Christopher Nolan’s brilliant, expansive film about the life, work and disturbing legacy of a complicated, haunted man was one of the most intense cinema experiences I’ve had in a while. It may not be completely free of Nolan’s worst traits, but it also feels like the mature, contemplative film he’s been building towards throughout his entire career.
Though Oppenheimer has ambitions beyond a mere biopic or history lesson, it was definitely a fascinating history lesson for me personally. While I knew about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since I was a kid in the Soviet Union, I was always hazy on the origins and creation of the bomb. I’m sorry to say that my entire knowledge of the Manhattan Project comes from Sid Meier’s Civilization video game, and prior to this film I don’t think I’ve even heard the name of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man often called the father of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer’s life story, as it turned out, more than deserved the attention of Nolan, who seems to be fascinated with obsessive, driven, morally ambiguous men.
I fully expected the movie to lean hard into another of Nolan’s obsessions, time, and Oppenheimer is indeed a story told in fragments, moving the viewer back and forth. Time jumping aside, the film has two distinctive halves, which in turn can also be split into halves. First up, there’s Oppenheimer’s early academic career and personal life, which leads into his crucial role at the Los Alamos Laboratory, racing against time to beat the Nazis. This first half culminates with the successful test of the first atomic bomb in the desert of New Mexico, a masterpiece of onscreen suspense that had me on the edge of the seat despite knowing full well how it was going to end.
Later, there’s the rigged 1954 interrogation by a Security committee, where Oppenheimer’s past associations with communists and his opposition to the further nuclear arms race threaten his all-important security clearance. The last part, shot in stark black-and-white, abandons Oppenheimer’s perspective altogether and instead features Lewis Strauss (barely recognisable Robert Downey Jr.), a founding member of the Atomic Energy Commission, who is just one Senate hearing away from fulfilling his political ambitions and would rather not deal with awkward questions about his history with Oppenheimer.
With its dense and intricate story, three-hour runtime, gargantuan cast of characters and constant jumps in time, Oppenheimer demands your full attention, and not just because the dialogue gets frequently drowned in the mix (a persistent problem in Nolan movies). Though I was annoyed with the booming sound of our movie theatre that made even the preceding trailers unintelligible, I can’t deny that it contributed to the immersive, almost overwhelming experience that left me literally shaking on the inside by the end. Ludwig Göransson’s beautiful, mercurial score is likewise effective. At times it felt just a tad overused and I appreciated a few scenes without any music whatsoever, but it plays a crucial role in binding the movie together – especially in its early stretch with its frenetic editing.
For a movie that mostly takes place in lots of small rooms, Oppenheimer has a surprising number of elegant, visually stunning moments that are beautiful or terrifying or both. The setting of Los Alamos has a shade of old-school Westerns, especially when bathed in the light of the setting sun. Early on there are many impressionistic images of collapsing stars and quantum realms that haunt the mind of Oppenheimer as a young, homesick student at Cambridge. There are audio and visual snippets – thunderously stamping feet, rain drops breaking the surface of water – whose significance you realise only later.
Though the film never shows the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their horrors are reflected in what for me was the most nightmarish scene in the entire film, taking place soon after the surrender of Japan. Inside the gym, the ecstatic crowds cheer on as Oppenheimer attempts to give the kind of rah-rah speech the occasion calls for. At this point, he’s already disturbed by the implications of what he and his fellow scientists have just achieved, and how quickly the politicians and the military took over. Still, he proceeds, with a visible effort. But in his mind, he sees a white flash in the auditorium, and strips of flesh peeling from a young woman’s face. On his way out, he steps onto a blackened, charred corpse.
Despite the many moving parts, the film never loses the sight of Oppenheimer the man, and ultimately belongs to Cillian Murphy and his layered, anchoring performance as the aloof, charismatic and contradictory genius who changed the world and paid a heavy price. He’s always been a striking actor, with piercing eyes and eerie features that can shift from unearthly handsomeness to something more dark and grotesque, but here Nolan gives him a leading role to die for. Though the movie is sympathetic to Oppenheimer, it doesn’t shy away from his many flaws and complexities, or simplify his crisis of conscience. Your average straightforward hero would never get introduced by an early scene in which he poisons his tutor’s apple in a fit of frustration (this little episode seems to foreshadow the destruction and regret that would go on to play on a much larger scale).
I was a bit worried when I read about the ridiculously stacked supporting cast, full of familiar faces and past Oscar winners popping up sometimes for a few minutes of time, but they never felt distracting and most got at least one shining moment. It’s an absolute joy to see Robert Downey Jr. in a truly meaty dramatic role after his decade of Marvel, while Matt Damon works beautifully off Murphy as earthy, no-nonsense general Leslie Groves, who is also the closest stand-in for a regular person among all the high-flying scientists.
This movie is not going to do much to dispel Nolan’s reputation as a cold filmmaker who is awkward at romance and sexuality, and doesn’t really know what to do with women. Poor Florence Pugh bares nearly all as a communist party member Jean Tatlock, who has a tempestuous and tragic love affair with Oppenheimer, in the scenes that were probably meant to be intimate but instead feel weirdly robotic. Emily Blunt fares better as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, bringing interesting complexity to the character who stands by her husband but is also the farthest thing from a typical warm, sweet and supportive biopic wife. Later in the movie, she gets a killer scene during the interrogation and does one of the best withering glares I can think of. I kinda wished for this intriguing marriage to get its own separate movie.
I really kept my fingers crossed for this film after bailing on ever watching Tenet which, by all accounts, combines all of Nolan’s vices as a filmmaker and cranks them up to eleven. Happily, Oppenheimer doesn’t just reverse the downward trend, but is easily one of Nolan’s best movies; technically impeccable, superbly acted and morally complex.
P.S. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but we ended up watching Oppenheimer on 6 August, which as I found out later was the exact date of the Hiroshima bombing. Talk about an eerie coincidence!
P.P.S. I recognised Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman under all that makeup, but I didn’t at all recognise Josh Hartnett playing one of the scientists. I remember when he was hyped as the hottest thing in Hollywood twenty years ago or so.
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