OPPENHEIMER - Mark Reviews Movies

Oppenheimer, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 20, 2023

Oppenheimer is the story of a dreamer who unleashes a nightmare upon the world. It’s a rich, deep piece about a complex and seemingly inscrutable man, the history through which he lived, and the horrific future he helped to usher in. Writer/director Christopher Nolan has put considerable effort, effortless skill, and what must have been a sizeable budget into creating a three-hour film that ponders the vastness of the unknowable and the petty destructiveness of humanity with equal attention to detail, as well as with a mounting sense of terror.

In other words, it's a notable achievement in its own right and a bit of an unexpected outlier in Nolan's output. The filmmaker who so often creates puzzles involving and revolving around time, memory, dreams, and/or fictional notions of science has once again created a narrative that feels like a bit of a puzzle. What makes this film distinct among Nolan's others, though, is that the puzzle reflects something about the complexities of the man and the story at its core, instead of its own complicated nature.

We're shown about four or five stages in the life of the eponymous figure, divided into a clean three-act structure yet pieced together, not with strict chronology, but based on mood, historical discovery, and personal revelation, as the man who would come to so obviously define the world in the second half of the 20th century and beyond grapples with the sheer enormity of what he has done.

Within that narrative, Nolan's screenplay, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, further divides itself into two distinct perspectives. The first belong to the primary subject, and the other belongs to that of a lesser man (By comparison, who isn't, though?), whose life and career come to be defined by his essentially passing connection to the protagonist. Looking at this material as a straightforward biography of one man, the film making so much of the connection of these stories seems like more than a bit of mystery unto itself, but again, it's not a straightforward biographical account of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called "Father of the Atomic Bomb."

It's about the man's place in history, yes, but this account is also about how so many of his contemporaries attempted and, in many ways, succeeded in writing and re-writing that history as it was occurring and in its immediate aftermath, as the entire context of domestic and international politics changes because of Oppenheimer. One of the many, many questions posed by Nolan's film is who among these really possesses the power they claim to have. Even a question such as that, though, is eclipsed by, perhaps, the ultimate one involving these figures: Do any of them—or, for that matter, any of us—actually deserve to possess such power?

This biography begins with relative simplicity, as we meet a young Robert—played throughout the course of the story by Cillian Murphy, in a staggering, internalized performance of a man who comes to be haunted by his own existence—at Cambridge, circa the mid-1920s. Robert, the American son of German-Jewish immigrants, has left the United States to pursue his education in the burgeoning field of quantum mechanics, which has yet to arrive in any meaningful way in his home country.

At Cambridge, he is lonely, homesick, and imagining a realm beyond yet within the tangible, visible one—the empty space between atoms, the power of gravity, the void left by a dead star. Nolan employs a series of optical tricks for these moments, and if we can only barely grasp their meaning (a series of circles, for example, forming what looks to be the structure of the atom), that's basically the point. When Robert's greatest and most terrifying work comes to fruition in the desert of New Mexico, the imagery of fire, smoke, and sparks is first presented in close-ups, with that same air of mystery, until the scale of the explosion is seen and felt with unmistakable reality.

The man is one whose life and studies are devoted to theory, not practice or action, and that's a way of saying that, as someone jokes about the initial that starts Robert's full name, our protagonist doesn't stand for anything. After spending some time studying in Germany, Robert returns to the United States to teach quantum physics at Princeton, while fellow colleagues work in offices and labs next door to put such ideas to physical tests.

In politics, Robert spends time at meetings for the local Communist Party but, while he believes in unions and fighting the rise of fascism in Europe through communist channels there, never joins. In his personal life, he starts a seemingly one-sided affair with Jean (Florence Pugh), before beginning another affair with and falling into a marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt), the wife of a colleague when he first meets her. That such an indecisive man would become responsible for the most decisive creation of the 20th century is a paradox that fits perfectly into Robert's field of study.

Boiled down to its core, the rest of the story, which follows Robert through the race to beat the Nazis in developing the first nuclear weapon at a secret military base in Los Alamos and a closed-door hearing several years later in regards to his security clearance, is about the consequences of the man's life and work. They remain unforeseen by him, because he deals in the theoretical, and are only realized when it is far too late to do anything about what he has wrought on himself, other individuals, and the whole of humanity.

At any point and at many specific points, Robert could take a stand, but there's a lot of ego to the man, too (At one point, he dismisses Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti, and his discoveries as items of the past). There are benefits, enabled by his military handler Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), and fame to be had in keeping one's head down, going along with the prevailing sentiment, and not standing for anything. The second perspective, by the way, belongs to Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), whose path crosses Robert's after the war and whose desire for political power slowly reveals an ancillary, resentful motive that serves as a stark juxtaposition to the awesome power created by and the debilitating responsibility felt by Robert.

After witnessing the destructive potential of the bomb (in a spectacular scene of re-creation that eliminates all but awed breathing on the soundtrack) and imagining the effects of it on human bodies (in a horrifying sequence that has the noise of a cheering crowd pierced silent by a single, anguished scream), he finally takes a position that, in the aftershock of victory and the rise of the Cold War, few want to hear. Oppenheimer forces us to bear witness to it, though, in intimate and all-too-frighteningly human terms.

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