‘Must see’ movie: Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan is obsessed with time. He has reversed it in Tenet, layered it in Inception, been adrift in it in Interstellar, and traveled through it at three different velocities in Dunkirk. He manipulates it both for characters and audiences with equal ease, but in Oppenheimer – his biography of the father of the atomic bomb – he does both simultaneously
It’s 1924, and a young J. Robert Oppenheimer quits Cambridge to study the new discipline of quantum physics in Germany: a decision that ultimately leads to him running the Manhattan Project, America’s World War II rush to build a functioning atomic bomb. It’s 1954, and Oppenheimer is in a small room in Washington, D.C., facing a kangaroo court predetermined to confirm suspicions that he was a Red. It is 1958, and commerce secretary nominee Lewis Strauss is facing a brutal Senate confirmation hearing over his advocacy for the now-disgraced Oppenheimer. These three interlocked narratives are sheathed within each other, information being recontextualized backward and forward, entangled at a quantum level
What bonds them is Oppenheimer, scintillatingly and sympathetically portrayed by Cillian Murphy in a performance of breathtaking understatement and perspicacity. Without ever resorting to exposition or flagellant self-examination, he probes the complexities of a man who saw the workings of the cosmos on an almost instinctual level. Yet he’s not a dry academic, or the cryptic tool of the military-industrial complex as which he has been caricatured. Oppenheimer is presented as a revolutionary, part of an interwar era of music and art and philosophy and science that was redefining existence. Yet he’s never portrayed as a solitary genius burdened with eureka moments. Instead, Murphy gently inhabits a man who saw problems at macro and micro levels simultaneously, and so was able to understand both the grand plan of the Manhattan Project and also how to put people in place to deploy their own genius. Murphy’s line reading is perfect. He makes Oppenheimer seem not so much boastful as just aware of his gifts and what they let him get away with. This is an amazing performance. Nolan’s signature jumps through time require Murphy to portray Oppenheimer at different stages of his life. Each is convincing
Nolan’s script (adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s epic 2005 biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer) centres on Oppenheimer’s relationships. That includes his penchant for affairs, such as the catastrophic carnal connection with Jean Tatlock (a furious and tormented Florence Pugh) and the more scandalous one with Kitty Puening, who goes on to become his wife (Emily Blunt, capturing the steel that it must have taken to contend with Oppenheimer). Swirling around them is a perfect ensemble cast of researchers, many of them icons of science: Kenneth Branagh as Bohr, Tom Conti heartbreaking as the aged Einstein, and a lugubrious performance by Benny Safdie as Edward Teller. The people around Oppenheimer are his strength and his weakness, as Nolan’s script subtly indicates how his pre-war political naivety and basic humanism were used against him by Hoover’s commie-smashing FBI. Grand betrayal is an elemental component of the story, and this being Nolan, that cinema is indeed grand. Yes, the Trinity test sequence is a nail-biting feat of cinematic tension, but he deploys the same epic filmmaking to the smallest of moments. He subtly recalibrates how the audience sees Oppenheimer’s world, with seemingly constant particulate matter, whether it be dust or snow, drifting across vistas, highlighting the micro as part of the macro. Oppenheimer’s visions are as ear-shattering and eye-scorching as the Trinity test itself
At three hours, it’s a long film, but what keeps it breathlessly tense is the title physicist’s internal tug of war: Can the valiant quest for scientific advancement – his great passion – lead to the total destruction of the planet? And is he culpable for whatever happens, as the leader of the team who created the A-bomb over three years in secret in the Southwest? Or is it the person who decides to push the button, a. k. a. the leader of the free world?
“Just because we’re building it doesn’t mean we get to decide how it’s used,” he tells his frightened colleagues rather unconvincingly
As the chilly man considers these thorny questions – and also has moments of euphoric inspiration – Nolan throws in loud images from Oppenheimer’s mind, of atoms violently splitting, or of flames engulfing the screen. The cacophony shown inside Oppenheimer’s head fascinatingly clashes with Murphy’s outwardly stoic, privately vulnerable performance. He mesmerizingly journeys from intellectual force of nature to a guilt-plagued, damaged shadow of a man
Those with more expert knowledge of the history and science have criticised some factual faults in the film. Nolan has also been criticised before for his tendency to portray women unimaginatively through male eyes; Oppenheimer is no exception, though in this case, Oppenheimer’s perspective is obviously the point. There are other critiques of the movie’s accuracy and completeness that can be made – for instance, the Native American and Hispano communities that populated the areas around Los Alamos and also worked at the lab turn up for only one fleeting moment, when Oppenheimer suggests to a decidedly unsympathetic President Truman that he “give it back to the Indians”
But Oppenheimer, after all, is Nolan’s prismatic psychological study of one man’s personal choices and struggles, not a history of the Bomb. And if audiences can concentrate through the movie’s knotty and breakneck storytelling on its main dilemmas—whether or not building the bomb was the right thing, and how to live with the consequences—then the fragile moral journey that Nolan’s version of Oppenheimer survives will be haunting and illuminating. Nolan’s ability to transport audiences is undeniable. But like Oppenheimer’s own ambiguous end, the destination remains uncertain
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