Oppenheimer (2023)
dir. Christopher Nolan
Rated: R
image: ©2023 Universal Pictures
With Oppenheimer, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has made nothing less than the Lawrence of Arabia of the 21st century. Like David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece, Nolan’s picture is epic and grand in both scope and scale, while delicately humanizing a figure about whom most of the populace – myself included, at least, until I saw the movie – know little-to-nothing.
While the grandeur of recreating the first human-made atomic reaction has transfixed media coverage and those anticipating the film’s release, Oppenheimer’s true triumph is in unlocking the mystery of the man. By the time we reach its conclusion, Nolan’s film has given us a crystal-clear understanding of who J. Robert Oppenheimer was. We understand what drove him to unleash an unimaginable weapon upon mankind and how that work tortured him for the rest of his life.
Oppenheimer is also an unapologetic polemic against the reactionary climate of the film’s setting. That might not have been as compelling as it is if not for the fact that today’s political climate is increasingly matching that of 1950s McCarthyism. Red-baiting and using the word “socialist” as an epithet are de rigueur once again among reactionary right-wing fearmongers. (The argument can be made that this tactic never really went out of style for those on the American right.)
Based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which took author Martin J. Sherwin, with the eventual help of fellow author Kai Bird, 25 years to finish, Oppenheimer examines the life and work of the theoretical physicist between the mid-1920s and the early 1950s.
In an early passage of the film, we see a young Robert Oppenheimer make a rash decision to poison the apple of the demanding Patrick Blackett, the Cavendish Laboratory physicist under whom he is studying. Oppenheimer is furious when Blackett refuses to give him permission to attend a lecture by Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who revolutionized our understanding of atomic structure and quantum theory. Blackett instructs his pupil to finish cleaning the lab while he and the rest of the class head off to the lecture.
In a bit of foreshadowing of both his character and a major theme of the film itself, Oppenheimer regrets his actions. The next morning – after ditching his responsibilities to attend the lecture anyway – he races to the lab in time to stop Bohr himself, while in conversation with Blackett, from biting into the apple. In this instance, luckily, Oppenheimer avoided causing harm.
He will fail to do so in his future work.
Oppenheimer is haunted by visions of unleashing the horrific power of a nuclear reaction, but he is helpless to resist working on that very outcome. He is a man obsessed with understanding the invisible world of theoretical physics. In a refrain repeated throughout the movie, “theory will only get you so far,” Oppenheimer must put theory into practice in a race to save the world from fascism when it becomes clear that the Nazis are working on their own atomic bomb.
Convinced that the Allies must get to the finish line of a working nuclear bomb before the Nazis – those are my people they’re rounding up into camps, he tells a non-Jewish colleague – Oppenheimer is convinced he’s working on a necessary evil. The film shows him slowly, meticulously change his mind, especially after Germany surrenders.
The other scientists are concerned about the ethics of continuing their work. They’ve heard Japan is close to surrendering, giving them more reason to oppose going through with a test. The government, though, has already traded fascism for communism as the biggest threat to peace and freedom in the world, and they’re determined to demonstrate America’s nuclear capabilities as a deterrent to the USSR.
With his signature style of temporal dislocation – as seen in Memento, Inception, and Dunkirk, among others – Nolan’s screenplay uses two framing devices that increasingly overlap and intersect while commenting on the core plot of creating the first successful nuclear explosion in the New Mexican desert.
The first is labeled with the title Fission, and it mainly traces the events leading up to the Trinity bomb test. The second, titled Fusion, is mostly shot in black-and-white and focuses on political intrigue centered around smearing Oppenheimer as a communist after the war. His change of heart about the newly developing arms race has led the scientist to call for disarmament for both the US and the Soviet Union. It’s a stance the US government can’t abide, which puts Oppenheimer’s government security clearance – which he’s desperate to keep, so he can continue to agitate for disarmament – in jeopardy.
The Fusion portion of the film centers on the US Senate confirmation hearings of Lewis Strauss, who is being considered for Secretary of Commerce, a cabinet position he has long coveted. Strauss served on the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) immediately following the war, and he was a central figure in bringing Oppenheimer on board to continue his work. During one hearing, members of the Senate committee question what role Strauss played in the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance years before, due to suspected communist sympathies.
Nolan shows us testimony from the AEC committee hearings concerning Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Within these scenes, Oppenheimer and witnesses both for and against him recount events from Oppenheimer’s life.
The scenes detailing the events discussed in Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearings begin in black-and-white but eventually transition to color. It can at times be a bit confusing keeping up with what’s happening when – I had similar reservations about the timeline structure of Dunkirk upon my first viewing of that film – but it reinforces the idea that the past is constantly impacting the present. What we have done in the past ripples into the present and will continue to do so into the future.
It's been bastardized from overuse, almost exclusively by former president and neo-fascist Donald Trump, but J. Robert Oppenheimer was the subject of a witch hunt in the truest sense of the term. (Unlike Trump, who is not the victim of a witch hunt, as he claims, but is instead facing actual legal accountability for his alleged crimes.)
He was painted as a spy for Soviet Russia because he gave a shit about workers’ rights – in one sequence, Oppenheimer is admonished for advocating for a pro-labor movement on the campus where he’s teaching – and for the friends he kept. His first wife, Jean Tatlock, was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (which is not a crime!), as was his brother, Frank. For his part, Oppenheimer never joined the Communist party, but guilt by association was all it took to make him an enemy of his country.
The film’s portrayal of Oppenheimer’s on-again-off-again romance with Tatlock, which took place during his second marriage to Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, serves to give insight into both characters. Their tempestuous relationship ends with the troubled Tatlock dying by suicide, an event the movie obliquely suggests might actually have been something far more nefarious.
Oppenheimer’s 180 minutes – that gargantuan run time is deceptive; the movie is briskly and breathlessly paced, feeling more like two hours than three – is bisected almost in half by the bravura Trinity test sequence. Nolan’s film here is a stand-in for the effect entering the Atomic Age had on all of humanity. The movie wrestles with the fact that our fate was sealed when President Harry Truman made the fateful decision to demonstrate our potentially world-ending prowess by unleashing not one, but two of these utterly devastating weapons on the Japanese populace.
One of the most chilling scenes of the film comes when Oppenheimer meets with Truman to express dismay over his role in helping create the bomb. Truman dismisses the scientist by ensuring him that no one will remember Oppenheimer for making the bomb; instead, everyone will remember Truman for using it. It’s clear that Truman takes satisfaction in this, horrifying Oppenheimer (and the audience) in the process.
The Trinity detonation sequence is wonderfully and fearfully mesmerizing. Nolan and his sound team drain everything from the soundtrack as the bomb goes off, making the moment haunting and surreal. Nolan & Co., forgoing any CGI-created imagery for the film, used a mix of gasoline, propane, aluminum powder, and magnesium for the atomic explosion. (Nolan did not, as I at one point mistakenly believed, detonate a real nuclear device in the name of artistic verisimilitude.) The staging by Nolan, cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema, and editing by Jennifer Lame all coalesce to produce a horrific vision of one of mankind’s greatest and most terrible achievements.
The lack of sound during this sequence is echoed later in the film as Oppenheimer is giving a victory speech in the aftermath of the war. The crowd is cheering and applauding boisterously, but Oppenheimer can’t hear them. He is too consumed by the death and destruction he has unleashed.
It’s fitting that the Trinity sequence ends with Oppenheimer voicing his most famous quote, a recitation of Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In one of the film’s rare missteps, Nolan has his protagonist issue this quote earlier in the movie as well, a moment that borders on obvious and clumsy foreshadowing.
Irish actor Cillian Murphy turns in a career-defining performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer. He portrays the father of the atomic bomb as a haunted man who carries his burden of understanding like a weight around his neck.
Robert Downey Jr. is captivating as Lewis Strauss. Without going into too much detail, the political intrigue portion of the film doesn’t, as you might expect, center on communist sympathies or redbaiting (although that’s certainly front-and-center) but on Strauss’s fragile ego. Downey turns in a performance that leaves no doubt about his character’s petty grievances.
It’s a valid criticism that Christopher Nolan struggles to write female characters; more than a few of his protagonists get their motivation from the death of a woman they love. While Oppenheimer is about as male-centric of a movie as you might expect, due to both the director and the subject matter, the two main female characters (of only three total female characters with speaking roles, if I’m remembering correctly) both leave a striking impression.
Some of that is down to the writing, but the lion’s share of credit must go to the two phenomenal actors embodying the roles. The radiant Florence Pugh gives Oppenheimer’s first wife, Jean Tatlock, a sense of danger and a cutting intelligence. Emily Blunt plays Kitty, Oppenheimer’s second wife, as an icy pragmatist. Blunt steals the movie for about three minutes when Kitty lays out her morbid philosophy concerning the death of her first husband.
Matt Damon turns in a serviceable performance as Gen. Leslie Groves, the man who recruits Oppenheimer into heading the Manhattan Project. Damon’s best moment comes when Groves loses his temper at a scientist whom Oppenheimer is trying to convince to join the secret project.
The most serious charge levied against Oppenheimer so far has come from New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D), who condemned Nolan’s movie for ignoring the fact that the Los Alamos facility was hardly a remote location with an otherwise zero population. Generations on, Luján points out, there are still people dealing with the deleterious health and ecological effects of the first nuclear test. It is disappointing that Nolan chose to elide this bit of the history. Still, in Oppenheimer, he’s made a stunning piece of art that acts as both a warning to the human race and as a reclamation of the man who performed a deadly, horrific miracle.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- The overall effect of Oppenheimer is nothing short of transcendent. Christopher Nolan has made a towering epic that is hard to shake even after you’ve left the theater.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- In a sixth grade (?) science class, I was assigned to make an artistic rendering of Niels Bohr’s atomic model, so I was excited to see Bohr represented on screen; my project ended up being a cookie cake, with icing representing the nucleus and the orbits of the electron.
- Kenneth Branagh is steady as a rock as Bohr. There are a boatload of cameos in Oppenheimer.
- While the threat of nuclear annihilation is still very real, I couldn’t help but make the connection that climate change is analogous to the story Nolan is telling. The effects of climate change are a horror that we have brought on ourselves, much like the horrors of nuclear war.
- The makeup in the final minutes of the film, showing the key players as much older people, is wonderful; it looks so much better than making someone young through CGI.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this at a press screening. I brought along a friend from college — hey, Rhianna! — who is an A#1 Christopher Nolan fan. She made a shirt for the occasion, and I got permission from her to share with the class:
