In retrospect, Warner Bros.’ decision to put their slate out on HBO Max may have had another silver lining beyond simply allowing subscribers to watch Dune at home. The company wide-chaos it inspired, which is still being litigated to this very day, freed Christopher Nolan from his longtime studio home and allowed him to make a different kind of film than the one he’d spent the last 20-odd years producing for WB. It may not surprise you that Nolan’s heart was never really into the superhero game. Still, it may come as a shock that Nolan wasn’t always in the James Bond mode either: Before Scorsese announced he’d be making The Aviator, Nolan was gearing up to make a movie about Howard Hughes, only for the project to be stillborn. There’s always been an aspect of him that feels particularly suited for biographies of “great” and extraordinary men: His formerly choked mode of emotional expression on-screen and analytical mind applies well to these stories, rooted in fact and rigor and intrigue. In short, Oppenheimer may be what Chris Nolan might have looked like without Batman, and it’s hard not to wonder exactly what other masterpieces we might have missed out on after witnessing the totality of its terrifying brilliance.
Those who have spent the better part of the last decade-and-a-half ranting about a lack of Event Cinema for Adults will find their needs met and more: Oppenheimer is a clear-eyed glimpse into one of the most pivotal moments in human history, from the vantage of the oft-enigmatic man who helped shepherd it into existence. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is many things, depending on whom you ask: A master physicist, a terrible mathematician, an angsty pupil, a charismatic leader, a passionate lover, a homewrecker, a patron saint of scientific endeavor, a war criminal, a patriot, a traitor. Those last two qualities give the film its framing device: Oppenheimer’s security clearance has been challenged by a former opponent of his, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), and an inquiry – more like a prosecution – is being conducted by the Federal Government. It’s the height of the McCarthy era, and every association undertaken by either he or his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), before or after his involvement in the Manhattan Project is suspect. But the real heart of the matter is this: Why did Oppenheimer come to oppose the H-Bomb, even when his subordinates at Los Alamos helped to bring it about under his supervision? To answer that, Nolan takes us on a journey through the man’s past, equally uncovering his good works and darkest sins. It’s a three-hour anxiety attack of once-good intentions – beating Hitler to the atomic bomb, after all, is a hard mission to argue with – metastasizing into a cancer that may culminate in the destruction of the human race. Talk about joy.
As an unrepentant admirer of Nolan, it’s weird to see him take an even grander narrative step than he did between The Dark Knight and Inception, complimenting the further rigor in style established when he changed cinematographer-partners between Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar. To say that Oppenheimer is the best script he’s ever written is underselling the competence with which he constructed and executed near-gibberish plots into multi-faceted stories, but it’s true. Nolan excels when he handicaps himself: Dunkirk stripped him of the archetypes he’d established over the course of his career but allowed him to re-engineer his essential approach to film editing, Tenet allowed him to embrace all of his most audience-repellant curiosities and required him to innovate in pure spectacle. Outside of a flashback structure, though its achronal similarities to his prior work are often undone by its competing POVs (this is his ethos behind the usage of color, with the greyscale sequences depicting Strauss’ point of view and the color being what Oppenheimer witnessed), the lack of “action” and the sort of awe-generating imagery that one believed was the key to him sustaining audience interest forces him to make a compelling feature through traditional means: character, pace, depth, dialogue.
That these facets harmonize in the way they do is a credit to the whole production’s command of tone and the seriousness of their task. Hoyte van Hoytama’s cinematography – someone should post the man up in a desert and have productions come to him, given how much he owns the landscape of the American Southwest in modern cinema – provides the scope and scale that the content doesn’t, showing us the enormity of the endeavors taking place at Los Alamos. His focus on minor details in, say, a close-up of Murphy recalls Mihai Mălaimare Jr.’s work on Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, using every inch of that 70mm real estate to emphasize beads of sweat or slowly forming wrinkles as Murphy hears some bit of news or an accusation. The cast, which is so stacked that it recalls the kind of mass-scale disaster picture of the ‘70s (seriously, it feels like everyone currently working in Hollywood – or at least those who have left Marvel behind or never worked with them in the first place – is present here), is uniformly excellent, with even the smallest bit players receiving a reel-worthy moment. Special mention goes to Blunt, who deploys charm and venom in equal measure, Damon, who embodies the idea of Leslie Groves in the popular consciousness about as strongly as one can; and, surprisingly, Josh Hartnett, who provides a warm presence as one of Oppenheimer’s colleagues and collaborators at Berkeley and can turn on the superstar wattage not seen on screen fully since Nolan was in preproduction on Begins.
Yet the movie ultimately remains Murphy’s and, to a far lesser extent, Downey’s. The war of attrition waged by Strauss – who begins the film as a semi-sympathetic point-of-view character whom one may assume is under assault by HUAC, though it’s anything but that – has shades of Forman’s Amadeus to it (come-on-and-rock-me-oppen-heimer), with petty slights, professional envy, and a lack of prescience leading to both men’s ultimate undoing. But the comparison to Mozart – whose seemingly benign talents are underwritten by a personality his peers find repellant – is a soft one for a man like Oppenheimer. Though Nolan’s portrayal of him is sympathetic, it regards everything about the man and his character with frank doubtfulness. Even in the best of times, when he’s knee-deep in work out in Los Alamos, there remains plenty to criticize him for: He’s a brilliant mind given the full faith and credit of the United States to conduct research for them and the power does get to his head. To Nolan’s credit, all of this remains subtle enough that it never derails the film’s momentum and only adds to the growing terror of the moment. But on the most meaningful issues, the film doesn’t shy away from the reality of the matter and doesn’t let its protagonists out of its iron sights. Each defense he makes in favor of continuing the project is steadily undone until it becomes radically clear to him – and to us – just how wrong everything was after VE-Day, even if one ultimately agrees with Harry Truman’s decisions on those fateful days in August 1945.
Murphy sells this slow-growing reignition of conscience with appropriate weight, with his heavy features only appearing more gaunt as he realizes that one day, the consequences of his work and his beliefs may drown the world in nuclear fire. This is where the film intersects with the Promethean myth, where, after giving humankind a tool for purposes both good and ill, Oppenheimer is destroyed by it in the aftermath, with every failsafe he depended on for ethical stability giving way when confronted with man’s worst instincts. His government, which he ultimately comes to trust despite his political beliefs thanks to them becoming an active presence in his life, shuts him out of any major decision after Trinity and renders him a pariah, stripped of his clearance and power despite his services. His semi-rakish charm, while good at getting women to cheat on their husbands with him, causes him to be isolated from a community that he once led. In the end, he’s left with the blank space found in the absence of his fiery ambitions, the light from his good intentions slowly being stretched and bent, transformed into an abyssal void by its collapse, endangering everything he once took for granted.
There’s a keen terror at the heart of Oppenheimer that manifests itself as creeping anxiety before it gives way to the Eldridge horror of fission, where humanity sees, in its full glory and terror, the elemental nature of the forces that we’re manipulating. If one had a nickel every time someone compared the marketing of this film to that key moment in Twin Peaks season 3 – in which an atomic bomb test brings in the supernatural evils that haunt the world – you wouldn’t need to stand in line at the gas station for the Powerball. They are, of course, fundamentally different: Lynch wants you to appreciate the high strangeness inherent in the mushroom cloud as a symbol of unimaginable terror, an E.B. White-like forever-alteration of man’s place in the universe, while Nolan emphasizes the fireball, captured by the production quite nearly recreating the Trinity test itself, to both make one cognizant of the immediate nature of the devastation, putting you front-and-center for the blast close enough for you just to imagine the heat on your face. There are shades of Lynch, however, in how Nolan depicts Oppenheimer’s decaying mental state in the aftermath, with a crowd of cheering figures at a pep-rally style speech he’s forced to give after Hiroshima, being slowly obliterated in a blinding flash of light, with a persistent scream becoming an element of the score. A woman with burnt, blistered skin flapping in the blast winds is the closest we get to the realities of atomic warfare’s effects on the human body. There is no need for more: the point is made, and the nightmares are fully imaginable for a person who once thought he was doing the world a favor.
His famous quote, taken from the lines of the Bhagavad Gita, is a tacit admission of guilt made a man of the old world in the face of the new: the metaphorical descendant of Einstein realizing the enormity of his actions and the fresh horrors that will supplant his endeavors in the years to come. Nolan references it twice, both at moments of vulnerability in which the ego is forced to proverbially (and on the first occasion, physically) bare itself. The assertation is that this moment of immense importance is still defined by the personal: A flashback to happy times curdled over by time and blood. Yet while Oppenheimer turned to Vishnu to express himself at a moment of sheer existential horror, Nolan, given his vantage point in time, uses Oppenheimer to allegorically echo a bleeding Christ mounted atop the cross, albeit with a careful omission: They know not what they do. Forgiveness isn’t really even a part of the matter, after all. But this ultimately is where Oppenheimer leads: the satisfaction of the narrative gives way to its meaninglessness in the face of annihilation. What’s a story if there’s no one around to tell it? What’s forgiveness if there’s no one left to offer it?