - between Oppenheimer being hauled before the AEC’s kangaroo court and Strauss’s increasingly fraught Senate confirmation - but its nails manage to dig even deeper, nearly drawing blood… the echo of Bohr’s observation that “You are the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves… and the world is not prepared” underscoring every moment. As a filmmaker, Nolan can often be too cute for his own good (Tenet’s deliberately muddy sound mix; the multi-timeframe structure of Dunkirk), but with this movie, he’s working in a register of righteous yet cold-flamed fury we haven’t seen from him before. Oppenheimer is a tough film to wrap your head around in a single viewing. It lingers with you. The missteps (and there are a few - such as Emily Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer having a vision of her husband and Tatlock copulating mid-testimony) are ultimately outweighed. The final scene, staged between the title character and Albert Einstein, is so starkly chilling and thematically unflinching, you’ll immediately want to experience the entire thing again.