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.