Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has presented us with so many dark splendors and unsettling displays of destruction in his career — in science fiction, in Gotham City or in “Dunkirk,” his first real-world historical thriller.
Now we have “Oppenheimer,” his second in that real-world category. People will be talking about it for a long time; they already are, largely because of what it’s not: not a sequel, not an overbudgeted franchise product, not junk.
It’s Nolan’s most haunted film to date, and with this subject — J. Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist, “father of the atom bomb,” anguished, conscience-stricken victim of America’s errantly shifting political winds — a filmmaker cannot treat the sight, and the fallout, of the dawn of our catastrophic nuclear age as mere spectacle. Well, they can. But it’d be a mistake.
It stars a pitch-perfect Cillian Murphy as the thin man in the famously oversized fedora, with Nolan freely adapting Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s superb 2006 Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus.” Nolan establishes back-and-forth timelines here, far less showily than in “Dunkirk.” (Fine by me; I found that film’s time-signature riddles to be facile in the extreme.) On one track in “Oppenheimer,” we follow young Robert as he races through the 1920s, coping with depression, discovering sex and women, chasing after quantum physics and bringing that exotic new branch of theoretical inquiry back to America from Europe.
A post-World War II timeline intertwines throughout. We see Oppenheimer fighting for his reputational life at the nadir of the anti-Communist McCarthy era. Robert Downey Jr., plainly relieved to get the hell away from Marvel green-screens for a while, portrays Atomic Energy Commission director Lewis Strauss, an old political nemesis of Oppenheimer’s, depicted as the cautionary tale’s cold-blooded antagonist.
Oppenheimer claimed he never was an official Communist Party member, but he circulated at the University of California, Berkeley among plenty of Communist friends and causes, with his troubled lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) a party member, and Oppenheimer’s troubled wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), a onetime party member as well. Nolan probably could have taken the time to explore more of what was behind that adjective “troubled,” but there it is.
Oppenheimer’s leftist beliefs made his rather unlikely leadership of the secret Los Alamos, New Mexico, project during the war a dicey proposition, but one that his boss, Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), sent through the channels. From a scientific and militarily strategic standpoint, it worked out beautifully; the U.S. got what it wanted, and it seemed (or so Oppenheimer said in the heat of the race to beat the Nazis) a simple, momentous challenge. Already by 1939, Germany had split the atom; if Hitler hadn’t dismissed nuclear physics and atomic weaponry as “Jewish science,” likely giving the Jewish Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos project time enough to develop and test the bomb in summer 1945, who knows how things would’ve gone?
How they went was horrific enough, and this is where “Oppenheimer” soars. Throughout the movie, Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame zap the audience with images of what Oppenheimer’s theories and imagination fire in his mind’s eye — images of electricity, fission, infernos of doom. The bomb test sequence at Los Alamos — Nolan re-creates the stunning sight and sound of its detonation, the sound and the blast arriving a full 100 seconds afterward — marshals everything Nolan has learned as a filmmaker. He craves intensity and screw-tightening; crucially, in “Oppenheimer,” he knows just when to strip it bare, and pull the audience in through other means.
The cast is enormous, with dozens of politicians, scientists, and academics darting in and out of the story, with especially intriguing work from a variety of weaselly D.C. operatives (Dane DeHaan as Strauss’ whipping boy Nichols, Casey Affleck as the quietly murderous Pash). The scene where President Harry Truman, played in a quick-and-dirty cameo by Gary Oldman, meets Oppenheimer and can’t fathom the man admitting he feels as though he has “blood on his hands” is true, or true enough, anyway, in Nolan’s telling.
What’s missing from the script, I think, is a fuller sense of Oppenheimer’s paradoxical, quizzical, tic-laden personality. Murphy’s first-rate, but on the page this is a rather smooth-edged depiction of a singular character caught in epically fraught circumstances. Pugh and Blunt excel, too, though only in brief bits and pieces; the boozy, violent extremes of the Oppenheimer marriage (and the fate of their daughter) remain outside Nolan’s preferred and very busy timelines.
It may be serious and important stuff, but Nolan sacrifices none of his cinematic instincts for tension- and momentum-building. That’s sometimes for the best, and sometimes not. The musical score by Ludwig Göransson never gives us a break, in a style akin to Hans Zimmer’s all-out assault in “Dunkirk.” More than anything this kind of scoring is hell on the actors; late in “Oppenheimer,” Blunt and Jason Clarke engage in a ripping verbal exchange during Oppenheimer’s Atomic Energy Commission security board hearing, but the music keeps grinding and grinding and you half-expect Blunt to call time out.
I wonder if Nolan subconsciously (or consciously) favors multiple layers of screw-tightening, visual and aural, with scripts risking an overload of exposition as this one does. He’s an elegant and extremely clever structuralist; in “Oppenheimer,” Nolan is also trying to honor and dramatize as much of his subject’s burdens as three hours can handle. The results are pretty gripping and occasionally brilliant; its peaks, particularly when Nolan suddenly changes gears, cuts out the sound and reveals the full weight of Oppenheimer’s tormented psyche, reach higher than anything this filmmaker has scaled to date.
Such scenes, awful and beautiful, have no need for words. And Nolan takes care of Job No. 1: This is a film about terrible risks and a planet likely destined to destroy itself someday. And we see it, and feel it.
The movies have played around with global destruction for fun once too often; it’s about time we took it seriously again.
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'OPPENHEIMER'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for some sexuality, nudity and language)
Running time: 3:00
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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