Oppenheimer
One part of the movie event of the summer, a beautiful and terrible historical drama
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.
Oppenheimer is a showcase for writer-director Christopher Nolan, a culmination of skill and experience that attempts to accurately recreate history through the format of a biography picture which plays with chronology, color, and the subjective experience of reality. In doing so, he and his collaborators – cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema; editor Jennifer Lame; and an impressively deep ensemble cast led by Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, and Florence Pugh among them – create a film that explores the brilliance and weakness so often intertwined in men that institutions and systems anoint with greatness to use for destructive ends. Oppenheimer is exceptionally well-paced for a three-hour film, using legal drama as a framing device for military orchestration of scientific advancement, coated in dramatic music and accented by moments of despair, dread, and shame.
It begins with a timeline which starts in color in the 1920s (“1. Fission”) following J. Robert Oppenheimer (Murphy) and another which begins in grayscale in the 1950s (“2. Fusion”) following U.S. cabinet nominee Lewis Strauss (Downey). Over Oppenheimer’s run time, audiences learn how Oppenheimer developed the relationships which enabled his pursuit of the atomic bomb to end World War II, motivated in part by his interest in advanced theoretical physics married to his concern about the Holocaust (naming his fear of Jewish extermination explicitly). Meanwhile, former Atomic Energy Commission (A.E.C.) Chair Strauss is being questioned because of Oppenheimer’s alleged communist connections, so the film is intent on examining politics through the lens of explicit consequences for the firmness or flimsiness of belief. Through these experiences, Oppenheimer opens its audience to possibility and then closes with reality.
The whole course of Oppenheimer leading to the Trinity test detonation of the atomic bomb, the film is sonically situated in outer space and quantum theory. You feel among the cosmos, because of dealing with the many hypotheses of advanced physicists, augmented by the university and Los Alamos production design by Ruth De Jong and set decorators Claire Kaufman, Olivia Peebles, and Adam Willis. After meeting Oppenheimer’s friends, relatives, and academic and political fellow travelers, the audience learns about how the Manhattan Project was set up, divided (“compartmentalization” is a favorite word of General Leslie Groves, played by Damon), and how it went about the business of developing the world’s first nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer is, unsurprisingly, concerned with the political and moral fallout of these devices, as the spotlight on the titular historic figure draws away from him, reflected like a blinding light from a mirror, as the dual dueling timelines intersect, undercutting narcissistic myths that Oppenheimer and Strauss each have of themselves.
Alongside the sound department (sound designer Randy Torres, supervising sound editor Richard King, sound effects editor Michael W. Mitchell, and ADR supervisor David Bach among the team’s leaders), composer-producer Ludwig Göransson, who also worked with Nolan on Tenet (2021), did an awesome job with the film. Oppenheimer is frequently awe-inspiring its ability to make tension, anticipation, terror, and wonder course through the film. This would not have been possible without the special effects team led by Scott R. Fisher or the visual effects team from production house DNEG. They created perhaps the most spectacular explosion I have ever seen put to film, as well as several haunting, taunting precursors. From Oppenheimer’s earliest moments, the abstract and obtuse concepts which underlie quantum physics are given shape and color, though clear elementary explanation is sometimes beyond the film’s grasp.
What this all adds up to is the story of a deeply flawed man – a womanizer waffling in his political ideology – put in position to help orchestrate the ascent of U.S. military hegemony to the peak it would use to dictate geopolitics for going on eight decades. Oppenheimer is not aloof to this reality and comes far too close to outright condemnation to be lambasted as propaganda in the interest of U.S. military hagiography. The film is also honest about anticommunist paranoia in the early-to-mid 20th century and is even-handed in its observation of American communists and sympathetic to the student labor movement in the California university systems, highlighted by Josh Zuckerman as Rossi Lomanitz.
Because of the large team necessary to develop the atomic bomb, this could have been a movie about the individual lives of several great scientific minds, though it works effectively through the lens of one man’s ability to orchestrate and inability to decide. Without laser-focusing on so many individuals, Oppenheimer can demonstrate how many brilliant people were involved in the making of the bomb, so the casting done by John Papsidera becomes a storytelling tool. If you cannot keep track of all the names, you will at least be impressed to see so many notable faces and understand their connected and contrasting relationships to one another, the Manhattan Project, and to Oppenheimer. There are too many to shake a stick at, though standouts include Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, Rami Malek as David Hill, Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, Tom Conti as Albert Einstein, and Casey Affleck as Col. Boris Pash. Aside from that, the cast list can be an interesting starting point for historic research, as minor characters include important historical figures like Lilli Hornig (Czech-American scientist and feminist activist played by Olivia Thirlby) and J Ernest Wilkins (played by Ronald Auguste, he attended the University of Chicago at the age of 13 prior to working on the Manhattan Project; his father was later the first African-American U.S. Cabinet undersecretary).
Oppenheimer is without neither limits nor flaws, which are not the same thing. Any framing of historical events around the biographical experiences of one man will necessarily omit important details. The displacement of people to mine uranium and plutonium, the effects of testing on nearby towns and the long-term medical affects on the people that were near or far parts of the project all go mostly undiscussed. This does not impede the film’s ability to entertain or to inform about J Robert Oppenheimer (and in fact the scant mention of the displaced is informative about it) but it does limit the film’s ability to inform about the project in all details. Whether existing books and documentaries are sufficient to fill this gap is down to the viewer. I do not think it is possible to walk away from Oppenheimer thinking that everything turned out alright for the Manhattan Project’s members or the world. I do think that the limited perspective reflects the protagonist’s myopia, rather than making him a faultless hero.
The actual effects of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not displayed, an artistic decision which reflects Oppenheimer’s own horror and shame at the results, the literal aversion of his eyes. This decision ties into Oppenheimer’s own fecklessness in trying to caution against the initial bombings, as well as the way his attempts to caution against further development led to him being pushed out of academic and military institutions which he helped develop and establish. There are not as many women as men in the film, reflecting the gender politics of the time, which are examined and sometimes confronted in the film.
Oppenheimer shifts, two-thirds through the film, from using legal proceedings solely as framing to main action. While I enjoy movies about arguments, this may be jarring or incongruous for some viewers. Audiences used to comedies or action films, or simply not used to three-hour films, may find Oppenheimer slow, though I find it well-paced and was surprised at how frequently it uses comedy or irony to underline drama, as serious films often do. In the end, consecutive dramatic turns for the dueling perspective characters undercuts their respective senses of narcissistic self-importance by the march of history. Oppenheimer’s last line is a haunting reminder that the final legacy of nuclear weaponry has not yet been written and may yet be written in humanity’s end.
This leaves me with a sense of awe at the power of science and the building blocks of the universe. Nearly the whole film I am arrest in disquiet because I know the catastrophe unleashed by these scientists. I leave the theater with a sense of profound respect for the artists and craftspeople who developed the picture, and a renewed sense of concern about what humanity has wrought upon the world. Interstellar and Tenet are both films concerned with the way humanity has wrecked the only place we have to live, yet each expresses some hope that we might change and that we must go on. Oppenheimer, while funny and sexy at points, is a warning that does not brook optimism about how humans – at least regimes long in power – see problems and solutions. They just keep building more advanced hammers, at great cost to the masses, seeing more and more things as nails.
Great write up! I'm curious, does the film include the debate about whether or not to use the bomb? I know there was disagreement at the time.