How “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” Bring Monumental Figures to Life
The new film from Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer,” starts and ends in the round. In the opening shot, ripples expand in puddles as raindrops fall. Three hours later, we get a vision of Earth beginning to burn, as nuclear explosions bloom across the globe. Nolan is always entranced by the vast and the tiny; “Inception” (2010), wherein city streets fold like paper under the pressure of dreams, concludes with a spinning top. This obsession with scale is well served by “Oppenheimer,” in which the amassing of refined uranium, for the construction of an atomic bomb, is indicated by marbles piling up inside a goldfish bowl. How much roundness can you take?
The antidote to this circularity is J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Though named for his father, Julius, he insisted, with Prufrockian nicety, that the “J” stood for nothing at all.) Lean, sticklike, skullish in his gauntness, and too clever for comfort—his own or anyone else’s—he has gone down in history as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, in New Mexico, where the bomb was built, and it is from history that Nolan seeks to pluck him. Oppenheimer is played by Cillian Murphy, who catches the quiet inquietude of the man, and his tobacco-softened speech. In the blaze of his blue eyes we see not candor but a kind of undimmed shock, as if he were staring straight through us at matters invisible to regular mortals. “What happens to stars when they die?” he says, by way of small talk, at a party in Berkeley. There he meets the incandescent Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh); later, at her bidding, he translates a Sanskrit text as they make love. For Oppenheimer, no talk is ever small.
The film is adapted from “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. I hate to say it, but, if you zip through all six hundred pages of the book before seeing the film, you’ll enjoy the ride more. Much is omitted in the adaptation; there is no whisper, for example, of the fact that Oppenheimer was born into serious wealth. Yet Nolan, who wrote the screenplay, has a fine taste for the delicious detail. During a youthful sojourn in the Netherlands, Oppenheimer doesn’t just learn Dutch in six weeks. He learns enough to give a lecture on quantum physics. The irony is that what makes the movie challenging is not the scientific theory—which is delivered with a diplomatically light touch—but a glut of political paranoia.
Like “The Social Network” (2010), “Oppenheimer” is structured around two inquisitions, each of which is designed to load us with information and to trigger significant flashbacks. If, in the process, we feel dumb and dumber, tough. The first is a closed hearing, in 1954, at which Oppenheimer’s security clearance is revoked—an affront from which he never recovers. The revocation (which was not officially voided until last year) turns upon his left-wing sympathies before the war, but it has clearly been engineered by the F.B.I. and by certain figures who have Oppenheimer’s worst interests at heart. The second occasion is a Senate hearing, in 1959, that is held to confirm the appointment of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. And what does that, you may wonder, have to do with blowing things up?
The answer is far from simple, and the tangle left me genuinely torn. The upside is that Downey, liberated from the stranglehold of Marvel, provides the least mannered and the most densely textured performance of his career. Polite, bespectacled, and immune to panic, Strauss—a chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—comes across, in Downey’s rendering, as the most pitiless of Machiavels. The downside is that he all but commandeers the film. Even Oppenheimer’s marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt), troubled but enduring, seems to flit by in snatches when set beside the enmity of Strauss, who believes that Oppenheimer has humiliated him. Addicts of Cold War conspiracy will be in bliss, but not everyone, I suspect, will thrill to the truffling up of former Communists in West Coast academia. Folks want some bang for their buck.