Film Review: Oppenheimer
AMERICAN PROMETHEUS
Theory vs. practice. Creation vs. destruction. Christopher Nolan’s paradoxically sprawling, intimate Oppenheimer is a stunning deconstruction of the “great man” biopic. Navigating the vast gulf between science and empathy, Nolan’s latest - and perhaps best - delivers a harrowing drama about the moral cost of unleashing upon the world the most horrible weapon it has ever known. Minor spoilers ahead…
A forbidden and destructive technology, a tortured protagonist, intertwining timelines: Oppenheimer has many of the hallmarks of a traditional Christopher Nolan yarn. As an expert wrangler of spectacle, big ideas, and expensive pulp, it would only seem natural that the 52 year-old British filmmaker would set his eyes upon the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the pioneering physicist dubbed “the father of the atomic bomb.” Shooting on IMAX cameras and employing his signature, byzantine structurings, Nolan once again applies his touchstones to the pages of history, this time on the flip side of Dunkirk’s theater of war: the nail-biting buildup to the world-stopping Trinity test, its horrific application in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the complicated, genius scientist at the center of it all.
Leafing through Christopher Nolan’s storied filmography - the “just feel it” time shenanigans of Tenet, the apocalyptic grandeur of Interstellar, the trumpeting “braaam” of Inception’s dream-raiding - it seems that his particular lens would be a perfect fit for the genesis of the most devastating weapon ever created. Of course, the fated New Mexico detonation is irresistible to Nolan - it still serves as the blinding centerpiece of the film - but Oppenheimer, in many aspects, is the director’s most mature, textured film: a devastating examination of the vast gulf between science and empathy, centered by a spectacular Cillian Murphy performance.
“…Oppenheimer, in many aspects, is [Nolan’s] most mature, textured film: A devastating examination of the vast gulf between science and empathy…”
Taking a page from Tenet’s playbook, Oppenheimer employs its own temporal pincer movement for its framework, a triple-pronged approach that is immediately elegant and affecting rather than finicky and calculated. A clever deconstruction of the source material - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer - into an intricate triptych, Oppenheimer follows the creation of the bomb leading up to the Trinity test itself, the dogged security hearings that would eventually strip the scientist of his government clearance, and the story of Oppenheimer’s chief political rival Lewis Strauss (a venomous, revelatory Robert Downey, Jr.). Peppered with searing visions of particle collisions and arcing hellfire, ingeniously cut by editor Jennifer Lame (Hereditary), the structure of three interwoven timelines is more than just Nolan-esque flourish, it is a conduit of conversation between past and future. When we’re first introduced to Oppenheimer, in college in the 1920s, his eyes are affixed to rippling puddles in the rain, triggering apparitions of excited subatomics. Is it divine inspiration? Or is it a portent of cataclysmic nuclear conflagration?
Long-standing Nolan critics love to blast him for his showy frigidity - “emotionally chilly,” if you will - but from Oppenheimer’s opening frames, it revels in its contradictions and internal, moral despair: a massive, awesome scale that seems to only unspool from the tormented psyche of its subject matter. Stripped of heady science fiction and kinetic action, Oppenheimer is no more than three hours of talking heads and geopolitical maneuvering, but Nolan mines his most riveting - and emotionally complicated - story from Cillian Murphy’s singular performance. Subdued yet expressive, Murphy captures nearly every paradox within Oppenheimer: a polymath who was bad at math, a womanizing family man, a hubristic champion of the working class, and inevitably, a destroyer of worlds. Through Murphy’s tremendous evocation of tortured, culpable genius, Oppenheimer drives its exhilarating propulsion through its parallel tensions of the Manhattan Project’s race to end World War II and Oppenheimer’s own postwar stance of anti-proliferation, one that would only abet the government’s McCarthyist witch hunt against him.
“…[Oppenheimer] revels in its contradictions and internal, moral despair: a massive, awesome scale that seems to only unspool from the tormented psyche of its subject matter.”
Oppenheimer spans decades, but it never feels rushed. Eschewing the rise-and-fall of a standard biopic, Nolan instead pings Murphy’s Oppenheimer against the various figures within his life, hurtling towards a 20th Century Rubicon where the world would be irrevocably changed. His dueling romances with his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) and temperamental lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), his relationship with fellow physicists and Army brass, his leftist politics and noncommittal flirtation with the Communist Party, they all inform one another and Oppenheimer’s own insatiable chasm of ambition, curiosity, and guilt. Nolan squeezes every drop of buildup to the fateful day of the test; we know that the world didn’t end in 1945, but with Ludwig Göransson’s vice grip of a score and the sunken glint of fear in Cillian Murphy’s eyes, Oppenheimer does its best to put apocalyptic trepidation in the audience’s heart. The Trinity detonation might not be the meat of the meal, but Christopher Nolan still knows how to rip a showstopper onto celluloid: a gargantuan setpiece that recreates the Manhattan Project explosion itself - albeit without actual fissile material - Oppenheimer’s nuclear climax will singe your retinas and quake your eardrums, especially if you’re watching in 70mm IMAX.
The awful fruit of Los Alamos is purposefully never shown, instead, there’s a singular moment of queasy reflection: Oppenheimer, post-victory, addresses the Manhattan Project scientists as the magnitude of his creation - and the terrifying schism between theory and practice - dawns upon him. The enormity of human loss palpable through bureaucratic remove and political gladhanding, it’s a deliberate omission to never step foot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer himself is discarded after his “success.” He had fundamentally changed the fabric of history and science, but a mere decade later, the vaunted scientist would be eagerly branded a Communist patsy, served up in a new fight in a new nuclear age. As the closing moments of Oppenheimer rest upon Cillian Murphy’s weathered face, its harrowing thesis is laid bare: We might be able to split the atom, but empathy is still the hardest thing to come by in this world.
