**½/****
starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh
written and directed by Christopher Nolan
by Walter Chaw Stolid, classical in form, stately in a way some would say is boring yet so precisely parcelled out in perfectly measured, oppressively scored, bite-sized mic-drop morsels that it holds one’s interest whether one is interested or not, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is indisputably well-made and certainly well-intended. If it’s not entirely unlike an amalgam of A Beautiful Mind and The Imitation Game, well, there you have it. As Oppenheimer ploughs no new furrows in the biopic game, what’s left to ponder is whether the story of the father of the atomic bomb is told with enough nuance and ambiguity to justify its declarative urgency, its…what is it? Self-satisfaction? Or, failing that, whether it has enough ticking-timebomb doomsday urgency to cut through the curtain of unjustifiably-pleased-with-itself-and-let-me-explain-to-you-why-with-an-unreasonable-amount-of-exposition that suffocates so much of Nolan’s recent work. I mean, it’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s neither novel nor mind-breaking–neither Mishima nor JFK. In the end, I’m not entirely convinced it’s much more than strong yeoman’s work bolstered by predictably fine performances from a prestigious cast hired to do what they always do.
What I’m saying is that as the first heavily touted mainstream salvo of an awards season now imperilled by Hollywood labour strikes that could stunt year-end campaigns, it makes its methodical, unsurprising, airtight case for recognition by a long-devalued, antiquated organization and voting process that privileges all-star films like this about the Greatest Generation. All the usual concerns, all the usual suspects. It reminded me of the ad campaign for Volvo the lunatics in Crazy People (1990) come up with: “Buy Volvos, They’re Boxy But They’re Good. We know they’re not sexy. This is not a smart time to be sexy anyway with so many new diseases around. Be Safe Instead of Sexy. Buy Volvos.” Oppenheimer is a Volvo. You can drive it into the ground–and damn if Nolan doesn’t try. Consider what Oliver Stone brought to his American history lessons, once upon a time: a pure, unfiltered shot of screaming-hot madness; the homeless guy Stone played in his own The Hand who accosts you with his briefcase full of evidence and a bellyful of zealotic bile. Stone believes what he believes with more force and conviction than anything you’ve ever believed in your life. I exit movies like JFK and Nixon with a head full of bees.
I don’t know that any of Nolan’s films have felt unnerving to me since maybe The Prestige. He has it in him (Memento is perverse as shit, ditto Following), but though I’m a staunch defender of his Dark Knight trilogy–he excels at monumentalizing iconography–I wonder where the dangerous, morally slippery, devil-may-care part of him has gone. He would be a fine choice to tell the story of the American Revolution, in other words, yet I wonder about his current ability to express the manifold atrocities of the dawning of the atomic age. Cillian Murphy, a veteran of Nolan’s work, plays J. Robert Oppenheimer as the sort of tweedy, neurodivergent genius who spends most of his time striding purposefully across various campuses, shouting at flocks of book-carrying acolytes, and running to answer telephones. (He also reads newspapers.) Gruff Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) recruits him to head America’s “Manhattan Project,” focused on creating an atomic bomb before the Nazis do. He chooses Oppenheimer despite the good doctor’s dalliances with the American Communist Party, his womanizing, his arrogance. Without seeing it, you can probably write the scene where these two men banter back and forth, the one winning grudging respect from the other with his unwillingness to play by the rules.
Oppenheimer has an adulterous affair with Kitty (Emily Blunt), whose main qualities are that she’s a mean drunk and that’s kind of it, and another adulterous affair with–I think she’s a psychiatrist?–Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), whose main qualities are that she’s so depressed she acts at all times like a refugee from an I Never Promised You a Rose Garden travelling roadshow. While he’s fucking Jean one night, after demonstrating an extensive knowledge of psychotherapy by name-dropping Jung, he reads her the line from the Bhagavad Gita with which he has become associated: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Hot, I know. This line is closely identified with Oppenheimer because he says he muttered it after witnessing the first test of an atomic bomb, i.e., the “Trinity” test–named, we are told, after John Donne’s line “batter my heart, three-person’d God.” John Donne was a religious tourist, spendthrift, and philanderer. A bit of a rake who wrote amazing religious poetry because he compared his conversion with sexual ravaging. I find it disquieting, the lengths to which Nolan has gone to make his Oppenheimer simultaneously sexy and obsessed with star-collapsing quantum paradoxes like black holes and the atomic state of light. Was he thinking this meal is dry as a soda cracker and needed livening up with some cheese and horseradish? Anyway, Oppenheimer marries Kitty. It doesn’t really matter. He also gets the government to build him a scientific compound in Los Alamos, NM, where he had always dreamed of practicing physics. Then there’s a montage of him recruiting other scientists to uproot their families and live in the middle of nowhere for as long as it takes to develop a functioning atomic bomb.
If you’re collecting physicist trading cards, you’ll be happy to see Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Isidor Rabi (David Krumholtz), Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighofer) just for the principle of it, Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), Kurt Gödel (James Urbaniak) who is more mathematician, and of course Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), who provides adorably hard-bitten wisdom at key moments. The other story is about the failed cabinet confirmation for Eisenhower nominee Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), who oversaw a tumultuous tenure as chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that Oppenheimer boils down to a largely inexplicable and obviously personal hatred of Oppenheimer for offenses public and private. This entire period of upheaval in the Senate, worthy of a movie of its own, leads to an extended “trial” sequence in which the question of renewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance is debated in a kangaroo court by hostile inquisitor Roger Robb (Jason Clarke), the strawman/scapegoat loaded down with the burden of America’s collective Red Scare sins seeking to humiliate a scientist after elevating him to a position of godhood. Oppenheimer is one part talking in New Mexico and another part talking in the Senate. On the bright side, Ludwig Göransson’s score is omnipresent and expository, while the recurring image of expanding circles on the surface of a pond is only used a few dozen times. If you squint just a little, you can see how the film is split into around 36 5-minute scenes that would fit neatly on notecards–three dozen delivery vehicles for gotcha lines, gravid historical references, and simplistic full-body-chills-bait. “Who voted against you? Oh, some senator from Massachusetts trying to make a name… JOHN F. KENNEDY! DID YOU HEAR ME?”
This may be all that Oppenheimer is ultimately about: how we love wizards when there are dragons to slay and fear and loathe them, reduce them to political pawns and objects of scorn, when we don’t. How we only listen to science when it serves us, or how scientists will often do things without asking if they ought to first, and how the unintended consequences of their actions can have a lasting and irreversible impact. Oppenheimer is a Frankenstein story where J. Robert’s monster is the Cold War and policies of mutually assured destruction. The film opens, after all, with a brief telling of the Prometheus myth–Frankenstein being the “modern Prometheus,” right?–and proceeds with multiple characters calling Oppenheimer a martyr to his act of bringing nuclear fire to the affairs of nations. (Prometheus having been martyred for a while in the Caucasus and often thought of as the antecedent to the Christ myth.) Maybe it’s about the fact that we are what the T-800 says we are in Terminator 2: hellbound with an appetite for self-destruction, even as we’re fucking like rabbits and procreating like there’s actually a tomorrow. (Why else have Matt Damon mention that a number babies are being born at Los Alamos while Emily Blunt in a pregnancy suit rumbles on screen?) It’s all quite portentous, though I don’t know if it has anything revelatory to impart, making it not unlike other Christopher Nolan films, expensive nothingburgers like Tenet and Dunkirk and Inception, too, let’s face it. But I want Oppenheimer to succeed, because its ambitious and epically-scaled mediocrity is still preferable to the too-many-cooks algorithmic disasters dominating the marketplace. I wonder if it doesn’t seem better than it is because no real point of view is better than an entire boardroom of idiots with artless opinions. Anyway, JFK is great. You should watch that.
