Oppenheimer is a three-hour biolographical techno-thriller that has grossed over $950 million worldwide. If there is any testament to how audiences would be willing to sit through a movie that has most of its actions in rooms where characters are talking mostly about science, then there is hope for the rest of American cinema. While superhero fatigue has made box-office bombs out of highly anticipated The Flash, The Marvels and that Ant-Man movie, people want something different.
British-born filmmaker Christopher Nolan and his constant collaborator Cillian Murphy, an Irishman, have given us a complex story of American paranoia that seems relevant today as it did back in the 20th Century. The movie tells three different stories all woven together in the end with tension switching back and forth between these moments in the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Murphy in his best role).
The first story is the generic plot of Oppenheimer’s rise from a undervalued college student at Cambridge on his way to a well-respected physicist professor and finally overseeing the creation of the atomic hydrogen bomb. Then, there is the a Kangaroo Court-style hearing before a Personnel Security Board in 1954 followed by a third story focusing on a Senate Confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr. in a great role) for Secretary of Commerce under President Dwight Eisenhower. Strauss had served as chair of the Atomic Energy Commission and is believed to have had put Oppenheimer under scrutiny for some comments he made during a hearing that Strauss felt was insulting.
Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, and Murphy make no qualms about portraying Oppenheimer in a negative light. It’s implied the only reason he ever married his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), was that he got her pregnant, while he still had an affair with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a psychiatrist who was a member of the country’s Communist Party. Tatlock would later commit suicide, even though the movie doesn’t lend speculation that she may have been killed as she drowned herself in a bathtub. Kitty was an alcoholic and suffered from mental issues and neither are good parents to their son, who they leave with family friends to take care of for an unspecified time when he was an infant.
Oppenheimer, himself, isn’t shown as being a Communist even though Kitty was. He tells Col. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) that he’s a New Deal Democrat, but you get the feeling the military didn’t agree with FDR’s policies. Conservatism and the rise of Nixon and McCarthy grew out of opposition to the New Deal. What they were really afraid of was too much left-wing ideals at once. Considering that America was still in the Great Depression caused by the failed policies of the Republican Party, keeping America become resorting to same thing that happened to Russia was a priority.
But Groves, who would later become a general, knew he had to treat Oppenheimer and the other scientists with kid gloves. What were they going to do if they didn’t get them on board? Put guns to their heads and make them? Throw their loved ones in prison? Hitler was turning Europe into a Fascist country along with Mussolini. Then, you had the Communist Regime in the Soviet Union. The Pearl Harbor attacks had forced the government to take American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps. They couldn’t force the scientist to build an atomic bomb efficiently if there was a threat looming over their heads. One of Oppenheimer’s friends and colleagues, Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz), is initially opposed to it because he knows the bomb will kill the innocent.
Then, after getting what they wanted out of the scientist, the government cut them loose and in some cases, threw them to the wolves. And as Oppenheimer is grilled in 1954 by Roger Robb (Jason Clarke), an attorney for the AEC board hearing overseen by Gordon Gray (Tony Goldwyn), it’s apparent they’re trying to cut Oppenheimer down because he had expressed doubts about the bomb. Nolan suggests rightfully the U.S. made the bomb to have an advantage over Nazi Germany. But after Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrounded, they dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make Harry S. Truman (Gary Oldman in a great cameo) look good following the death of FDR.
Truman had been named FDR’s running mate in 1944 over current Vice-President Henry Wallace because he was more conservative and probably the only way FDR could get a unprecedented fourth term. Would FDR have used the bomb if Germany had already surrendered? The government operates under the idea that “A weapon unused is a useless weapon” as it was said in Spies Like Us. And when Oppenheimer forces his concerns toward Truman, the President mocks and insults him saying “Don’t let that crybaby back in this office,” as Oppenheimer leaves. Strauss would raise concerns that there was a leak at the Los Alamos, N.M. location that led to the Soviet Union developing an atomic bomb.
As for the atomic bomb testing sequence, Nolan frames a tense action scene that is some of the most thrilling of his career. We all know what’s going to happen but still seeing how it’s done is amazing. It’s crazy that the physicists and scientists were just working on a theory. During a great scene between Oppenheimer and Groves as they wait out a rain storm overnight to test it before dawn, there’s the possibility the testing might nuke the whole earth as it reacts with the atmosphere. You can sense with Damon’s performance that they have done the worst thing possible by destroying the world in order to save a country. Groves who has been mostly pro-America and telling people this is the most important thing they can do by working on the bomb realizes he may have just doomed the world.
Nolan is known for relying on practical special effects and no computer generated images. When the bomb goes off, it’s a huge one and the editing by Jennifer Lame, cinematography by Hoyt van Hoytema and musical score by Ludwig Goransson is one of the thrilling sequences in years. But almost immediately, after Groves and the scientist realize as Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, they were so concerned if they could, they never stopped and asked if they should. Earlier, Oppenheimer tries to rationalize things by arguing Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and they named a Peace award after him.
Oppenheimer remains on the fence earlier in the movie with his political beliefs which Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist and colleague who feels people should express their views by voting rather than in the classrooms. During the Red Scare of the 1950s when McCarthyism was running wild, it’s apparent that the government was trying to cover its own face by allowing a bunch of left-leaning Communist sympathizing scientist create the nuclear bomb. Would the public pushback if they knew who helped make? It’s like the same problem people have nowadays on how to separate the art from the artist.
Nolan does a fine job here, considering most of the movie consists of science talk that might go over the heads of several people. I don’t know if he has seen the 1989 movie Fat Man and Little Boy which was about the building of the nuclear bomb, but either way, he avoids the pratfalls that Roland Joffe did with that movie. (Incidentally, Damon recalled once on the The Daily Show a rumor he had heard where the filmmakers of that movie, which was a critical and box office disaster, thought the movie would be a huge Oscar contender. It wasn’t.)
Of course, Nolan does have a difficult job of presenting a three-hour movie with several real-life characters who may get lost in the story. Rami Malek has a nice small role as David L. Hill, a physicist who worked at the Chicago lab, who became a crucial witness against Strauss in the Senate hearing for the way Oppenheimer was treated during the Grey board meeting. Kenneth Branagh is a nice treat to see as Neils Bohr and Tom Conti manages to keep Albert Einstein from becoming another caricature he’s been in other media portrayals. You might find yourself scratching your head and wondering who’s who after the halfway mark. Casey Affleck pops up briefly as Army Col. Borish Pash, a military intelligence officer who was tracking Oppenheimer when he was still having an affair with Tatlock.
This might be Nolan’s best movie ever and that’s taking into account how I feel The Dark Knight is the gold standard on how to make a superhero movie serious while at the same time not taking itself too seriously. His earlier movies such as Memento and the remake of Insomnia showed he is a brilliant filmmaker and storyteller. What makes this movie work is how he along with Murphy show Oppenheimer as a man who wanted to be remembered for doing something great but didn’t realize the costs that came with it.
While there hasn’t been much talk lately of nuclear bombs, the movie can also be viewed as warning of other technology and advancements that might be getting out of hand, such as artificial intelligence. The final shot scene has Oppenheimer watching the rain cause ripples in the waters of a pond. It says a lot about cause and effect and the dangers that we don’t think about until it’s too late.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 