Oppenheimer

History is good discipline. Christopher Nolan is far too faithful to it to let his usual gimmicks get in the way. Following the facts and the scientific method is a conviction; he follows them even when they would seem to defy his preconceptions. Oppenheimer is like an Eagle Scout project.

This movie is about a demographic that Nolan has always struggled to get his head around: people. In Dunkirk, his other historical piece, he got away with using representative figures because that movie dissected a collective struggle—like Battleship Potemkin on a much grander scale. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, is about individual people, and categories of people this director understands: engineers, managers, and physicists. It is about the conflict between theory and practice. Its scope is larger than science.

At the center is J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, Cillian Murphy clipped not by hunger but sublimation of appetite. The actor’s voice is impeccably soft, as though it cradles a heavy heart. He speaks like a learned man—parsing every syllable; his languid motions register the afterimage of thought. This scientist is only impertinent when he tests the edges of authority: whether it belongs to General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), who recruits him to lead the Manhattan Project, or Karl Marx at a faculty mixer in 1930s Berkeley.

The man is, in short, a genius and a freethinker, and Nolan is strikingly vivid about what that meant in this interwar milieu. (Precisely once does the physicist become as lurid as Bruce Wayne—when, in the throes of an affair, he recites the passage from the Bhagavad Gita he made infamous: an interlude John Waters could not have improved on.) Oppenheimer is a Jewish-American civilian—Communist-curious—and engaged in routing Nazi Germany. As long as that remains true, he can stick to the science. But he lets that remain true even as he feels the quicksand at his feet.

Like Lawrence of Arabia, Oppenheimer is not tortured by his brilliance; he is tortured by its limits, and its applications by others. But when the going is good, as it is in the movie’s middle third—which details the construction of, and daily life in, Los Alamos—and he talks shop with fellow luminaries with half an eye on his military-industrial-complex office politics, Murphy and the movie glow like a reactor. Neither the science nor the politics are mansplained. They coil around one another, trapping excess heat.

But, when Hitler’s regime collapses, so too does the nuclear bomb’s initial justification. Between the Trinity test in New Mexico and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer’s siloed sense of accomplishment will be forevermore dogged by a question mark. It is here that Oppenheimer coalesces into a Greek tragedy: it pushes relatable problems to unthinkable extremes. Great Neptune’s ocean will never let our hero’s bloody hands run clean, and the stain spreads across a superpower coming into its own.

Oppenheimer meets President Truman at the White House in a sequence taken from life, and Gary Oldman is explosive in his mere minutes as the commander in chief. He gives cornpone flavor to grim complexities. When he calls the theorist a crybaby for openly airing his guilty conscience, the executive could be gloating about his own culpability—and suppressing its collateral damage—or clear-eyed about the sacrifice he willingly made at the altars of power and peace. Either way, the dismissal is searing.

Nolan does not show the horrors unleashed on Japan, but Oppenheimer, their architect, experiences them. Stomps of adulation become deafening punishments; flesh ripples off smiling faces like snakeskin; rooms full of unsuspecting people are penetrated by light as pristine as a lab coat. The torment will scar the backs of his eyes for the rest of his natural life.

But perhaps Nolan could not stare into that abyss for long. The movie, to a large extent, pivots away from Oppenheimer and to his rival Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), onetime head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Snippets of the former’s hearing to get his top-secret clearance renewed in 1954—at the height of McCarthyism—and the latter’s in front of the Senate, when he was appointed secretary of commerce in 1958, have encircled the Manhattan Project years like a pair of grayscale vultures. But now that the bombs have dropped, the document thriller takes center stage. In so doing, Oppenheimer switches from a track that asks difficult questions to one that yields unequivocally satisfying answers. It switches to personal justice.

This is more than simple grandstanding, as the satisfying answers index the political thin ice. And Nolan uses these crucibles to illuminate the key figures, including Oppenheimer’s wife (Emily Blunt). Rather than crumple under cross-examination, Kitty razes a lifetime of men’s low expectations, a prison her husband was sensitive to but could not liberate her from. She had an objective view of the playing field Oppenheimer was on even as he was distracted by equations. Blunt is piercing—her Kitty is shrewder than her husband and Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), his troubled mistress.

And then there is Strauss. I think Nolan prevented himself from making satisfying answers also simple ones by virtue of casting Downey. One can imagine a less formidable performer taking this role and crudely putting the “rat” in bureaucrat. But if Murphy’s eyes seem to shroud the secrets of Oppenheimer’s personality, Downey’s beam like uncut caffeine—nothing escapes their attention. Acting like a swell does not make him superficial; Strauss’s wingtip collars were ruthlessly earned. Even if his reasons for railroading his rival are small, he is not. Downey keeps us honest.

That Strauss acquires magnetism from Iron Man is relevant. At bottom, the mythological idea of the genius is just a tweak on the vigilante—that certain self-appointed men are superior to their societies and thus not to be held accountable to the usual rules. These figures are part of the same patriarchal soup that Barbie stirred. They lurk at the crossroads between fanboy pulp and reactionary politics, which is a pot that, intentionally or not, Nolan stirred. In The Dark Knight, the Joker was not just beyond the rules; he was beyond psychology. And Nolan, with his ponderous idea of realism, made the clown’s nihilism glamorous while simultaneously justifying the extraordinary measures required to take him down.

In effect, Nolan offered two versions of vigilante/genius: the billionaire playboy who takes it upon himself to protect the rabble (one assumes he can dodge the taxes that would fund their public safety) and the magical psychopath who wants to inflict suffering. By contrast, the creative team that produced the first few Iron Man outings spared us the pretense that their hero posed a moral dilemma; they coasted on Downey’s herculean charm. But their moral simplicity created a template that lends valor to plutocrats, a rebranding bonanza for wealth inequality. By casting Elon Musk’s inspiration as the wheedling functionary who takes down the freethinking individualist genius, Nolan is making a statement.

Oppenheimer And Groves, Ground Zero

It is a point that, as I suggested earlier, may not accord with the director’s instincts. He tips his hand by putting the wittiest lines in his script (based on the biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin) toward Oppenheimer’s quips about his own singular talent. In his works of fiction, Nolan seemed like a theorist manqué—his ideas cashed checks his imagination could not pay. Compare, here, how he renders Oppenheimer’s visions with the gremlins crawling out of the floorboards in David Lynch’s dreams. Twin Peaks contained Southwestern scenes conjuring the Trinity test’s downwind horror: its grip on the unconscious. Nolan, by contrast, depicts phantoms as physics predicts them or history records them.

But I think it is reductive to call him, as I was wont to, literal-minded. He is an engineer at heart with a scientist’s passion for truth. In Oppenheimer, Nolan expresses the ecstasy of accomplishment and the agony of emerging from the bunker to appraise what it has wrought. The director reconstructs the Trinity test in painstaking detail, but he captures the brio of teamwork, an awed sense of the achievement. Nolan makes momentum tactile. And once the mushroom cloud recedes, sobriety hits like a shock wave.

Eighty years on, the legacy of the atom bomb is murky. By now the idea that humankind could commit suicide is one we take for granted. I would put the odds on a slow-torture decline, as opposed to instant incineration, but the seeds of our possible demise—our drives to organize and cooperate, to understand and shape our environment—remain stubbornly the same. Oppenheimer’s team, against Hitler’s genocidal war effort, exemplified these virtues. And yet his sorrow at their shortcomings abides.

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