Oppenheimer
**This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
If you want to understand how “Oppenheimer” fits into the larger picture of Christopher Nolan’s career, I think you have to go back to “Memento.” Both films, at their core, are about men whom are exploited by people to kill others because of how their minds operate. In “Memento,” Teddy uses Leonard to do his dirty work because he knows Leonard won’t remember it. In “Oppenheimer,” the government enlists J. Robert Oppenheimer to create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, and then tosses him aside when his views shift on what they have done. There are other similarities that I will go into as this review continues, but to have a baseline perspective on what “Oppenheimer” is doing, this is an important way to begin this review.
The creation of the atom bomb that was dropped on Japan, and summarily started the Cold War, is only a piece of the picture that Nolan is painting of Oppenheimer. The larger picture is that of a man burdened by genius, who is capable of leading others, but struggles to engage with them because of how all-encompassing their genius is. This includes other scientists, politicians, the military, and even the women in his life. It also shows us a country terrified by “the other”- in this case, communism- to the point that even the man who gave them its greatest weapon is suspect. All of this builds the story of Nolan’s 3-hour epic, which is- quite frankly- his finest hour as a filmmaker. Every idea, every technique, every narrative tool that he’s been playing with has led him to this moment, and it is an unquestioned triumph.
I joked on Twitter prior to my screening of the film about Nolan giving away spoilers saying that we didn’t see the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in “Oppenheimer,” but we do not need to. That is not the point of Nolan’s film, but a step along the way. We are given two narrative lines to follow in the film- the main one is of Oppenheimer’s life, from his studies in Europe, his groundbreaking work in Quantum Mechanics, how he returns to America to teach, and how his problematic ties to communism make him a security risk to the government before, during and after his work at Los Alamos in New Mexico; this part of the narrative is seen, largely, in context of a closed security review Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) is put through as he starts to question America’s motivations of what they are doing with this extraordinary power he has given them.
The second part of the narrative is seen in black-and-white, and largely from the perspective of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission who is going through hearings to become Secretary of Commerce. The picture of Oppenheimer we get through Strauss is seen through the perspective of him as a political liability at the start of the Cold War. When Nolan said in the lead up that the color scenes would be a subjective narrative of Oppenheimer and the black-and-white an objective one, what he ultimately means is a first-person perspective on Oppenheimer through his own eyes vs. a third-person one through others. This is the other place where “Oppenheimer” reminds me of “Memento,” where the black-and-white feels observational in looking at Leonard’s life- and condition- as an outside observer, and the color feels visceral, as we are going through Leonard’s perspective with him. For a film that takes place largely in offices, boardrooms and interior settings, Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema have created some breathtaking cinematic images in the way they utilize both color and black-and-white photography. This might be his richest visual experience yet.
In his past few films, Nolan has played with sound in a way that has- sometimes- infuriated audiences (including me), but shown an inventive interest in taking the cinematic experience ahead to a purely sensory one over simply a narrative one. With “Oppenheimer,” he returns to more subtle sound mixing techniques, but he doesn’t lose his desire to make the sound mix a character unto itself in the film. There are two moments, in particular, where that is most true- the Trinity test of the bomb, and his speech after the bombing of Hiroshima. Nolan, his sound mixers and sound designers and composer Ludwig Göransson (who creates another tremendous score for Nolan) take a more natural approach to the cinematic experience for much of the film, but in these moments, they are playing off of the apocalyptic implications of what has occurred, and it’s some of the most terrifying filmmaking of Nolan’s career.
“Oppenheimer” is truly a study in character, and one of the things about Nolan’s approach to his story is that he is unafraid to show Oppenheimer in a frustrating, and unflattering light. Early on, he looks to exact revenge on a professor, but when it looks like it will backfire, he has to pivot away from that plan with a flimsy excuse. His relationships with women- first with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a student, and then his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt)- are problematic in how he approaches them, but we never feel like he doesn’t care about them; he just has a hard time engaging with them emotionally. When it comes to the military brass he is forced to work with on the Manhattan Project, he must come to tenuous understandings with the likes of Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) while also being cautious how much he talks about his colleagues with others. He is most comfortable when he is interacting with other scientists, but even that comes with pitfalls when ideas of what they should be doing- and how- clash. Murphy and Downey Jr. are the acting heavyweights in the film, showing unexpected depths in both characters even as they are revealing uncomfortable truths about themselves as individuals. As Groves, Damon is terrific as a bottom-up military man who trusts Oppenheimer only as far as he feels comfortable their aims align, and Blunt brings warmth and vulnerability in her moments as Kitty. There are others that create vivid impressions, though, whether it’s Pugh or Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr or David Krumholtz, Josh Hartnett or David Dastmalchian- this feels like his richest ensemble of characters since “Inception,” and they are all in the service of a film exploring the challenging mind, and legacy, of one of the most significant men in the 20th Century, from one of the best filmmakers of the 21st Century. And this is Nolan’s masterpiece.
