Oppenheimer

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bhagavad Gita

With Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan has made a great big movie about a great big man. Most biopics are character studies, explorations of our often-titular character over time and through the crucible. And while this movie does deliver on the necessary requirements of technically being a biopic, there is something about the scope and separateness of the plot and artistic vision that keeps it from becoming a truly great film. Let me clear, this movie will dazzle you. You will be on the edge of your seat for large swaths of time. The first two thirds of this movie should be studied in film schools—how can something as boring as “a misunderstood physics PHD contemplating unionizing and communism” be paced like Mad Max: Fury Road? But after the literal explosive climax, the movie reveals itself to be marathon not a sprint, and the audience has little energy to spend on the last third of the race. This is a movie that deserves to be seen, and to be seen in theaters on the biggest screen possible. However, after its initial viewing, you will probably never think about it or see it again.

A three-hour endeavor, Oppenheimer, follows the relevant personal history of the paradigm-shifting Robert J. Oppenheimer— from Snow White cosplayer to God-incarnate to a man trying to regain the limelight by “draining the swamp” and taking down those pesky Washington bureaucrats. Cilllian Murphy, a man I could describe as “what if cheekbones could act,” plays “Oppy” over three tangled timelines across his life. One, as a young professor bringing a new science to America as he flirts with communism and any woman who looks his way. Two, as the self-righteous leader and visionary behind Los Alamos, dealing with accusations of espionage and Soviet sympathies. And three, as a man dealing with the fallout (pun intended) of the Trinity Test and about what happens when the military-industrial complex no longer needs its most central creator.

This movie features an overwhelming amount of acting talent to the point of distraction. Murphy is absolutely the center of this movie, and his performance is an interior and measured one. While the script does not give his character much range outside a kangaroo court showdown, he brings a weight and a seriousness to the role that propels the movie. Emily Blunt joins the inner circle cast as Oppenheimer’s definitely-not-a-teetotaler wife, and Florence Pugh plays Jean Tatlock, a communist lover of Oppy whose relationship forms the alleged emotional core of the movie. Robert Downey Jr. plays a bureaucrat who you will more than likely need to google, Lewis Strauss, who is out for vengeance.  Matt Damon goes toe-to-toe with Paul Newman as Leslie Groves. And Jason Clarke should legitimately study for the Bar. Perhaps the breakout role goes to Benny Safdie playing Edward Teller, the unapologetic, pie-in-the-sky thinker whose character and invention fuel the backdrop of the Cold War.

 This is a star-laden cast whose bonafides are too long to list here. Not that every movie deserves an intertextual reading, but some of the casting runs the risk of drawing the audience out of the headspace of 1940s wartime-America. As well-acted as their scenes and characters are, the third line off the bench of Jack Quaid, Josh Peck, Alex Wolf etcetera just brought me out of the movie. It made me ask ridiculous questions like—“Can you imagine if Billy Butcher testified in the McCarthy-era Senate?” Or “what if Nickelodeon did a kids show about the nuclear apocalypse?” Or “what if all of a sudden, the demon-king-of-hell, Paimon, joined in for a threesome as Oppy read the Bhagavad Gita with Jean Tatlock?” All that might just be a function of my wild imagination, but I think this movie would have benefited from consolidation of characters, done to great effect in the comparable Chernobyl miniseries.

Thematically and story-wise, this movie is best compared to his previous works of Interstellar and Dunkirk. Interstellar, for its similar grandeur and contemplation of the human condition. Dunkirk for its obvious WW2 connection, the great men of history, and for its separate interwoven plots and subsequent cross-cutting. This movie is mesmerizing for the first two thirds, and I was ready to anoint it a historic film of the 21^st century. Then the bomb went-off, which wasn’t even that big of a deal, and the movie still had a full hour left. Whereas that first two thirds of the movie was exhilarating as the tension builds around the test, the last third, with similar pacing, has the tension built around stakes we are imminently less familiar with. Essentially the structure of the film, forces the viewer to compare the testing of the nuclear bomb with the petty politicking of a Washington bureaucrat (Downey Jr) and Oppy as they engage in a cat-and-mouse game across multiple years, a really big flower vase blocking Dane DeHaan, and a JFK reference. It is this disappointment that had me reconsidering the first part of the movie retrospectively.  Was it legitimately gripping? Or is a pretty banal scene punched up with quick cuts and interstitials that are supposed to tell you what Nolan thinks physics is (bright dots and lines and explosions and loud sounds against a black backdrop)? Was it all just a cheap trick?

There is something removed and cold about how this movie treats its central character that keeps it from connecting with audiences. After spending nearly three hours with the guy, I really can’t say much about Oppy, other than he was cocky, kind of felt guilty about nuclear proliferation and was sad when his lover died (that isn’t a spoiler that is history). But even then, when we find Murphy crying on the forest floor, which is supposed to be more of an emotional apex than when the bomb goes off, I was left not really caring about his relationship with Tatlock. They were basically just portrayed as on-again-off-again and he always brought her flowers and then there was birthday suit time and she was a commie and he was a Montague just commie-curious. But if you’ve read the source-text American Prometheus, you know that there was much more depth and nuance to their relationship and its impact on both their lives. It is as if Nolan feels like by showing the archetypical beats of a relationship, he has done the emotional heavy lifting, when, audiences needed a written-with-words emotional connection. This is an ongoing theme and limitation of Nolan’s work—cool story, great editing, direction, cinematography, epic vision, practical effects, but the characters tend to be tools useful to the plot and not fully conceived humans. I can not say it is much improved here.

This is a Hollywood spectacle you should absolutely see. I liked it. For the most part. It took a great big swing to be a great big film and fell a bit short. That is something I will always admire but I will more than likely forget this film.

Three out of four stars.