Oppenheimer (2023)

On a grand scale, the atom bomb and the man who built it bring the heat

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos

Oppenheimer (2023)

In theaters

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It is a mistake to think that the task of physics is to find out what nature is like. Physics is concerned with what we can say about nature.

– Neils Bohr

Whoever finds a thought which enables us to obtain a slightly deeper glimpse into the eternal secrets of nature, has been given a great grace.

– Albert Einstein

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The Danish physicist Neils Bohr (1885-1962) was a giant of 20^th century theoretical physics who, along with other titans, flourished next to that parallel colossus in the field, the German-American Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

The two men approached the discipline’s conundrums differently, but both deeply admired J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the gifted physicist and indomitable humanitarian portrayed to agonizing perfection by Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s breathtaking new movie.

Both Bohr and Einstein make telling appearances on screen.  Early in 1945 we see Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) solemnly warn Oppenheimer that in shepherding more than 5,000 scientists to build the atomic bomb, he’s ushered, or pushed, humanity into a new world order.

America, and shortly other major powers, he cautions, will escalate military options in dimensions that will never be widely understood and can never be scaled back.  In the public mind Robert will go from national savior to purveyor of global calamity.

Einstein (Tom Conti), once the bombs have been dropped on Japan in August of 1945, is no less somber, but more contrarian.  The most famous scientist in the world tries to lift from Oppenheimer’s shoulders the guilt the younger man can’t absolve himself of.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some American authorities – who’d once lauded Oppenheimer – turned on him, bent on removing his security clearance and eviscerating his reputation.

This patent “anti-communist” vendetta – Oppenheimer was never a member of the Party – strikes Einstein as wholly, despicably dishonorable.  “Tell them to go to hell,” he counsels Robert.

Bohr’s admonition, that physics ought to confine itself to what we can say about nature, is well understood by Oppenheimer and where Nolan anchors his incendiary screenplay.

Oppenheimer didn’t want to put nature at the service of evil.  He wanted to harness it for ultimate good.  Whether, as Einstein hoped, he’s finally been “given a great grace” Nolan leaves for us to decide.

The script is shrewdly adapted from the 2005 biography American Prometheus:  The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.  In its nearly 600 pages, we find a number of quiet, contemplative, even blissful moments in Oppenheimer’s turbulent life.

But there’s no letup in the cautionary tale Nolan has extrapolated from the book.  I can’t recall one such gentle instance in this movie that lasts more than a few seconds.

Oppenheimer, in Nolan’s deeply sympathetic account, is blessed and cursed with dark understanding, starting in his early twenties, which is when the movie opens.

Studying physics in the late 1920s at the University of Cambridge, Robert nervously walks the halls and lies awake at night haunted by visions of pulsing light, stars exploding in far distances, subatomic particles colliding.

Here’s our first, vital key to the man.  He “thinks” in physics.  In his enraptured mind he can’t help taking matter apart and putting it back together again.

His feverish insights boom and crackle on screen.  The movie’s sound design scrapes our nerves, as nature’s possibilities enthrall and rattle Oppenheimer.  Further study in Göttingen, Germany solidifies his gifts and leads him back to the U.S., and a teaching post at the University of California at Berkeley.

Where he falls into quandaries he couldn’t have predicted.  In the 1930s, leftwing causes burned hotly at Berkeley, and the campus and city were home to unapologetic members of the Communist Party, as well as fellow travelers, not that it was always easy to know the difference.

If you donated to Republicans fighting fascists in Spain, did it matter if you funneled the money through the Communist Party?  Yes, Oppenheimer rudely discovered.

Also caught in these shadows was Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), an avowed member of the CP, a brilliant psychoanalyst and Oppenheimer’s sometime lover.  Kitty Puening (Emily Blunt), whom Robert later married, was in the CP too.  Though Kitty had left the Party before the couple met, her fellow traveling, along with Oppenheimer’s, haunted their marriage.

Loyal Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) lent fierce support to her husband under fire

Once Hitler invaded Poland, Robert the brilliant theoretician was thrust into a role he’d never been good at, experimental physicist, a builder of machines that measured, to the farthest decimal point, the cold hard facts of what theory only proposed.

In the midst of WWII his extraordinary insights were known to the worldwide physics community, so he was bound to come to the attention of Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon).

Groves was charged with finding a scientist who could lead a vast effort to build an atom bomb before the Nazis did.  He reluctantly settled on Oppenheimer as administrator, and the two men forged a working partnership that got a small city built in New Mexico at Los Alamos.

From there, they marshaled the military and scientific personnel needed for what became The Manhattan Project.

And did exactly what their country asked of them. Two powerful bombs were built and eventually dropped on Japan, ending WWII.  Oppenheimer became an international celebrity.

But Nolan isn’t dramatizing just the scientific “triumph”, a hotly contested word even at the time.  He’s determined to light up, as American Prometheus does, the most savage historical ironies.

For there’s a painful corollary to Bohr’s stricture that physics shows us what we can say about nature.  All unsuspecting, we’re shocked to learn what nature says about us.  We’re meant, apparently, to steer our discoveries of nature.  What happens when we allow those revelations to spin around and begin to steer us?

I sometimes sensed that Murphy would have an onscreen breakdown, so deeply did he show a man with high intelligence and inner demons tearing him apart.  He’s in nearly every scene, and he seems to present us with a fresh piece of the puzzle every time.  Who could truly know this man?

That’s the question Nolan poses with an almost bullying fierceness.  For the movie’s three-hour runtime, he won’t let Oppenheimer or us off the hook.  What’s been wrought at Los Alamos?  Are we seeing the best of humanity, or the worst?

For actions have political consequences.  If you can build a big bomb, what’s to stop you from building a bigger one?  That’s what physicist Edward Teller (Bennie Safdie) won’t let Oppenheimer forget.  And on behalf of the victorious U.S., President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) refuses to slow the arms race that’s suddenly underway. 

Oppenheimer, argues Nolan, is in a double bind.  He and his fellow scientists can manipulate nature to distill its secrets.

But when nature reveals an unimagined power – namely, that under pressure combined atoms can unleash catastrophic destruction – we’re in its vise.  Scientists, and the governments that appoint them, must choose how they’re going to use a noxious power they’ve placed in their own hands.

And the brilliant, tormented man at the center of this grand exploit has earned spiteful enemies.  One of the most doggedly bitter is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.).   Strauss is a self-made millionaire who rose from shoe salesman to investment banker and has since worked his wiles to rise in Washington.

Robert Downey, Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the Washington insider out to destroy Oppenheimer

Strauss believes Oppenheimer looks down on him, dissed him both in a government hearing and to Einstein, and has earned a national prominence that Strauss thinks should surely be his, too.  If he can diminish Oppenheimer in the public eye, it will be.

As chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, in the midst of the McCarthyite red scare, he has the power to orchestrate a proceeding that could permanently discredit Oppenheimer.

Thus, the onetime scientific hero, a self-described New Deal Democrat, finally faces down a concerted attack from frightened, Eisenhower-era non-scientists, including Strauss (who earned the AEC chairmanship through political connections, not due to any scientific expertise).

They like the weapon he helped build but feel no qualms about icing the maker.

I was absorbed and impressed by American Prometheus – the book on which the movie Oppenheimer is based – and its exhaustive research.  Yet like other fine, even superb biographies I’ve read, I was left feeling I still didn’t have the firmest grasp on the subject, the man himself.

No fault of the authors.  I had the same profound respect and lingering discontent with Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs, Michael Holroyd on Lytton Strachey, David Herbert Donald on Thomas Wolfe and Deidre Bair on Samuel Beckett.  Their books, too, were about stubborn geniuses who had trouble telling their own stories straight, and some episodes the same way twice.

Oppenheimer could be like those men, his own worst enemy.  In Robert’s case, how could vain, petty bureaucrats dare not just to discredit but to overthrow a towering intellect?

That was the poisonous agenda Nolan needed to explain in writing and directing Oppenheimer’s story, and it’s astonishing how he’s not just recognized the obstacles but turned them to his advantage.

My greatest fear having read the book was that the science, and the massive effort to build the bomb, would receive the greater screen time and hence the greater weight.

To my surprise, Nolan, jiu-jitsu-like, has made the building of the bomb, its initial trial in the Trinity Test, and its “successful” drop a calculated twist in the middle of the story.

He superbly lays out the ordeal of the Manhattan Project, from filling Los Alamos with great minds to racing against the clock to beat the Nazis (who weren’t as close to making a bomb as the U.S. and other countries feared).

But the before and after are fiery, too.  Murphy makes both the jittery young Oppenheimer and the embattled mature scientist mesmerizing.  The nervous gestures, the chain smoking, the hypnotically fixed eyes never feel like mere tics.

They tell us that searching for inner and scientific revelations can ensnare even the most self-assured man. At first his powerful insights drive him, then they slowly, immeasurably set him up for a fall.

I sometimes wondered whether Murphy himself might have teetered on the edge of an onscreen breakdown, so fearlessly did he show a man with high intelligence and inner demons tearing him apart.

He’s in nearly every scene, and he seems to present us with a fresh piece of the puzzle each time.  Oppenheimer was just the right man to do the job his country asked him to. Then a searingly wronged man when the powers that be turned on him.

Murphy gets the man’s genius throbbing in terror right onto the screen.  It’s a lead performance that not only pulls us through the movie but keeps taking us by surprise.

There are other fine performances.  Emily Blunt makes the impatient, loving, unquestionably alcoholic, sometimes abusively drunken Kitty a woman to reckon with.  She acidly accuses her husband of infidelity and cowardice yet goes on loving him.  The affection and fury contained within one performance is shattering to watch.

Damon keeps the gruff Groves credibly tough, decisive and no nonsense.  We have no trouble believing this man built the Pentagon.  Oppenheimer for him seems another problem with multiple angles.

Groves doesn’t pretend to fully understand the scientist, but he respects the administrator Oppenheimer is required to become. Precisely because he’s a visionary, Groves needs to rein him in, keep him on task. Before Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had never run anything larger than a university physics department.

Yet at key moments the man of science has to be given his head. He’s a conceptual genius, after all, and Groves is self-confident enough to concede a great man his due.

Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) forged an unlikely bond with the genius Oppenheimer

Groves had his work cut out for him, overseeing a man so different from himself.  The man of mind versus the man of action; Murphy and Damon prove to be jaunty, give-no-quarter scene partners, a sprightly movie-acting duo.

Robert Downey, Jr. simply floored me.  I never could have imagined he’d get this deep into the nuanced spite and pettiness of the man who believes himself undervalued.  Which he can’t abide.

Strauss clearly had a gift for making money as a Wall Street partner, and here we see that he’s wormed his way at least partly into the esteem of some of his conspiratorial Republican buddies in Congress.  And he knows how to make use of that most devious, heartless wrecker of reputations, J. Edgar Hoover.

Downey gives all this a kind of strange, choked elegance.  Strauss’ impeccably tailored suits and grand entrances give him the air of an Important Man, and he tactically deploys the impression hoping it will pass for the real thing.

He knows he commands nothing like the respect Oppenheimer does.  But his substitution of ferocious ambition for actual genius makes perfect sense to him.  Downey, going all-in with Strauss’ self-delusional cruelty, deftly lets the mask slip on a ruthless bureaucratic monster.

Along with the perfect casting of at least a dozen subordinate roles, none of which feel small, the cinematography, editing, set design, costumes and, as already noted, sound, are meticulous, appropriate and masterful.

The most overpowering contribution comes from Ludwig Göransson’s pounding, shimmering, nowhere-to-hide score.  Many scenes are simply talking heads, but Nolan and the composer know that without the undercurrent of dizzying, fretful, even enraging music we wouldn’t experience Oppenheimer’s angst, his perplexity at critical junctures in his adult life.

Göransson not only keeps the musical pulse churning, but he also understands that he has to keep up the pace.  It’s not just the race to beat the Nazis to the bomb that’s being dramatized.

It’s Oppenheimer’s gathering, terrifying understanding of how deeply he’s committed, first to the enormous scientific challenge he faces, then to the battle he has to wage to salvage what he can of his reputation.

The composer keeps all that urgency coming at us.  Robert’s peril, his vulnerability, feels as if it can never come to a close.  Inner peace for this regretful warrior always seems just out of reach.

And tackling such a subtle yet historically pivotal a personality as Oppenheimer’s is where I give high praise to Christopher Nolan.  He’s not been a director whose “cerebral” qualities have much appealed to me.

But his consummate craftsmanship here has led him to devise a biopic, also a historical drama, unlike any I know of.  It’s of the subjects’ time and ours, too.

We live in the world Oppenheimer helped to open up. So, we can recognize the figures here like people we know today and could have known back then.  There’s nothing improbable or fanciful about any of them.  People have trouble untangling their good from their bad, even atrocious, acts.

Which makes this a big movie that unfurls within a relatable human scope.  That’s among the hardest balances to achieve in a movie, letting the camera roam grandly, immersively, then editing to deliver jolts that are illuminating and ferret out truth.

Nolan has made a movie not just for now but for years to come, for anyone who truly wants to think about 20^th century American history and how it bears down on us in the 21^st century, leaving us with vital, unaddressed questions.