Oppenheimer

 Everyman Bristol

The American political system and quantum physics. Two things about which I know nothing. Christopher Nolan combines them into a film that I wasn't at all bored by and was able to follow quite long sections of.

I kept thinking of other stories from the Great American Movie Book. I imagine I was supposed to. The Godfather Part II, for example. One of my favourite films and very possibly the greatest American movie of all time. But I've never been entirely able to keep straight in my head who is double crossing who and who's wrists are being slit at any given moment. Particularly during the senate investigation sequence.  

Oppenheimer is framed, kind of, by a detailed account of the scientist's appearance before the US Atomic Energy Commission, to establish if he can have his security clearance renewed. It turns out he can't. The committee hears from everyone who ever knew him, everyone who ever loved him, everyone who ever hated his guts. It still fails to find out what "Rosebud" really means. The frame is itself framed by an even more detailed account of Lewis Strauss's (Robert Downey Jnr) appearance before a Congressional committee to confirm his appointment to Eisenhower's cabinet (which is apparently a thing in America.) Strauss is brought down because another scientist testifies that he, Strauss, brought the AEC case against Oppenheimer out of personal spite.

The action jumps non-linearly between the two hearings; flashing back into events of Oppenheimer's life. We see him as a geeky but brilliant undergraduate; a brilliant academic with Communist leanings; head of the Manhattan project; and finally as post-war father of the Atomic bomb with serious misgivings about whether vaporising Japanese cities had really been that great an idea. There are a lot of people with famous names played by famous actors at various different ages: one gets the gist without necessarily always knowing who is who. 

It suffers from the Curse of Bio-Pics: ironic foreshadowing. (You would have thought that Walk Hard skewered this tendency so severely that we would have seen the back of it forever. Baz Luhrmann notably avoided it in Elvis.) Oppenheimer shags Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) after meeting her at a communist cocktail party, and she immediately pulls a copy of the Bhagavad Gita off the shelf, turns up a page at random and asks him to translate the Sanskrit to show how clever he is. Can you guess which passage she chooses?

There isn't much attempt to actually explain the science, but there is an impressive feeling that Science is occurring. Whenever Oppenheimer starts thinking about Science we see stars exploding and atoms splitting and universes being sucked into other stars. I didn't know that it was Oppenheimer who first theorised the existence of black holes. The idea that what is happening in the protagonists head is shown directly on the screen is the main unifying visual metaphor of the piece. When the committee asks Oppenheimer about his relationship with Tatlock, he briefly seems to be naked in the court-room; when making a speech about the successful military use of his bomb; he sees the audience melting and exploding like the unfortunate residents of Hiroshima. This acts as a set-up for the devastating final scene, when Oppenheimer "sees" the likely end-result of his work.

I had a good liberal upbringing and went to a good liberal Sunday school and my mental tool kit places Auschwitz and Hiroshima alongside each other as The Worst Crimes of the Twentieth Century and place-holder emoticons for man's inhumanity to man. One sees immediately why Oppenheimer, a Jew, believed that it would be a Good Thing if America developed the ultimate weapon before Hitler did; and why he had increasing misgivings after Hitler died. And why a person who had read Karl Marx in the original would be compromised when the Soviet Union became the USA's primary nuclear rival. I can see an argument which says that a sympathetic portrayal of Robert Oppenheimer in a film which hardly mentions Japanese people is on a moral level with one which gave Eichman the benefit of the doubt but didn't particularly mention the Jews. But I think the audience can be relied on to make the correct moral judgements. We see rooms full of scientists and politicians who've got a little list of cities they might destroy. The war secretary has deleted Kyoto because he and his wife went for their honeymoon there. We probably don't need a directorial voice to tell us that this is abhorrent. One recalls the Nazis in Conspiracy coming up with the idea of gas chambers because they don't know where they would get six million bullets.

Cillian Murphy is hypnotic in the title role, of course: I don't think we ever quite understand him, and I don't think we are meant to. A Frankenstein figure or a psychopath or merely a scientist who can't be held responsible for what politicians do with his invention? When he expresses remorse for Hiroshima, Truman calls him a crybaby.

My wartime history is very vague: it was possible to lose track of where we were on the time line. I had flashbacks to Hamilton; a pageant of famous names that I was supposed to be aware of but actually wasn't. I couldn't swear blind that before the movie came out I could have even told you that Oppenheimer was the Father of the Atomic Bomb. I am fairly certain that I had heard of Heisenberg. (Do you see what I did there?) Einstein himself (Tom Conti) is rather cleverly a central presence in the movie, although he only appears in a couple of scenes. We see a late-career meeting between him and Oppenheimer in the opening minutes and only find out what was actually said in the final seconds. (Rosebud, again.) I knew that Feynman  played the bongos (as a result, admittedly, of someone explaining a joke in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey to me many years ago) and I assume that there are a lot of other visual gags of that nature that I missed. I suppose it most be a bit like watching Ahsoka if you haven't seen the cartoons.

There are, as you would expect, some very big bangs and some very disturbing silences and therefore some moments where you literally jump out of your seat. But a lot of the film is talking faces and court hearings, and once the first nuclear test has been successfully carried out, the court hearings stop being the frame and become the main thrust of the movie. Christopher Nolan insists on making his actors mutter, so you miss about a fifth of what is being said. But the overall effect is undeniably powerful. The other Great American Comparison is perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood: long; with a huge cast of characters and megatons of capital-A acting and a gravitas that matches the heavyweight theme. The subject matter is so overwhelming that you feel morally obliged to be overwhelmed by it.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you enjoy these reviews, please consider leaving a tip on the Ko-Fi platform. 

If you can afford it, please consider becoming a Patreon, by pledging £1 or more each time I publish an essay on the main blog. (I don't charge for these little reviews.) 

Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Make a one-off donation on Ko-Fi