Oppenheimer: The story of man and his times

 

    In Oppenheimer, the story of the scientist known as "the father of the atomic bomb," director Christopher Nolan takes a deep look at a complicated man who found himself poised at a pivotal moment of history.

    A theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer led the bomb-making effort in the Los Alamos, New Mexico. Deemed an unlikely choice for the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was supported by Leslie Groves, an Army officer charged with overseeing the project, which employed  some of the world’s most gifted physicists.

    Oppenheimer might be less stylistically self-conscious than such Nolan movies as Inception, but that doesn't mean the movie lacks style. Nolan presents his story in sharply edited narrative bursts that brim with detail and suggestive power.

   Working from American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Nolan builds the story around a politically loaded 1954 closed-door hearing at which Oppenheimer’s security clearance was challenged.

   At three hours in length, Oppenheimer is comprehensive enough to be a compelling account of the invention of the atomic bomb and a character study about a man riven with contradiction. Simultaneously proud of his achievement and aware of the horrific destruction he helped unleash, Oppenheimer was cursed with irresolvable conflict.

    Cillian Murphy brilliantly portrays Oppenheimer from his student youth through his appearance at a closed-door hearing which pitted him against Lewis Strauss. As head of The Atomic Energy Commission, Strauss had it in for Oppenheimer.

     Subtle, reticent and wily, Murphy’s Oppenheimer belongs to a rare group of scientists devoted to pursuits about which most of us remain only sketchily aware. In Oppenheimer's case, quantum mechanics.

    Oppenheimer wasn’t immune from the intellectual arrogance such endeavors can breed. He often held his cards close to the vest, minimizing his liberal/left leanings when necessary. Nonchalant about his association with friends who were members of the Communist party, he ultimately got caught in the backwash that swept the country during the McCarthy era.

     As intriguing as Murphy can be, he receives support from one of the strongest casts to populate a movie in some time. 

    Made-up to the point where he almost disappears, Robert Downey Jr. portrays Strauss, a figure whose presence grows as the film progresses. Downey creates an indelible portrait of a man cast into a world in which he's almost always out of his depth.

      Matt Damon does solid work as Groves. Other performers find featured moments, including Benny Safdie as physicist Edward Teller. 

      The movie's all-star group of scientists and theoreticians includes Kenneth Branagh as Neils Bohr and Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and participant in the Manhattan Project.

      Nolan dips into Oppenheimer’s tangled personal life with performances by Florence Pugh as a politically consumed woman and Oppenheimer paramour and Emily Blunt as Kitty Harrison, Oppenheimer’s wife. The harried mother of his children and a hard drinker, Harrison emerges as a woman who refuses to be bowed by her husband's interrogators.

     The test of the atomic bomb precedes the movie’s third act, which tends to make the remainder of the story feel slightly anti-climactic. 

      Still, scenes at the hearing (in black-and-white) allow for a burgeoning conflict to emerge: Oppenheimer came to oppose the development of the hydrogen bomb, a position that put him at odds with Teller and a defense establishment increasingly mired in Cold War frenzy.

       There are genius strokes: Focusing on Oppenheimer’s face when bombs explode in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. Nolan spares us the sight of nuclear devastation. We know that Oppenheimer knows what he's wrought.

       Nolan also displays a keen understanding of how an academic environment that sheltered so many gifted scientists merged into the country’s war-time agenda. He captures the fervor of men who found themselves moving from the world of theory to the world of practice.

         With help from composer Ludwig Goransson, Nolan masterfully infuses a surfeit of expository scenes with tension and urgency, leaving it to us to debate some of the ethical considerations that probably are more evident today than they might have been during the heat of war.

        A movie about a momentous subject that’s branded as one of the year’s most important releases carries a major burden. Time will tell whether Nolan has lived up to it.

       Meanwhile, Oppenheimer deftly illuminates the allure and dangers of being caught in the sweep of history.

       It's a movie about Oppenheimer, yes, but you remember him in the well-developed context of the movie's cascading scenes and shorthand revelations, a man fully and sometimes dangerously situated at a historical turning point whose implications still reverberate.