"Oppenheimer" - Film Review
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Oppenheimer wouldn’t exist.
Even those who aren’t familiar with the name J. Robert Oppenheimer are aware of what he oversaw in the dusty, makeshift town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the early 1940s. It was secretly called a gadget, and was created by a collaboration of the greatest scientific minds of the Allies during World War II. The result was the atomic bomb, and a mere month after its first and only test in the desert, President Truman authorized the United States military to drop bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer’s invention is often credited with ending the Second World War.
The man behind this catastrophic leap in scientific understanding is the focus of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy plays the titular theoretical physicist in what is his finest role to date. Oppenheimer is a relentlessly paced, three-hour epic. Nolan rarely gives the audience a chance to breathe, and it’s Murphy’s precise, captivating performance that ties the film ever so neatly together. The movie begins in 1926, but as anyone who is familiar with Nolan’s work will tell you, time doesn’t move in a linear fashion. There are three main sections that the film returns to as a means of creating structure. The first is Oppenheimer’s time at Los Alamos during the development of the bomb, roughly 1942–1946. Next is his 1954 security hearing. Finally, the Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) in 1959. Most of the 1959 confirmation hearing, as well as a few select other scenes, is presented in black and white, acting as an unbiased look at the historical events. The rest of the film is presented in color to denote Oppenheimer’s subjective reflection on his own life.
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In previous works by Nolan, the dialogue comes off stilted and sparse. It’s as if the words were written in a vacuum chamber, solely for promotional use in trailers. They lack an underlying sense of normalcy, the regular, mundane way people speak. Oppenheimer is confidently Nolan’s finest script. That’s not to say that all of his previous problems in terms of dialogue are fixed, but it is his most successful in terms of a cohesive, genuine script. Of course, any improvements Nolan has made in terms of his writing carry over only to the way he develops his male characters.
It would be unrealistic to expect a film about the life of Oppenheimer to manage to cover every detail about the Manhattan Project and the people in Oppenheimer’s life. Even though the movie is three hours long, that’s still far too much of a burden to place on it. That being said, Oppenheimer presents two women in the titular physicist’s life: his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), and his ex-girlfriend Jean (Florence Pugh). Kitty is a biologist and an ex-Communist, while Jean maintains membership in the Communist party. Oppenheimer’s connections to the Communist party are heavily scrutinized post-World War II, so it would behoove the film to give these women some time. Even though neither is responsible for introducing Oppenheimer to Communism, they were still major influences in his life. Their main role in the movie was to be drunk and cry. Maybe that’s a tad reductive, but it’s not reflective of Blunt’s or Pugh’s performance. It’s just baffling that in a movie that runs for 180 minutes there wasn’t time to allow these women to bee seen as substantial parts of his life. Nolan paints Kitty and Jean broadly and emptily. A cursory scroll through her Wikipedia will tell you that Jean was a writer and reporter for the Western Worker, as well as a graduate of Stanford University Medical School. Kitty helped research cancer therapy and held a BA in botany.
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Visually and auditorily, Oppenheimer stands alone. It’s not simply the volume that gives the audience the feeling of experiencing the test of the atomic bomb, but the layers in the sound design. It’s like a rolling sound wave coming through the speakers, knocking audiences back in their chairs. Then, the blast itself. The blinding, overexposed light washes away everything. Nolan has never shied away from scale, and there are few things bigger than the effect of Los Alamos’ discovery on the world. In that regard, there is no working director who could capture the scope of its impact in the way Nolan did. It’s particularly haunting when Oppenheimer is finally allowed to be silent. Too much of the movie is filled with a score that overtakes the actors, but when the test bomb is dropped, all that’s left is Oppenheimer’s unsteady breathing. It’s that moment where everyone realizes what they have unleashed upon the world.
The film ends with a conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). They question what comes next. What will the world do now that humanity has the ability to destroy itself? In many ways, we’re still asking that question. We live on a precipice of nuclear war with no more answers than Oppenheimer and Einstein had in the 1950s. Oppenheimer asks audiences to understand America’s Prometheus and reckon with the power he gave to an angry world.
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