Oppenheimer movie review: a particle of concern, a wave of complicity

In a way, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour, shot-in-IMAX historical docudrama epic entitled Oppenheimer isn’t really about J. Robert Oppenheimer at all. Yes, even though it’s full of extreme closeups of the anguished scientist and much figurative rending of garments over his role in the creation of our modern world in which an atomic sword of Damocles hangs over us all.

I’m serious.

I mean, obviously, yes, the film does focus on the theoretical physicist, the man who led the United States’ secret program during World War II to develop an atomic bomb. Cillian Murphy (A Quiet Place: Part II, The Party) as the scientist is mesmerizing, conveying calamitous inner turmoil while remaining still and modulated on the surface, even when his lack of apparent reaction damages him. This can only be called a pointillistic portrait, one full of staccato visuals that hit rapid-fire but also somehow lazily, not least as Nolan switches from often intensely hued — indeed, fiery hued — color images depicting Oppenheimer’s subjective experience of his life and work, to cooler, calmer black-and-white to show the external, more objective reality in which he operates.

(There’s a lot going on in this film, on so many levels, but I suspect entire theses will be written alone about the distinction Nolan makes here between personal emotional and intellectual experience as more vivid to the individual [obviously?] versus the drier, more distant, more neutral impartiality of everything outside of ourselves… and the limits of that, too, since it can only be cast through subjective eyes such as those of a filmmaker or a historian. This movie is a darker, grimmer, film-stock-flipped Wizard of Oz, and way more existential, dreaminess turned deadly actuality. Not that Oz didn’t have its own grimdark existentialism, of course.)

Nolan (Tenet, Dunkirk) casts Oppenheimer as a man possessed by preternatural visions of the subatomic world, a strange reality that the mathematics says must exist but which he can see only in his imagination… and this is one of Nolan’s startling uses of IMAX. We’ve been trained to expect that IMAX pictures will capture the bigness of the world, but Nolan goes in the opposite direction here, zigzagging dots trailing light on the biggest movie screen we have suggesting the unfathomably minuscule realm far beneath our awareness. It’s like a buzzing in your ear of the universe’s tiniest unseen insects, hounding you to accept them even as you cannot comprehend them.

(Nolan does go big with his pictures, too. His incredibly brief yet horrifyingly riveting impression of one worry that dogs the atomic scientists — would a runaway atomic reaction set off by a successful bomb ignite the planet’s atmosphere and Jesus fucking Christ they went ahead with it anyway — is perhaps the imagery that haunts me the most from the movie.)

Yet as much as Nolan’s Oppenheimer is very much stuck in his own head, he can also be thoughtless and impulsive, giving in to urges without considering the consequences of them, from an itch to poison (what? yup!) a professor when he was at Cambridge university, to an ill-advised sexual situationship with a fellow pseudo-communist (Florence Pugh, goddess: Black Widow, Little Women) in the pre-war years, to a momentary lapse into wearing a military uniform that does not suit him in any way in the early days of the Manhattan Project. Nolan’s Oppenheimer can be very self-involved… to the point where you kinda wanna smack him out of it. Which his wife, played by a caustic Emily Blunt (Jungle Cruise, A Quiet Place: Part II) as a brilliant woman underappreciated by the world, almost literally does. (Ironically, or perhaps not, given his track record, Nolan underappreciates her character and the actress as well.) It comes in a moment where Oppenheimer is castigating himself for being, frankly, a huge jerk and suffering the consequences of this — in a personal capacity, not a military-industrial-scientific-complex one — and it’s almost the thematic centerpoint of the film. It’s echoed later, when in an astonishing one-scene cameo, Gary Oldman (The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Darkest Hour) as US president Harry Truman berates the physicist as a “crybaby” for feeling as if he had “blood on his hands” after Hiroshima. Truman was the one who dropped the bomb(s), after all: Oppenheimer only made the bombs.

There is a paradox at the nucleus of Oppenheimer. I don’t think Nolan has any intention of suggesting that Oppenheimer shouldn’t have felt guilty or responsible for what his work led to. It is and would be only human for him, for anyone, to do so. (Indeed, Ludwig Göransson’s [Creed II, Black Panther] aggressive score and the film’s relentlessly belligerent sound design, not to mention the overwhelming impact of the IMAX visuals that are both intimate and epic, ensure that we feel in a visceral way how tormented Oppenheimer is.) And yet the film projects what could be seen as, at worst, disdain for Oppenheimer’s pity-poor-me martyrdom. At best, Oppenheimer is dismissive of the notion, which the man himself as depicted here seems to hold, that Oppenheimer is solely to blame for the horrors that his atomic-bomb project unleashed. Because once the possibility of an atomic bomb was conceived of, someone was going to make it happen, certainly in the context of World War II. The whole point of the Manhattan Project was to build a bomb before the Nazis did. (The deeper question of why we seem, as a species, constitutionally driven to find the most violent, most destructive uses of our scientific knowledge is a philosophical conundrum for another film.)

Truman’s point is well taken: No matter who built the bomb, it would be, and was, the politicians who decided when, where, and how to deploy it. And boy howdy, the character who represents that side of the equation is a doozy. Although much in the same way that the film isn’t really about Oppenheimer, it’s also not really about this other major figure either: Lewis Strauss, a former (as of 1959, the present-day of the film) Atomic Energy Commission head vying for a seat in US President Eisenhower’s cabinet. The film is structured as a series of nested flashbacks around Strauss’s confirmation hearings in the US Senate, which involve Oppenheimer because of the publicly and politically contentious professional relationship the men shared.

Robert Downey Jr (Avengers: Endgame, The Judge), in his finest and most interesting performance since before Marvel, plays Strauss as a shallow, grasping functionary unaware of how absolutely useless he is, a contrast to Oppenheimer’s profound intellectualism but also a complement to the scientist’s self-involvement: Strauss is just as focused on himself as Oppenheimer is, if with far less self-awareness about it. Nolan mines extraordinary suspense from a simple exchange between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti: Paddington 2, The Dark Knight Rises) that Strauss witnesses but cannot overhear, during which Strauss believes Oppenheimer must have said something that soured Einstein on Strauss, because everything went to shit for Strauss after that, and what other reason could there be?

(This leads directly to one of the many tiny, unsettling zingers of the film, a bit of snark from Alden Ehrenreich’s [Solo: A Star Wars Story, Hail, Caesar!] aide to Strauss about that mysterious exchange. Such an amazing ensemble cast in this film! Entire theses will be written about that, too.)

When we at last hear that conversation — this final flashback is the closing scene of the film — it’s shocking for what is said, and also for what isn’t. It’s here when what Oppenheimer is about hits hard, and it is, once again, paradoxical: With the power to destroy ourselves unleashed — not just nukes but global warming, possibly AI, maybe genetic engineering, probably lots of other potential nightmares — how such awesome capability is used goes far beyond the acts of any one person, even the self-centered, self-involved men who think they make the world go round. And yet, when enough of them get together, even in opposition to one another, the tragedy is that they might actually make the world stop.

more films like this:
• JFK [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Max US. | Disney+ UK | Netflix UK]
• First Man [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]