By Jake Wilson
OPPENHEIMER ★★★½
(MA) 180 minutes
A brilliant, restless, obsessive figure, impossible to fathom in full: this description could fairly be applied to the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, both the real man and the version cagily portrayed by Cillian Murphy in the new film by Christopher Nolan.
Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer.Credit: AP
Something comparable might be said of Nolan, though the differences are as notable as the resemblances. Oppenheimer, according to one of his lovers, was so precocious he “never had a childhood”. Nolan has hardly needed to grow up, having built his career as an entertainer on subjects that might be expected to interest a bright 12-year-old: war, superheroes, time paradoxes, magic tricks, things that go bang.
Considering the grand scale of Nolan’s ambitions, his sensibility can feel almost grotesquely limited. Yet, he’s always had the knack of undermining his grandiosity from within. From The Prestige to his Batman trilogy to the wilfully incomprehensible Tenet, he’s made movies about men neurotically determined to leave their mark, through creation or destruction or both.
The latest in the series, Oppenheimer is on one level a traditional Great Man biopic, albeit more wedded to the facts than most (the starting point for Nolan’s script was Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s doorstopper 2005 biography American Prometheus). Gaunt and shock-haired, with depths of alarm in his big blue eyes, Murphy as the young Oppenheimer is everybody’s idea of a tortured genius – though there’s no denying the real man looked somewhat like this, and was indeed the sort of polymath capable of learning Sanskrit in his spare time for fun.
Cillian Murphy in a scene from Oppenheimer.
Dozens of well-known actors file past as prominent scientists and politicians of the mid-20th century, from Tom Conti’s cuddly Einstein to Gary Oldman as an unusually malevolent Harry Truman. Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt, as the two main women in the hero’s life, are minor players at best: even Pugh’s hyped nude scene is mainly a way of showing her character and Oppenheimer remain sexually involved without slowing down the conveyor belt of exposition.
As with many an old-fashioned epic, Oppenheimer is composed largely of solemn scenes of men in rooms making speeches – as dry as any historical miniseries you had to sit through in high school, though more fleetly edited. To some extent, the willingness to risk tedium is to Nolan’s credit: it would be too much to claim you’ll leave knowing more about quantum physics, but you’ll probably be better informed about Oppenheimer’s political views, which were left-wing enough to occasion the revoking of his security clearance in 1954.
The confidential hearing leading to this decision supplies the film’s framework, with Oppenheimer recounting his life story from the stand – although Nolan characteristically complicates the time scheme further via flash-forwards centred on the sometime Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (an aged-up Robert Downey jnr, who gets to do more showboating than anyone else, with Matt Damon running a close second as Oppenheimer’s gruff wartime boss).
Just as characteristic is the ambiguity of the ultimate message. If you wandered in at the right moment, you could see this as a piece of old-fashioned liberal uplift about an intellectual dynamo who overcomes anti-Semitism and his demons in time to help ensure the safety of the free world, then becomes the victim of a witch-hunt for having taken advantage of that freedom (as the script indicates, while Oppenheimer had Communist ties in the 1930s, there’s no firm evidence he was ever a party member).
But lurking behind the prosy biopic conventions is a touch of Kafka: just because a man is unfairly accused doesn’t mean he isn’t guilty in a deeper sense. Likewise, there’s something of Kafka’s imaginary America in the depiction of Los Alamos, where the first nuclear tests took place. The desert town built to house the scientists is almost like a film set – and Oppenheimer, glowering under his broad-brimmed hat, is like an uncanny version of a western gunslinger, haunted in advance by the future he’s working to bring about.
The entire structure of Oppenheimer is built around the detonation of that first bomb, the pivot point where theory becomes practice and the nature of reality shifts. The nearer we get to ground zero, the more the film moves towards abstraction: the editing speeds up, the repetitions of Ludwig Goransson’s hammering score grow more insistent, and the recurring flashes of cosmic imagery take on a nightmare quality as if the narrative universe were about to collapse in on itself like a black hole.
Since this never quite happens, the aftermath can hardly be anything but an anticlimax. If a degree of tension persists, it’s largely through the film’s reluctance or inability to answer its central questions: was Oppenheimer at all justified in agreeing to work on the bomb, and how much responsibility does he personally bear for the outcome?
Perhaps Nolan feels a similar uncertainty about his motives for making this often laborious yet genuinely strange and gripping movie – a grand spectacle inspired by some of the grimmest events in human history, and itself an invention meant to blow us all away.
Oppenheimer is released in cinemas on July 20.
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