Movie explores Einstein's legacy
Archival footage and re-enactments illuminate history
Anthony Philipson’s Einstein and the Bomb is a carefully compiled docudrama focusing on the three weeks Albert Einstein, a German Jew escaping the Nazis, spent hiding out in a hut in Norfolk.
Philipson relies solely on Einstein’s own words, from interviews, speeches and letters, using a blend of archival footage and re-enactments. It’s a fascinating story, leading neatly into Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
The splitting of the atom started it all, creating the capability to generate the critical mass of radioactive material necessary to create a nuclear bomb.
Next came the world’s most famous equation, E=mc2 , explaining what energy is, making a possible nuclear bomb a reality, but nobody yet knew how to build one.
Both Oppenheimer and Einstein and the Bomb, in showing only some aspects of the bomb’s creation, leave room for audiences to fit the pieces together for themselves.
Jonathan Glazer perfects this approach to historical film-making in another recent movie, The Zone of Interest.
In the Norfolk hut, Einstein (played in the re-enactments by Irish actor Aidan McArdle) seemed to go unnoticed.
The two armed guards had little to do, even after the anti-fascist Conservative MP and former naval commander Oliver Locker-Lampson (Andrew Havill), who had invited Einstein to hide in his hut, invited the press to interview him.
Unsurprisingly, the press revealed the story of the Nobel laureate, the E=MC2 genius on the run, but even then, his only visitor was Jacob Epstein, who arrived to sculpt a bust of him.
Days after that publicity, Einstein agreed to speak in a packed Albert Hall, calling on all nations to “resist the powers that threaten intellectual and individual freedom … which our forefathers won through bitter struggle”.
The film shows a lot about Einstein’s complex character.
He was endearing, a clown with bad hair, a self-described incorrigible non-conformist, a brilliant person with a deep commitment to peace.
Yet, even after relocating to the safe environment of Princeton University, living in the US for the rest of his life, his view that peace was so important it was worth fighting for got him into big trouble from the political left and right.
There’s one photo of him with his second wife, his cousin Elsa Einstein, but she’s otherwise absent from the film, along with his physicist first wife, Mileva Maric´ .
Einstein apparently obliterated them from the record, along with the children he had with Maric´ and any recognition of the contribution Maric´ made to his work, which was widely believed to have been significant.
In 1939, Einstein petitioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt to accelerate the development of a nuclear bomb, in case the Germans got there first, but in July 1940, the US Army Intelligence office denied Einstein the security clearance needed to work on the Manhattan Project and the scientists on the project were forbidden from consulting with him.
Einstein lived to regret petitioning Roosevelt. When he heard that Hiroshima had been bombed he apparently exclaimed: “Woe is me.”
Interviewed by Newsweek in March 1947, he said, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed, I would have done nothing.”
■ Rating: Three and a half stars