‘Oppenheimer’
To make the definitive movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who turned innocent subatomic particles into city-leveling weapons, would take a filmmaker as imaginative, bright, candid and eloquent as he was. Screenwriter-director Christopher Nolan’s stubborn quirkiness is therefore just about the ideal approach to bring the theoretical physicist’s story to life.
Curiously, there is a lot to admire about the guy who led the effort to create a weapon of mass destruction and then spent much of the rest of his life struggling unsuccessfully to contain it. As “Oppenheimer” shows, the scientist could be his own worst enemy on occasion. And downright weird.
While Nolan closely follows the facts set out in Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” he skews chronology as he did in “Dunkirk” and “Memento” so that “Oppenheimer” never feels like a filmed Wikipedia entry. We pick up Oppenhimer (Irish actor Cillian Murphy) in his college days and see him recruited by the gruff Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to run the Manhattan Project but Nolan crosscuts the biographical background with Oppenheimer defending himself a decade later in a closed door hearing as his security clearance is about to be revoked.
With astonishing economy, Nolan demonstrates how Oppenheimer’s formidable people
89 Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Jason Clarke, Macon Blair, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Conti, David Krumholtz, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Tony Goldwyn, Tim DeKay, Josh Hartnett, Matthew Modine, Rami Malek, Casey Affleck, James Remar Director: Christopher Nolan Rating: R Running time: 3 hours
skills helped the United States beat the Third Reich to the bomb. Groves picked him because he could corral strongwilled peers like Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) and Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett). He was also unfaithful to his loving, if chronically alcoholic wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) and was a timid, ineffectual father.
He supported the Republican cause in Spain, unions and Civil Rights. He also made friends with Communists. He became friends with several card carriers (Kitty was one), but he never joined and felt no love for Stalin after hearing of the purges.
Throughout his life, Oppenheimer was tarred as a Red and criticised for his calls to create an international body that controlled nuclear energy and weapons. He also opposed Teller’s plans for a “super” or hydrogen bomb. Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), his nominal boss at Princeton, was not only politically opposed to the scientist’s stands but went to great lengths to sink him, his career and his credibility.
Downey manages to handle the vindictiveness without going overboard. He knows how to quietly seethe because he lacks Oppenheimer’s wit and charm.
As anyone with a computer or a smartphone can tell you, “Oppenheimer” is three hours long.
Having actually seen it, I can say it has to be.
His politics and his story couldn’t fit on a bumper sticker. Furthermore, we need time to learn who the people in his world are and why not all scientists, bureaucrats or military leaders are the same.
What took Bird and Sherwood pages takes Nolan and his cast a mere shrug or the raising of an object. While much of the hype has gone into the IMAX photography and the shifts to black-andwhite (from regular Nolan cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema), all of that effort and expense would be wasted if Nolan and company hadn’t cast the film so well.
Murphy nails Oppenheimer’s distinctive mannerisms and also just happens to have his pale, haunting eyes.
More importantly, he’s got the range to pull off a character who can revel about being able to blow up the world at one moment and become overwhelmed with guilt the next. He and Blunt also pull off a supportive but troubled marriage with aplomb. Her Kitty is paradoxically afflicted by her drinking but has a spine of steel when defending her husband.
There are several Oscar-winners dropping in for appearances that last for a few minutes, but both they and Nolan treat these moments with the same care that was devoted to the scene where the initial test was detonated. Tom Conti drolly plays Albert Einstein as a theorist who might be behind Oppenheimer’s theories but is ahead of him on reading politics.
Oppenheimer spent most of his years after World War II trying to figure out how to mitigate the potential harm of nuclear weapons. It’s reasonable to ask us to spend just three hours going over those questions in the movie.