Oppenheimer

Directed by Christopher Nolan (2023) **1/2

Is a film covering an important subject important by default? Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a cinematic excursion into the life of the theoretical physicist who directed U.S. government’s laboratory at Los Alamos, unwillingly says: no. Hailed as a masterpiece of directing in some quarters, the three-hour commitment somehow finds ways to render an inherently interesting subject uninteresting. While exceedingly well made in many respects, Oppenheimer suffers from an unfocused script (by Nolan). It checkmarks all the pertinent highs and lows of the physicist’s life, like an author dutifully planning out a biography, but doesn’t appear as interested in Oppenheimer’s work as it does in extraneous figures in his life.

Kudos, though, to the casting of Irish actor Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders), whose tall, thin presence sporting a porkpie hat, tie, and pipe evokes a mid-century David Byrne. Murphy is excellent at capturing the dual nature of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had an intensity he brought to his work that he never used to defend himself from conspiring political forces. Being a Nolan movie, the narrative of Oppenheimer jumps from time period to time period. The various periods aren’t confusing, helped by different B&W and color schemes for differing times and places (the IMAX presentation also included different aspect ratios). A short meeting with Albert Einstein functions as a framing device for the narrative.

Nolan tells the essentials of Oppenheimer’s life with deft clarity and an amazing attention to period detail: Oppenheimer’s early encounters with physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and his dual teaching appointments at Caltech and Harvard. Oppenheimer gets somewhat involved, along the way, with the Communist party and its funneling of money to the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War, and very involved with a young Communist psychiatrist, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, of Dune: Part Two) who, though obsessed with Oppenheimer, repelled him the more he was attentive to her (we get it: opposite particles attract). As happened with so many, these early century dalliances would come back to make life miserable for him.

It’s when Colonel Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), director of the Manhattan Project, hires Oppenheimer to head the project’s lab, that the film makes its strongest marks, a large project reenacting and recreating another large project. The New Mexico-based endeavor to build workable atomic bombs before Germany did the same was a project requiring so many workers and immense resources that a small town was quickly built to house the population. Working with, among many others, physicists Edward Teller (film director Benny Safdie, Uncut Gems) and Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett, Black Hawk Down), Oppenheimer was also accompanied by his wife, Kitty Puening (Emily Blunt, Sicario), a former Communist Party member and a fiercer defender of her husband than Robert himself. (And also, an unhappy person? I saw Blunt’s Kitty smile for a total of two seconds during the entire movie.)

Despite the time-jumping and subject matter some may find too dry (stay home, then), Oppenheimer stayed, for my tastes, too safely in the middle lanes of Hollywood, using a nearly omnipresent score by Ludwig Göransson to accentuate every emotional turn (though Nolan smartly cuts the soundtrack during the Los Alamos bomb detonation). Much of the film’s running time is devoted to a grueling post-war security hearing (resulting in Robert’s security clearance being revoked) and a later Senate confirmation hearing for Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss (well performed by Robert Downey, Jr.) in which it’s revealed Oppenheimer’s post-war downfall was orchestrated by Strauss. Here the unfocused nature of the screenplay most manifests itself. I would have much preferred the film detail the specifics of nuclear fission, a subject Oppenheimer so dug into that we’re watching a film about him today and concentrate far less time on a peripheral personage like Strauss.

Nolan’s Oppenheimer finds visually inventive ways to portray the demons and guilt which took hold of Robert’s soul. The film never shows the Japanese devastation wrought by dropped bombs, but the haunted demeanor of Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer makes his sorrow plain. Even though the film takes on the task of putting Oppenheimer’s mental state on screen, do we really need to see a naked Jean Tatlock incongruously climbing overtop him during the security hearing? It’s tonally jarring.

Oppenheimer‘s substantial cast also included Rami Malek (Mr. Robot), Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone) and Scott Grimes (The Orville). The Universal DVD features over three hours of extra features, including a documentary, To End All War: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb and a segment on the various film stocks and technical methods pioneered in the making of the film.

—Michael R. Neno, 2024 December 22