Review: “Oppenheimer”

It’s a thorny subject, one usually entered into with reticence. That the United States military’s dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end a war that was already effectively over was a horrid act is more of a fact than an opinion nowadays. Upwards of 200,000 people, mostly civilians, are estimated to have been killed in the attacks, either from the direct impact of the bomb, or the effects afterwards, ranging from burns to illness from exposure to radiation. The demonstration of power that has mercifully not been matched since cemented an Allied victory in World War II and America’s might in the nuclear arms race, but at a cost. Chief among those straddling the line between the thrill of scientific discovery and the moral reckoning of what they have wrought are the team of scientists placed on the Manhattan Project by director J. Robert Oppenheimer. And that’s closer to what writer and director Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is: less a biopic, and more an articulation of the crisis of conscience that often accompanies great genius and great responsibility.

Oppenheimer’s (soulfully portrayed by frequent Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy in a career-defining performance) early career is granted some snippets of screen time at the start of the film. In the late 1920s, Oppenheimer is a physics student in Europe, where he comes to know Nobel Prize-winning scientist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). By the late 1930s, he is teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and experiences some close brushes with the Communist Party of the United States; he also strikes up an on-again, off-again relationship with party member Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), two facts that will be held against him much later on. He then meets and marries a biologist, Katherine, aka Kitty (Emily Blunt) before, soon after the U.S. enters World War II, he is approached by U.S. Army General Leslie Groves (a scene-stealing Matt Damon) to assemble a team and move out to a remote stretch of land in Los Alamos, New Mexico to build and test an atomic bomb as a response to Germany’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program. These events—the trials, the dropping of the bomb, and the aftermath in which Oppenheimer advocates against the proliferation of further nuclear weapons, only to have his loyalty and status questioned during a 1954 security hearing—are shot in color and demonstrate, as stated by Nolan, Oppenheimer’s subjective perspective, but they’re framed by another hearing—the 1959 Senate confirmation hearing for U.S. Atomic Energy Commission member Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr. creating one of his most riveting characters in years)—distinguished by its black-and-white cinematography that pulls away from Oppenheimer’s point of view.

Nolan has built his reputation on marrying big budget blockbuster thrills with cerebral storytelling, but Oppenheimer, with the arguable exception of the awe-inspiring sequence in which the Manhattan Project team detonates their test bomb, is largely devoid of flashy, special effects-laden scenes or action sequences. It is, essentially, three hours of men in rooms talking. And yet, it’s utterly mesmerizing, Nolan’s best work at least since Interstellar, maybe The Dark Knight (admittedly, one of my personal favorite films). Much of Oppenheimer’s success hinges on the strength of its performances, from the leads to supporting players like Josh Harnett, Benny Safdie, and Alden Ehrenreich to the countless number of “that guys” who pop in and out of the narrative. But Nolan’s screenplay is sharp and structurally ambitious. The latter doesn’t come as much of a surprise; it’s practically Nolan’s calling card to play with concepts like memory (Memento), time (Dunkirk, Tenet), and reality (Inception), baking them into the plot of his films in intriguing and convoluted ways. As such, Oppenheimer’s trajectory, like many of the other movies in Nolan’s filmography, is occasionally a bit difficult to track. He has a harder time maintaining as engaging a pace in the film’s final hour as well, when the story moves past the war and into a seemingly never-ending barrage of hearings. But Nolan’s approach is so fascinating, I can’t help but imagine that there will be more to uncover with repeated viewings. What’s left out of the scenes told from Oppenheimer’s perspective is just as intriguing as what is left in. It would be easy to critique the fact that Oppenheimer leaves a lot of material by the wayside, when really that demonstrates his single-mindedness. It would also be tempting to write Oppenheimer off as just another movie about a tortured white male genius, but Nolan doesn’t necessarily frame him as such. He’s great at organizing the troops, but he isn’t the one spear-heading any actual scientific breakthroughs.

It would also be fair to question Oppenheimer because it does not incorporate any Japanese perspectives, the people who were the victims of Oppenheimer’s work. But that Oppenheimer flips the blame on American bureaucrats for the unspeakably horrific event is not in doubt. There’s no exploitation here (we don’t witness the actual dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on screen). Nolan offers up a remarkably incisive condemnation of American imperialism in his depiction of a meeting to decide which Japanese cities—out of a list of 12—they ought to drop the bombs on, to which one man responds that the crossed Kyoto off the list because of its cultural significance to the Japanese people—but moreover, because he and his wife had their honeymoon there. Later in the film, Oppenheimer robotically goes through the motions of engaging in the post-bomb celebrations, which make terrifying use of sight and sound to convey not only the guilt that will come to haunt Oppenheimer, but the specter of unchecked power that will come back to haunt us all.

Oppenheimer, however, still succumbs to the usual Nolan traps, which only become more irritating the more he falls into them. He has always underwritten female characters, their presence typically serving as little more than motivating factors for his male leads, and as compelling as Pugh and Blunt are in their roles here, they are no exception. Jean’s suffering (she dealt with clinical depression) is a fact that torments Oppenheimer, while Kitty isn’t given much life beyond her role as an explosive alcoholic (although her alcoholism wasn’t really documented in real life until after 1945, and she had a career in science that was more extensive than the passing acknowledgement it receives here). The film notably also skims over the fact that Los Alamos, where the weapons tests did take place, was populated, and civilians there did suffer illness as a result of their proximity to the site. And yet, the film’s chilling opening and denouement, coupled with its rich soundscape (of which Ludwig Göransson’s string-based score is an integral factor) and towering visuals (I frequently poke fun at the many confusing possible viewing formats that accompany every Nolan film and always send me down a frantic Google rabbit hole, but after experiencing Oppenheimer in IMAX 70MM, I really do have to hand it to him) renders most of its faults as rather minor. It may not be a subject we want to see treated as summer blockbuster material, but Nolan imbues his epic with so many thoughtful textures that, much like the visual of the billowing mushroom clouds, you can’t help but sit back and marvel at its simultaneous beauty and terror.

Oppenheimer is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 180 minutes. Rated R.