Say what you will about the films of Christopher Nolan, you have to hand it to the guy for sheer audacity, if nothing else. At a time when sequels, remakes and adaptations of familiar commercial properties are dominating studio production schedules to an ever-increasing degree, he has not only managed to marshal all the materials required for a blockbuster production (including a massive budget, a huge cast of familiar faces and shooting the whole thing in 70MM) in the service of an impressionistic biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer but managed to get it positioned as the cinematic event of the season—the one film (other than Barbie, which shares its opening weekend) that moviegoers seem genuinely interested in seeing. What the mass audience will make of Oppenheimer will be interesting to see—it tells its undeniably dark story in a somewhat chilly manner that willfully avoids most of the usual gimmicks, conceits and tropes of the biopic format—but in the wake of the mostly disastrous Tenet (in which his penchant for increasingly complex narrative structures finally devolved into pretentious incoherence), it is a strong, if occasionally uneven, work that shows off Nolan’s talents as both an artiste and as a showman.
Of course, anyone going into Oppenheimer expecting Nolan to employ a straightforward linear structure in order to recount the story of Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist whose role in organizing the Manhattan Project, the research and development program that led to the development of the first nuclear weapons, made him one of the most powerful and famous men of his time, will soon find themselves disabused of that notion. Instead, Nolan’s narrative bounces back and forth between timelines chronicling the events leading up to the two key events of Oppenheimer’s life—the development of the bomb itself and a security clearance hearing a decade later that, due to his highly public repudiation of the awesome force that he helped bring into the world, essentially became a kangaroo court in which every remotely questionable aspect of his life was dragged out in order to show him in the worst possible light. As the film goes between the two, the incidents from one era end up informing on the other and helps to paint a more complicated portrait of the man than might have been accomplished through a more traditional narrative framework.
What emerges is a portrait of an undeniably brilliant man (played by Cillian Murphy) whose greatest flaw may have been his awareness of his own brilliance and the sense of hubris that would help lead to his downfall. In episodes from his early days, both as a student and at the beginning of his academic career, this sort of intellectual snobbishness could be dismissed by his colleagues but when it became evident that he was not just all talk, others were forced to take him seriously at last—as fellow physicist Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) pointedly tells him, “You’re not just self-important, you’re actually important.” Therefore, it is not surprising when the U.S. government recruits him in 1942 to begin development of an atomic bomb in order to use it against the Nazis and bring an end to World War II, assuming that the Nazis do not create it first. With the aid of Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), he recruits a dream team of scientists and over the course of the next couple of years, what was once little more than a dubious theory becomes a tangible force capable of changing the balance of power throughout the world.
While the bomb is being developed, some of Oppenheimer’s fellow scientists try to point out the dire effects that his creation could have on the world but he more or less dismisses them—in his mind, he is an artist working on his masterpiece and nothing is going to stop him from seeing it through to its completion. (The sequence in which the weapon is tested for the first time at times almost feels like the opening night climax of a backstage drama, only with a bomb whose destructive potential stretches far beyond a few investors.) However, when the bomb is finally twice deployed on Japan during the waning days of the war (Germany having already surrendered by this point) and he is forced to confront the real world effects of his theories and notions, he tries to use his newfound fame as the so-called “father of the atomic bomb” to warn of its deadly power and to counsel sanity and restraint regarding its use, not realizing that this is one genie that is not going to go back into the bottle anytime soon. Eventually, this puts him up against the same government forces that recruited him in the first place and lead to a hearing in which his past, specifically his dalliances with left-wing politics, is conflated with current Cold War tensions in order to paint him as a dangerous subversive who is not to be listened to or trusted.
Although Oppenheimer crosses paths with any number of well-known figures here, from Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) and Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) to Enrico Fermi (Danny Deferrari) and Edward Teller (Benny Safdie)—who would begin working on a project to develop an even-deadly hydrogen bomb under his auspices—the one who would have the most consequential impact on his life would be Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr. In his most effective performance in a long time), the head of the Atomic Energy Commission who would become his personal and professional rival over the years. Due to the leeway that the military allowed Oppenheimer in regards to his Manhattan Project hiring practices, his already inflated sense of self allowed him to believe that he was in control of everything instead of the government and after being publicly humiliating Strauss during a congressional hearing in the late 40s, Strauss slowly and methodically elects to use the actual power he has to help bring down the atomic-age Mozart to his own Salieri.
Not surprisingly, Oppenheimer is not the kind of historical epic in which there are numerous scenes of boilerplate exposition that are included for no other reason than to explain things to audience members who may not be entirely up to speed on the early days of the U.S. atomic program. Instead, Nolan plunges you into the mix with the assumption that those who haven’t brushed up on their history will still be able to follow along. While I prefer this approach to the hand-holding, explain-everything-slowly take that others might have employed, I must confess that it takes a while to get your bearings here, both in terms of the narrative structure and Nolan’s stylistic choices, such as presenting the scenes from Oppehheimer’s perspective in color and those from Strauss in black-and-white, a slightly on-the-noses mirroring of Strauss’s view of the world. Additionally, since there are a huge number of characters that turn up here (played by a commensurate number of famous faces, including, in addition to those already cited, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Matthew Modine, Casey Affleck, Jason Clarke, Olivia Thirlby and Gary Oldman, the latter as no less a figure than Harry Truman), much of the first hour of the film seems to consist entirely of people introducing themselves to each other.
Nevertheless, once the film finally gets into its groove with the introduction of the Manhattan Project, it proves to be a mostly gripping cinematic experience that has the has the ambition and sweep of a grand drama and the relentless pace of an action film. Nolan does a very effective job of not only recounting the facts of the story but also grapples with the moral and philosophical implications of those acts by almost literally plunging us into Oppenheimer’s increasingly troubled psyche. One of the most intriguing aspects of the film is the way that he handles the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the hands of another filmmaker, these might have been the inspiration for a couple of wildly elaborate set pieces in which the genuine horrors of those days have been essentially anesthetized and channeled into slick VFX highlight reels. Instead, Nolan elects to not depict these events (though there is one sequence in which Oppenheimer imagines the audience at a lecture experiencing what the bomb victims did), a smart choice that forces viewers to contemplate and confront the ethics of dropping those bombs in the way that Oppenheimer presumably did, a conceit aided immeasurably by Murphy’s haunted turn. (My guess is that this decision will quickly lead to some complaints that the film is too “woke” for its own good.)
That said, Nolan, at least since ascending to the top tier of filmmakers working today, is not exactly known for skimping on the technical elements and that is certainly the case here. The 70MM cinematography by longtime collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema is legitimately stunning throughout, allowing a film that mostly consists of people talking in rooms to take on a strange and at times almost hypnotic beauty without ever seeming too out of place. The production design by Ruth de Jong is equally impressive, especially in its recreation of the quickly constructed Los Alamos community where Oppenheimer, his scientists and their families worked. As for what will certainly go down as the film’s centerpiece scene—the final test of the bomb, conducted by people who cannot be certain if that pushing of the button will result in success, failure or the immediate and literal destruction of the world—Nolan and his crew pull out all the visual and audio stops (including the judicious use of silence at key points) and the results are exciting, visually spectacular and terrifying in equal measure.
Other than my previously stated misgiving about the film’s early going, my only other real complaint about Oppenheimer is the way that Nolan gives a bit of the short shrift to his two major female characters, Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife Kitty (Blunt) and his even more troubled grad student lover Jean Tatlock (Pugh). Admittedly, Nolan is not exactly famous for his strong female characters, for the most part, but these two women are significant elements of Oppenheimer’s story but Nolan never quite figures out a way to flesh them out dramatically to take advantage of either their importance or of the talents of the actresses playing them. (What makes this even more frustrating is that Blunt does have one genuinely powerful scene towards the end that only serves to highlight what you had been missing up to that point.) Beyond that, though, Oppenheimer is an often-impressive look at one of the most notable figures in world history that is just as ambitious and complex as he was while still working as a thrilling, engrossing and ultimately human look at a man who seemed destined from a young age to make his mark on the world and, for better or worse, did.