★★★

If the entire world was destroyed in 1945, at least the commies would go with it.

Oppenheimer will not decisively answer the universal questions you bring with you to the big screen.  To the extent I can extrapolate an answer from Christopher Nolan himself based upon the story of the film, I suspect that Nolan would not wish to use anything made by that man, but would also be too awed to actually say no.

To see Oppenheimer today is to not only witness an explosion that’s as big as any you’ll ever likely see, but also to be situated in a bureaucratic parable.  By far the most directly political film Nolan has ever created, it has the pacing of an elaborate countdown and also the immediate feel of volatility characteristic of the life and career of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). Nolan’s procedural shifts between the past and two different presentations of the future – one in black/white, and one in color.  The most crucial events – from Oppenheimer’s study in Europe to his return to the States to his communist affiliations on campus to his womanizing to his marriage to his joining the Manhattan Project to the development of the bomb and the fallout of the successful Trinity test – are neither dwelled upon nor so closely emphasized such as to make any one of them more significant than any other.  As a document of history conveying information and details, scientific, political, personal, and eventful, it is the finest edited work of Nolan’s career alongside Dunkirk.

Two issues keep it from indomitable greatness.  The first is that while Cillian Murphy looks the part and speaks the words as Oppenheimer did, it is the film’s orbit of him that does the narrative work that he and his stone face seemingly cannot.  Murphy’s face begs a curious look but also coyly never reveals even when it’s supposed to.  He plays a theatrical diva to the point of liberal self critique, but he lacks the warmth and humor that George C. Scott brought to the portrait of General Patton in Patton.  It’s an emotional range that Murphy either doesn’t have or was told not to express because Oppenheimer prefers to suggest that his tortured state comes from perceiving the quantum realities of energy and of matter interacting with itself.

Soon enough, Oppenheimer creates his own problems, and they are almost always political, even when they involve other things.  Intriguingly, Nolan’s unromantic filmmaking sensibilities are put to their best use here.  Oppenheimer’s womanizing is so virulently non-sympathetic that it evokes repellance.  He never falls in love; his wife is merely a woman he can get (after her divorce but not before knocking her up while she’s still married) who then has the temerity to demand that Oppenheimer not be what the other main character, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), declares him to be in a climactic moment.

Oppenheimer is ambivalent about its ultimate climax, which both helps and hurts it.  Nolan very consciously refuses to portray the administrative show trials against Oppenheimer as the kind of inhumane, bureaucratic evil that Clint Eastwood depicted in Sully.  The hearing to restore his security clearance after Oppenheimer has taken on a new life of celebrity and influence as a voice against additional nuclear development is very much a sham trial and futile effort where all cards are stacked against him from the beginning, and where his attorney can do nothing but fumble with documents that have never been revealed to him and squeak out meek arguments that miss the point.  But it’s also, in important ways, the very trouble that Oppenheimer himself sought from the beginning.  When prosecutors and security judges ask him questions about his past, his affiliations, and of the various people he retained and allowed “in the know” during the Manhattan Project, they are not dredging up nothing, but rather asking him to explain things that we see or have previously seen in the film.

In other words, this is a rare film featuring a sham trial that in its own perverse way is actually geared towards the truth that the title character seems inclined to partially conceal.  It is in grievous reaction to an event we never see, and can only retroactively appreciate offscreen as the Soviet’s own successful nuclear detonation in 1949, and the revelation of treachery by Alger Hiss and by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.  There are few other ways to explain J. Robert Oppenheimer’s self-made mystique – i.e. why he would excitedly jump at the chance to build a radioactive device he knows to be a weapon of mass destruction, but also to work the project in such a way as to give his fellow left-wing scientists reason to believe that he would be sympathetic to their pleas for the bomb not to be used.  Or how the film can have a scene where the character can envision his entire audience burned, melted, charred, and eradicated – with the skin peeling off their face like tissue paper – yet also say in the very speech he gives them that he wishes he could have finished the bomb in time to use it on Nazi Germany.

Oppenheimer flirts with communism by flirting (literally) with communists, and always gives himself a way out by telling them, “I never joined the party.”  That habitual sly exit theme is revisited when he sternly rebukes his pacifist colleagues with ruthless pragmatism before his and Leslie Groves (Matt Damon)’s meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson, yet can then sanctimoniously tell President Truman (Gary Oldman) of the blood he believes is on his hands for having made the bomb.  It is a pivotal moment that happens a bit too quickly.  I suspect the general takeaway will be more about the way Truman responded to him rather than what Oppenheimer said, but Nolan sneaks a very clever line and rejoinder at the beginning that tells you everything.  Truman begins talking about the use of the bomb on Hiroshima, and Oppenheimer interrupts him by reminding him that Nagasaki was also bombed.  It is likely inaccurate, but as an insight into the character, it is one of the most ludicrous things he says in the whole film.  As if Truman doesn’t know about the order he himself gave to blow up an entire city and kill over a hundred thousand people to end a war.  But, of course, the reason Oppenheimer says it here is because he is desperate to control the narrative in such a way as to continue his importance.  It’s like when Warren Buffett wrote an op/ed column in 2011 asking the government to tax him more.

Why does Oppenheimer ignore the hydrogen bomb and then later on act as though that would be the ultimate bridge too far?  Is it really because of his ideals or because of the fact that the idea was someone else’s?  It’s the same reason he puts the Manhattan Project in the middle of the New Mexican desert.  Is it really the practical “midpoint” for shipping and transporting goods and people and because it’s an empty space with no one around (except Indians, Mexicans, and ranchers)?  No.  But it’s where Oppenheimer has his fondest memories.  It’s the world he knows and favors, and he treats it as such by leading the Los Alamos team in an effort to make something that can blow it up.

This is the second problem with Oppenheimer.  The clever way Nolan paces the character’s journey is more sequential than it is dramatic, and the implication that Oppenheimer is in some ways a personification of radioactive volatility and that perhaps a cold, bureaucratic show trial may actually be the only thing that could check him even as it is just as reactive to the fallout as his own actions are, does not make for quite the profound observation Nolan seems to think that it does.  And since Nolan can hardly leave Oppenheimer’s side, the critique can, at times, feel disingenuous.  Murphy’s character does not come to life on his own such as to make compelling his convictions and also make clear his flaws.  His flaws are observed by others, sometimes in starkly clear, unambiguous terms, but the film cannot make complete sense of them.

It’s as though Nolan has somehow been radioactively fused to J. Robert Oppenheimer.  He desperately wants to break free, yet can’t quite shake the sense that it would be too awesome to refuse.

– Vivek