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Universal Pictures
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Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer
“Nobody knows what you believe,” says physicist Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) to his Los Alamos supervisor, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) late in writer/director Christopher Nolan’s
Oppenheimer; “do you?” It plays a bit like a thesis statement for Nolan’s character study, which has to navigate a tricky path in peeling back the layers of the complicated man who shepherded the atomic bomb into existence, yet spent the later years of his life arguing for more cautious approaches to developing nuclear weapons. How exactly do you capture the essence of someone as fundamentally enigmatic as Oppenheimer, while not leaving the audience with the conclusion that the answer to “who was Oppenheimer”—after spending three hours watching a movie about him—is “beats the hell out of me?”
Nolan frames his attempt at an answer through two events held long after the Manhattan Project gave birth to the first atomic bomb: a 1954 proceeding in which Oppenheimer’s security clearance is threatened by his associations with the Communist Party; and the 1959 Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of Commerce appointee Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), previously Oppenheimer’s boss as director of the newly-created Atomic Energy Commission. From the testimony at those two events, the narrative spins back and forth through time, touching on Oppenheimer’s years as a grad-student physics prodigy studying in Europe, through his various romantic relationships—including Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and his eventual wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt)—and up to his work overseeing the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.
That’s a lot of ground to cover, even with 180 minutes of running time at one’s disposal, and Nolan generally manages to tell his story without feeling like everything is getting a superficial Wikipedia-esque coverage. Some characters are bound to end up feeling slighted in the process—there’s little indication, for example, of the lifelong depression Jean Tatlock experienced—nor do we get a taste of the childhood exposure to social-justice work that shaped Oppenheimer’s worldview. But Nolan is wise enough to spend the bulk of the story outside of the two aforementioned hearings ends up focusing on the work at Los Alamos, including the prickly relationship between Oppenheimer and the base’s military commander, Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), up to and including the landmark Trinity test in July 1945.
Nolan’s depiction of that event—a tense countdown set to the jittery strings of composer Ludwig Göransson’s score, before sharply dropping into awestruck silence—becomes just one of many places where his filmmaking choices elevate the material. Early sequences include images of swirling particles and ribbons of energy, effectively conveying the new cosmos being understood through theoretical physics. The very world around Oppenheimer at times pulses with the shockwaves of his terrible new invention, and a recurring motif turns the stomping approval of Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos team into a horrifying kind of sense memory. And then there’s the shifting film coloration, hints of conspiracy and propulsive editing rhythms of the hearing sequences, which evoke Oliver Stone’s
JFK even with a Kennedy name-drop. It’s all engrossing, eminently watchable stuff.
But that basic question remains: Who was Oppenheimer? Murphy’s performance is deliberately withholding, letting his piercing eyes and gaunt face do most of the work of pulling us into his intensity, and there are certainly late attempts to reconcile some of the conflicting components of the historical record about his actions and beliefs. Nolan ultimately suggests a man who wanted to have it both ways—acknowledged as a genius and a hero for pioneering work that ultimately ended World War II, and appreciated as a man of conscience for trying to mitigate the potential horrors of his creation—but
Oppenheimer spends an awful lot of time with Oppenheimer just moving through the key events of his life without necessarily understanding how they all fit together into one person.
Real lives are always messy and complicated, and condensed biographical accounts of those lives often struggle with when and how to streamline that complexity. In one scene, Oppenheimer tries to explain to Kitty some basics of quantum mechanics, particularly how objects seem solid despite consisting mostly of the space between particles. Nolan is clearly fascinated by all the particles of Oppenheimer’s personality, as well as the spaces between them, but his intriguing film can’t help but feel limited by the extent to which “nobody knows what you believe” is treated as a narrative feature, rather than a bug.
OPPENHEIMER
***
Cillilan Murphy
Robert Downey, Jr.
Matt Damon
Rated R
Available July 21 in theaters