OPPENHEIMER
Or How to Make an Atomic Movie Bomb
by armen pandola
Movies about famous scientists are difficult.
The most obvious problem is that most people don’t understand science and many are actively hostile, remembering those numbing lectures in school and being forced to memorize things like the Periodic Table.
That’s why Hollywood mostly avoided movies about science and gave people something easier - science fiction. In SciFi, you don’t have to understand anything, you just have to see it. The explanation of ‘warp speed’ is the visual of the Enterprise zooming away into the distance.
When Hollywood has tackled bios about scientists, it has concentrated on the personal story a la The Imitation Game. The formula for this kind of movie dates back to The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). The scientist struggles to get people to understand how amazing his discovery is and spends most of the movie in Sisyphus-mode, struggling to push that boulder (his discovery) up the hill and into the light.
Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer takes a different path. Fractured and polychromatic, he tries to immerse the viewer in the inner world of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb.” While three hours long, the movie provides information on its subject in small packets:
Oppenheimer, the student at Cambridge, clumsily failing to perform an experiment in a lab, is punished by his teacher and, in revenge, he prepares a poison apple for his teacher.
Oppenheimer meeting a young woman at a party, taking her to bed and reading Sanskrit poetry to her as they have sex.
Oppenheimer riding a horse in the wild countryside of New Mexico.
Oppenheimer giving a physics lecture in German after learning the language in only six weeks.
After the first hour of this fractured story, the movie settles down to tell two interwoven main stories - the making of the first atomic bomb and the government hearing to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance nine years later.
The centerpiece of the first story is Trinity, the name Oppenheimer gave to the test of the first atomic bomb exploded on earth. Nolan attempts to make the audience ‘experience’ the event by showing us the bomb explode in silence, as its first viewers did, since light travels faster than sound. Then, the sound thunders through the theater and finally, we see the blast knock down people two miles from the explosion. It’s the best sequence in the movie.
Most of the characters in the movie are mere names - Einstein, Bohr, Lawrence, Truman. That is because Nolan doesn’t care about characters - just as in his previous movie, Dunkirk, Nolan has little interest in the humans in this story (see my review of Dunkirk, here). Cillian Murphy plays the title character with the same wide-eyed, semi-surprised look throughout the movie. While it was universally agreed that Oppenheimer was one of the most charming of men and had affairs with many women, you would never know it by this performance. Yes, Nolan has someone say that he was a ‘womanizer’ but why people, both men and women, adored him is never shown. Nolan makes the audience ‘experience’ the first atomic bomb, but nothing of the personality of his title character.
The other main character is Lewis Strauss (pronounced ‘straws’) played by Robert Downey, Jr. Strauss was a very complicated man - financial wizard, adviser to four presidents, philanthropist, original member of the Atomic Energy Commission and a man who was one of the few in government trying to allow more Jews into the US during the Nazi reign. Yet, in Oppenheimer, Nolan portrays him as a simple villain, a foil to the title character’s good-hearted innocence. The source of Strauss’ hatred of Oppenheimer, according to Nolan, is a foolish misunderstanding. Really? While this may even be true, it is a slim thread to hold up a three hour movie about America’s most controversial scientist and the beginning of the atomic age. You don’t end Hamlet with the revelation that he was wrong all along and Claudius didn’t kill his father. Mere misunderstandings do not make for great drama.
The other characters are more like line drawings, some with great make-up. Emily Blunt is the drunken, bitter wife of Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh is his unbalanced, sexy mistress, Matt Damon is the tough, no nonsense General in charge of the project. Lots of others are there for a scene or two, mere dots on a ten foot pointillist painting of dread and despair.
Stories like this one - about huge, important figures and events are better served by the new medium of limited series television. Told over several one or two hour episodes, characters and events can be given the time and depth needed to tell such monumental stories. In fact, TV has already done that with Oppenheimer. A 1980 BBC Masterpiece Theatre seven part series with Sam Waterson as Oppenheimer did a much better job in telling the story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_(TV_series), with none of the pyrotechnics of modern movies.
If Oppenheimer turns out to be a box office success, it will have more to do with the lack of current movies appealing to adult sensibilities than its own merits. Hollywood is desperate for great movies that are also big hits. I wish I could like this movie - I, too, would like to see a great movie that’s a great hit, too.
ADDENDUM
Since I have reviewed Oppenheimer, many of you have written or spoken to me in disagreement. You like the movie. I thought I should clarify the reasons for my disappointment in this movie.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was dismissed from his position as an advisor to the US government not because of some stupid argument with Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Yes, they did have disagreements and yes, Oppenheimer could be ruthless with people who disagreed with him. And yes, Strauss used all of his powers to cast Oppenheimer as a traitor or, at least, a security risk. But the real reason he was dismissed was because of his beliefs.
Oppenheimer was a strong advocate for openness - for telling people the truth. Just as science could never progress without open discussion so too, he believed that democracy could never survive in the dark. The secrets that the US government wanted to keep were not secret to the Russians. They knew all about atomic bombs. No, the secrecy was to keep the American people in the dark. The effects of radiation, the impossibility of defending a nation against nuclear weapons, the fact that these weapons were weapons of terror, meant to destroy people and societies and not just win a battle - all of these secrets and many more were kept from the American people.
Most importantly, Oppenheimer was against the Cold War and the Nuclear Arms Race. He saw, as President Eisenhower did and spoke against in his Farewell Speech in 1960, the powerful ‘military-industrial complex’ that has kept the US military in clover and consuming over half of the discretionary federal budget for the past 75 years.
And when Oppenheimer was denied his security clearance, the message to all the other nuclear scientists in America was clear - if we can destroy Oppenheimer’s career, we can destroy anybody’s.
Now, that is a story worth telling. Also, it happens to be the truth.
So a movie about Oppenheimer that does not tell the truth is just too ironic - and sad.