Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic
WONDERS ARE MANY: THE MAKING OF DOCTOR ATOMIC, not rated, documentary, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3.5 chiles
There are two tense, nail-biting deadlines looming in Jon Else’s fascinating 2007 documentary. One is the opening night of a new opera. The other is the dawn of a new era. The stakes, of course, are vastly different, but for the people involved, each is all-consuming.
The opera is Doctor Atomic, the 2005 work by composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars, which chronicles the race against time to build an atomic bomb. Else shuffles his film’s two themes together. One half is a documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the team of extraordinary scientists, most of them in their twenties, who were gathered on a Los Alamos hilltop to devise a doomsday weapon before the Germans could beat them to it. The action covers the 48 hours leading up to the first test of the bomb. The other half of the film is a documentary about Adams and Sellars and the company of the San Francisco Opera who, in 2005, assembled to create the premiere of Doctor Atomic.
The results of this marriage of science and art are a little frustrating in terms of depth, particularly when it comes to the character of the polymath Oppenheimer, an extraordinary intellect who spoke many languages, read widely, and wrote poetry (but left no autobiography). But what the film loses in depth it makes up for in the tension between the two projects.
Sellars doubles as librettist and director (he is also directing the Santa Fe Opera’s new production of Doctor Atomic this season). His effervescent enthusiasm and drive are in marked contrast with the low-key bemusement of his collaborator Adams, and the film spends rewarding time with each, exploring their approaches to their work. Sellars explains that he assembled, rather than wrote, the libretto from a wide range of sources. Watching him stitch together snips of cut-out texts is reminiscent of the scene in Argo when a roomful of Iranians sifts through the leavings of the American Embassy’s paper shredder. As director of the opera, Sellars flings himself into rehearsals with an exuberant, immersive involvement that feels a pole apart from what we take Oppenheimer’s management style to have been; but the two men are linked by their total commitment to their projects.
Else employs a number of talking-head interviews from both worlds, spending time with members of the cast and the creative team of the opera, and with scientists who knew Oppenheimer and worked on the Manhattan Project. The physicist Freeman Dyson observes that scientists are like children tinkering: “We want to take the watch apart to see how it works.”
Hovering over the film is the knowledge that we have achieved the power to blow the watch to smithereens. — Jonathan Richards
Screens at 5 p.m. Thursday, July 12, only, with director Jon Else and librettist-director Peter Sellars in attendance.