Nobody knows what you believe. Do you?” So asks scientist Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), in a scene from Christopher Nolan’s nuclear epic Oppenheimer. The question is posed to J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, whose disavowed communist past clung to his reputation like stepped-on gum. But the question might just as well have been addressed to Nolan himself.
It’s easy to imagine the 52-year-old writer-director – perhaps the pre-eminent blockbuster filmmaker of our time – empathising with his latest film’s set-upon protagonist. Like Oppenheimer, Nolan is a man whose politics have often proved messy and inscrutable (on screen at least). That he has tended to keep his personal leanings to himself has only swung open the door for speculation; commentators from across the political spectrum have imposed all manner of personal readings onto his work. Ask some people and they’ll argue he’s a raging Tory. Others: a liberal pacifist. Many of his films seem to eschew politics entirely – it is hard to argue exactly what agenda a film like Inception is pursuing, fixated as it is on the psychology of the human subconscious. With Oppenheimer, though, this aversion to politics is put under a microscope, cleaved open like an atom. Nolan has finally grown up.
