You May Have Missed: Oppenheimer (Dir Christopher Nolan, 3h1m, 2023)
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| Oppenheimer IMAX poster |
Now, to Oppenheimer, the cinematic event of 2023. Alongside its curious companion, Greta Gerwig's Barbie, in the odd-couple portmanteau double-bill of Barbenheimer (an inevitable, and doubtless unoriginal mock-buster under that very name is currently in production), the duo marked the 'return of cinema' for the third year running since the pandemic. Fortunately, the memetic mashing together of a cinematic outing for a plastic doll in wry post-modern adventures, and a three hour biopic largely focused on particle physics and the political, and personal life of Robert J Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the father of the atomic bomb proved to be more than a joke, the two films took a collective $2.3 billion, and now face off across the awards season as we careen towards the Oscars, with first blood to Oppenheimer in the Golden Globes, with five, to Barbie's two wins.
All very well to consider Oppenheimer as part of a masterfully played marketing move that laid all other films, aside from the Super Mario Brothers animated outing to waste. Oppenheimer, of course, is more than this, in the same way that Robert J Oppenheimer was more than just the atomic bomb. From the bomb's creation in the desert of Los Alamos and the fallout from the political environment there, so the film juxtaposes these events with Oppenheimer's fall from grace in the offices of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1954, and the decades-long battle for the direction of the AEC between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), culminating with a Senate hearing in 1959 as Strauss seeks to become US Secretary of Commerce. What we see is a stunning portrait of a complex and often contradictory man, as the film steps back and forth in time, space and perspective to tell Oppenheimer's story.
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| The Father of the Atomic Age: Robert J Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) |
We begin in Cambridge, with the young Robert J Oppenheimer nearly poisoning his tutor,
and meeting Niels Bohr (Kenneth Brannagh), who recommends he take up theoretical, rather than experimental, physics in Germany. It is here-immediately-that the film unveils its two secret weapons. The first is Murphy himself-that
he plays Oppenheimer from his twenties to his late 50s across the film, with only makeup and wigs, is as much a sense of how much he disappears into Oppenheimer as Nolan's belief that he could-and does-pull off the trick.
Murphy inhabits Oppenheimer with a nervy quality, a palpable sense of energy and surface tension, his gaunt frame-Murphy lost an unknown amount of weight to play Oppenheimer-a man who often forgot, or neglected to eat. Alongside
this, much of the physical performance and appearance, as much informed by David Bowie's cocaine-era of the mid 1970s-Oppenheimer has an intensity, even as the events of the Manhattan Project fall
into the past-as the real Oppenheimer's appearance.
What we get, as Murphy can deliver like no other actor in Nolan's ensemble, is a man at the centre of history, the person at the centre
of this cinematic chain reaction, a performance that, as the film unspools over its mammoth three hour runtime, is that of a man of contradiction. The film's other secret weapon is its cast. Nolan, undeniably, has never
particularly struggled to attract impressive casts, but Oppenheimer's borders on the star-studded to the point of nigh-distraction. This is, in the old-fashioned way of putting it, an
ensemble cast. The memetic joke of 2023 may have been that seemingly every major actor in Hollywood appeared here or in Barbie, but this is a cast that has everyone from Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, the military director of the Manhattan Project to Rami
Malek as David Hill, whose appearance late in the film comes at a crucial moment, to Tom Conti as Albert Einstein, to everyone from Dane DeHaan and Alden Ehrenreich to Gary Oldman and David Dastmalchian appearing as figures
as minor as political assistants and as important as Harry S Truman.
The fact that much of this cast, from Downey Jr downwards, took a paycut to appear in the film, and that no single actor threatens to overpower
the film's impressively stacked cast is as much indication of the quality of Nolan's script as his direction. At this point, having already depicted Oppenheimer's time in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as
meeting Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), who will soon become his competitor in the race for the atomic bomb, and his friend and future colleague, Isador Rabi (David Krumholtz), as well as stepping forward in time
three decades to depict an older, and now decidedly out of favour Oppenheimer as he is grilled by the AEC committee Nolan switches from colour into black and white, and with this changes comes Downey Jr's Lewis Strauss,
the antithesis of Oppenheimer, his nemesis.
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| An Equal and Opposite Reaction: Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss |
Much has been made of what this shift, this juxtaposition of black and white against the colour of Oppenheimer’s scenes signifies. Undeniably, Strauss' perspective
is part of this but what else this implies is more open to conjecture. Is this movement between the two visual styles more than a juxtaposition of perspectives? Is the black and white of objective truth against Oppenheimer's
version of events in which he is the scientific genius ? Are we being shown in the colour segments a version of the truth, a possibility, against Strauss' alternative? Even more daringly, is Nolan inverting the language of cinema, the cinematic shorthand of a black-and-white past and a colour present, to wrong-foot us, to consider the reaction of his
audience? Is it all of these? Are we applying meaning where there is none to be had? Or is it in quite literally colour-coding between the 1959 scenes in Washington, and the recollections of the pragmatic Strauss, that Oppenheimer's
own story comes into closer focus? This is something that viewers must answer for themselves.
It is with this visual flourish, and an extended flashback from 1959 to Oppenheimer's first meeting with Strauss,
and with the arrival of Tom Conti's Albert Einstein, whose sudden chilly turn towards Strauss that leaves the latter continually rankling at what the two scientists must have discussed-a scene that returns at the very
dénouement of the film to answer-that Oppenheimer leaps into gear. Oppenheimer soon begins teaching at Berkley and becomes, if anything, even more politicised, butting heads with his
more practical colleague, Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) and quickly gains a large class of students, many of whom are both left-wing and who he will recruit for Los Alamos and its sister projects, and several of whom, most
notably Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) will appear at his security hearing to support him, or stick the knife in. All of this political activism, and the presence of Communist Jean Tatlock (a sublime Florence Pugh) in his life-the
film cannot quite resist dropping a love-scene between the two that has her surprised at his ability to read Sanskrit, and thus has him read the famous passage from the Bhagavad Gita-will later come back to haunt him.
Here, the genius of the juxtaposition of Oppenheimer's victories as a man, and the head of Los Alamos, and the father of the atomic
bomb, including his wife, (Kitty, played by Emily Blunt, whose grilling late in the film shows her to be just as a sharp a mind as her husband), are interrupted or undermined by the committee, scenes or even mere
minutes later. Each triumph is met with an equal, and opposite reaction. The question of his, Kitty's, and his friends and colleagues' politics quickly resurfaces in the AEC sequences. This, after all, is the excuse,
the given reason for the security clearance panel, and here where his loyalty to the US and connections to spies for the USSR are laid bare. At the same time, with Oppenheimer recruited into the Manhattan Project by Groves, the film launches into a elongated 'getting the team together' montage, as the town of Los Alamos is built, and populated by scientists, who quickly set to work on building the atomic bomb.
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| A Martyr or a mastermind: Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt, left) and Robert take stock of the AEC's showtrial |
From here, tension growns. It is Nolan's master-stroke to juxtapose the great triumph of Oppenheimer's life, the Trinity test, the visual high-point of the film in which-stunningly without CGI or other digital
effects-Christopher Nolan recreates the detonation of an atomic bomb to impressive effect, with his great disgrace, as the committee pore over his indiscretions, his connection to members
of the Communist Party, including the revelation that some of the very people who helped Oppenheimer build the Atomic bomb have leaked secrets to the USSR, and Oppenheimer's increasing resistance. The latter is best seen, although
much of the Strauss perspective of the scientist is as nuclear conservative, resistant to creating further bombs, let alone the more powerful H-Bombs, in the stark sequence that follows the bombing of Hiroshima, where Oppenheimer
begins to realise what he has wrought upon the world, the brutal, horrifying simplicity of turning the sounds of celebration down and with the scientist hallucinating the effects of a nuclear bomb upon both the auditorium
in which he announces the dropping of the bombs, and, as the grilling from the AEC reaches fever pitch.
It is a nightmarish visitation of his own creation, and a perfect visual representation of his guilt, a guilt that proceeds to colour his retreat from the limelight that Strauss, his dark shadow, his anti-material
echo, sneers that he's always dreamed of, declaiming, in one of Downey Jr's best scenes, that he has essentially absolved Oppenheimer of his guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that
Oppenheimer's downfall, whose architect is revealed in the tension of the film's final act, is in fact not a downfall at all. We are, it seems, confronted by versions of Oppenheimer, the martyr, the crybaby-as one
character daubs him post-Hiroshima, and, as Murphy inhabits the older Oppenheimer, a fragile man whose career is in tatters, but who contradicts this as the centre of many sequences, a man who still commands the respect of the scientific community that surround him, and who is arguably vindicated by history.
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| In the Shadow of the Bomb; Oppenheimer is a film as much about its period's fears as its protagonist |
To
make the complex figure of Oppenheimer interesting, despite his contradictions, may not have been the most difficult act in cinema history, to put it mildly. That this narrative, his rise and fall, his role as architect of the
atomic bomb is successfully yoked to a three hour plus film starring a good chunk of Hollywood and beyond's finest actors, a film in which our focus is, alongside the Trinity Test, a great
deal of talking about theoretical science, the Cold War, and the morality of nuclear weapons, and that Nolan has made this edge-of-your seat cinema, is a cinematic tour de force. It may be nothing less, in his sweeping tale
of the life of the father of the atomic bomb, than Christopher Nolan's grandest, his most daring, his best-made film to date.
Rating: Must See
Oppenheimer is available to rent and buy online in the UK via all major digital platforms,
and on DVD from Universal Pictures. It is also currently available via these in the United States
Next
week, we turn to matters of love in animation, beginning with Walt Disney's opus, Sleeping Beauty.
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