Oppenheimer (15, 180 minutes)
Verdict: Stunning
At the London premiere of “Oppenheimer,” before leaving in solidarity with the Hollywood actors and writers on strike, writer-director Christopher Nolan told the audience that he expected his film to “blew people’s minds.”
It was a dignified feeling, awkwardly put. Nolan’s highly anticipated film tells the compelling story of J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the brilliant theoretical physicist who ran the top-secret Los Alamos compound in New Mexico and spearheaded America’s Manhattan Project. That was the name given to the development of nuclear weapons and specifically to the devastating bombing of Japan in 1945.
But three hours after rolling my eyes at the English director’s choice of words, my eyes were wide with amazement at the magnitude of his achievement.
Oppenheimer is an amazingly well-made film, with one scene (you can guess which one) that is truly mind-blowing in its intensity. Nolan received an Oscar nomination for “Dunkirk” (2017), but now he surely has to be the favorite to take it one step further. Let’s just hope the current turmoil doesn’t wipe out next year’s awards season, because Oppenheimer is the kind of accomplishment for which there are glittering statuettes.
Cillian Murphy leads an all-star cast in Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer
It tells the compelling story of J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the brilliant theoretical physicist who ran the top-secret Los Alamos compound in New Mexico
Nolan adapted his screenplay from a 2005 biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its writers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. I can’t speak for the book, but on screen the story actually has four components: the race to create nuclear weapons before the Nazis; trying to prevent nuclear secrets from falling into the hands of America’s wartime ally Soviet Russia; the post-war campaign to besmirch Oppenheimer for his own alleged communist affiliations; and finally his chaotic personal life.
It’s a complicated story that Nolan doesn’t particularly try to simplify. The director lets us travel backwards and forwards through time, from “Oppy’s” days as a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s to the 1954 “safety hearing” in Washington DC, where he practically stands trial, and trusts that his Audience understands what is going on.
It’s not always easy. I’ll admit that my own understanding of quantum mechanics, nuclear fission, and related subjects is about the width of an atom, maybe even a split atom, but I didn’t mind being confused on occasion. This is adult storytelling at its finest.
The acting is just as wonderful, led by Murphy, who embodies the title role as fully as Tommy Shelby in the BBC drama Peaky Blinders. Robert Downey Jr. is similarly superb as Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and, aside from the unseen Nazis and a Soviet spy, is arguably the closest thing this film has to a villain.
Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer, which hits theaters tomorrow
The acting is just as wonderful, led by Murphy, who embodies the title role as fully as Tommy Shelby in the BBC drama Peaky Blinders.
But everywhere you look there are great actors doing their best, including Matt Damon as the army officer who recruits Oppenheimer to found Los Alamos, Gary Oldman (as President Truman), Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Casey Affleck and, perfectly convincing like Albert Einstein, dear old Tom Conti.
If the film has a flaw, maybe it’s because the female roles are underrated. But Emily Blunt is making the most of her screen time as Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty; Ditto for Florence Pugh as his emotionally fragile lover Jean Tatlock. Both women are former members of the American Communist Party, and Oppenheimer’s own left-wing sympathies come under close scrutiny after the war, understandably even in the fevered McCarthy era.
However, Nolan doesn’t mind showing his own cards. He clearly sees in Oppenheimer a flawed hero who was liberated by this film from anything but an American patriot, who understands better than anyone the unclear ethics surrounding the development of a nuclear arsenal. “I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon,” he says. “But I know the Nazis can’t do that.”
The scene in which we see the weapon detonate during a test in the desert near the Los Alamos lab is, I would happily say, one of the most powerful cinematic pieces in the medium’s entire history.
But beyond that virtuosic moment, much of Oppenheimer unfolds like a thriller without asking profound questions about the morality of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I despair of the excessive length of many movies these days, but even at three hours this movie never feels unreasonably long. There are a lot of stories to tell, and Nolan tells them great.
- “Oppenheimer” hits theaters tomorrow