“Oppenheimer”: Becoming Death

Oppenheimer
Written & Directed by Christopher Nolan
* Contains Spoilers *

After seeing Oppenheimer twice last weekend, I think that the folks who proclaim modern cinema dead can go… fine, I’ll be polite and simply invite them to reconsider their pessimism.

The last few years have revived my optimism about the future of Hollywood. On the lighter side, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and See How They Run all proved that Hollywood can still turn out fresh entertainment alongside its stale franchise entries, while Dune and The Menu demonstrated that mainstream studios can still tackle serious subjects with finesse — and, dare I say, panache. Christopher Nolan’s latest belongs among the latter.

In a nutshell, Oppenheimer recounts the life of the theoretical physicist who led the Los Alamos team in creating the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. That’s right: a biopic based on a 700+ page book — that’s not one but two notorious Hollywood hurdles to leap.

I generally dislike biopics and I’m skeptical about most book adaptations, because both must necessarily streamline the ambiguities which make novels and biographies compelling. Biopics in particular — like A Beautiful Mind or Lincoln — tend to become either hagiographies or character assassinations. Oppenheimer, I am pleased to report, becomes neither.

The two main characters in the film are Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.). Both men are morally wrinkled, and Nolan refuses to iron them out: Oppenheimer is a brilliant but self-important diva, while Strauss is a self-made man who, despite his seat on the Atomic Energy Commission, remains touchy about his humble background. Their Mozart-Salieri dynamic forms the skeleton of the film’s complex, nonlinear plot.

But Nolan’s restrained moralism extends beyond his characters: he lets their era show its wrinkles, too. Oppenheimer captures history through a rarely nuanced lens. The film doesn’t shy away, for instance, from the issue of communist infiltration in American institutions, though it doesn’t indulge in cheap polemics, either. (A possible exception is Gary Oldman’s cameo as President Truman, but I still can’t decide how to interpret Nolan’s writing or Oldman’s performance in the scene. That’s at least prima facie evidence against its being superficial.)

Thanks to the sensitive writing and performances of the principals and the nuanced depiction of their age, the film gives prominence to a particularly rich, but not typically cinematic, theme. Nolan has several times expressed a desire to tell stories in which scientists are the protagonists, not just the socially awkward supporting characters who furnish the heroes with tools and the audience with comic relief. That desire was behind the plot of Interstellar, and it resurfaces here.

If Interstellar explores the existential side of scientific inquiry, Oppenheimer explores something thornier and more concrete: the conflicting demands of science and politics. Col. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), director of the Manhattan Project, insists throughout the film that the threat of Soviet espionage requires scrupulous “compartmentalization” among the scientists and engineers at work on “the gadget” which would become the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer and his fellow eggheads are naturally frustrated by Col. Groves’ demands. As the film makes clear, science is always a collaborative affair, and requires a constant and easy flow of information from one scientist to another: no single genius has a monopoly on insight, after all.

But it’s one thing to describe that conflict in words; it’s another to see that conflict play out between characters onscreen. Sure, excessive compartmentalization slowed the free exchange of scientific ideas and thereby the development of the bomb. But at the same time (spoiler alert), Los Alamos ultimately did prove insecure: Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham) betrayed numerous secrets about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. Nolan doesn’t indulge in cheap judgment, and neither should we.

The moral complexities of World War II and the incipient Cold War — the problematic nature of genius — the conflict between wisdom and prudence: I left the theatre emotionally exhausted, but still pondering these and other subjects. A film that can leave its audience doing both is a true cinematic achievement…

…but given my disdain for hagiography, I would be remiss if I did nothing but sing the film’s praises. It has its flaws.

One flaw might be the pacing. From its first shot, the film runs on all cylinders — thanks in no small part to Ludwig Göransson’s pulse-pounding but strangely forgettable score — and doesn’t hit the brakes until the final frame. It slows a bit here and there, but not much, giving a high-octane quality even to Cillian Murphy’s countless thousand-yard stares into the camera.

Now, I said this might be a flaw, depending on your taste. Like all of Nolan’s movies, Oppenheimer is presented from a heavily subjective perspective — two, in fact: Oppenheimer’s in color, Strauss’s in black and white. I see the pacing as another artistic function of that subjective perspective: it captures something of the frantic mental activity which accompanies brilliance. (It also goes a long way to distracting the audience from the film’s 3-hour runtime.) But whatever its artistic justification, the pace is occasionally jarring.

Less debatable, however, are the sex scenes. Oppenheimer was apparently a rapacious womanizer (which came back to bite him in 1954), and a character study which neglects to dwell on this darker side of his personal history would be simply incomplete. But Nolan could easily have done justice to Oppenheimer’s womanizing without two sex scenes and oodles of nudity. Poor Florence Pugh spends nearly all of her scant screen time naked! I’m no prude, and I have no intrinsic objection to nudity in art, but I expect it to serve an artistic purpose. In my opinion, Oppenheimer’s sex scenes and nudity serve no such purpose. They expose an uncharacteristic lack of imagination for Christopher Nolan, and that’s a shame.

Flaws notwithstanding, however, Oppenheimer was a terrific film which I would heartily recommend, especially in IMAX. You should certainly watch it before you grumble once again that Hollywood does nothing but churn out woke garbage these days. That a major studio greenlit a 3-hour film which could have easily become a monotonous screed demonizing America’s jingoistic military-industrial complex, but instead wound up a thrilling and complex dramatization of the birth of the atomic age, is an encouraging sign that contemporary culture is not lost.