Game changer
Soaring ‘Oppenheimer’ another triumph for director Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan has done it again. He has assembled a great ensemble cast and made a visually lavish, stateof-the-art film you should see on the biggest screen you can find (I saw it in 70mm IMAX).
“Oppenheimer” tells the mostly gripping story of the brilliant, fedora-and-pipeadorned quantum physicist (Irishman Cillian Murphy in a definitive role), aka “the father of the Atomic Bomb.”
Oppenheimer is an arrogant genius and the leader of the Manhattan Project. He brings together groundbreaking scientists, including Czech-American Lilli Hornig (Olivia Thirlby) and Edward Teller (Bennie Safdie).
This motley band of brainiacs manufacture and test atomic weapons before the Nazis are able to, allowing the U.S. to use the weapons to force Japan to surrender.
As the film tells us, Oppenheimer was an “American Prometheus,” who bestowed the the fire of the gods upon American forces.
But, to paraphrase the first Morse Code message transmitted in1844, “what hath Oppenheimer wrought?” And what was his motivation and was he a Communist spy?
Based on the 2005 book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, “Oppenheimer” reminds us that J. Robert Oppenheimer was a non-observant Jew born in New York City in 1904.
The story begins in color (often shifting to black-and-white) in 1954 with Oppenheimer testifying before the US. Atomic Energy Commission, where ardent conservative Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) tries to get to the bottom of Oppenheimer’s and his troubled wife Kitty’s flirtation with the Communist party in the 1930s and ’40s. It is a “kangaroo court.”
As Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, Emily Blunt delivers one of her strongest performances, full of anguish and sexual and intellectual fire. Florence Pugh, who plays Oppenheimer’s longtime, deeply-troubled lover Jean Tatlock, is incandescent.
In flashbacks, we see a young, mentally unstable Oppenheimer having visions of the shining, spinning molecular world like the mad scientist in the old Roger Corman film “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.” Oppenheimer goes from Harvard to Oxford and then to mainland Europe to study and meet with the greatest physicists of his era: Denmark’s Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Germany’s Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighofer) and Italian Enrico Fermi (Danny Deferrari) and more. Science is Oppy’s religion.
The 3-hour “Oppenheimer” is almost an Atom-Age “Citizen Kane.”
As is often the case with Nolan, the visuals are the greatest achievement. Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Nolan’s “Dunkirk”) outdoes himself. If one grows tired of Nolan’s tendency to put actors’ faces in front, turning the film into a portrait gallery, Van Hoytema’s camera consistently enchants and awes. The sight of Blunt and Murphy galloping across the screen on horseback in New Mexico recalls the work of American auteur John Ford.
While the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are discussed at length, we do not see them. The film’s booming climax is the Trinity Test of July, 1945.
It’s hard not to see a connection between Oppenheimer and Nolan. Both are geniuses who assemble the greatest talent of their time to produce earth-shattering creations and who are harried by such relentless, unworthy adversaries as U.S. Atomic Energy Commission chairman and Naval officer Lewis Strauss (an almost unrecognizable Robert Downey, Jr.) and in Nolan’s case by film critics and studio executives.
Watching “Oppenheimer,” which was adapted by Nolan, I wondered why we spent so much time with Strauss, who is a small, evil and vindictive man. In pursuit of its Rumpelstiltskin-like villain, “Oppenheimer” does an injustice to its magnificent, deeply-flawed hero.
(“Oppenheimer” contains profanity, sexually suggestive scenes, nudity and mature themes)