Watching Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer watching the initial blast of the Trinity Test.

Note: Although this review is not spoiler-free, nothing is revealed that will spoil the film for you.  You can't spoil something that has to be seen.

I have not read American Prometheus but I know the general story of the Manhattan Project.  It has been of casual interest to me for decades.  I know all about the controversy as to whether or not we should have dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II.  I have always approached the situation from the military and geopolitical side of things.  Of the Manhattan Project itself, I knew only general details.  I knew nothing really about J. Robert Oppenheimer.  

Except he led the project.  Became world-famous afterwards.  Was attacked by McCarthyism in the 1950's.  Was supposedly exonerated by some report somewhere that came out long after his death forty years later.  I did not know he was a womanizer.  I did not know he was considered charismatic among his colleagues.  He was not good in physics labs.  But he was a genius in early quantum theory.  He pieced together various aspects of physics that took Einstein's theory of relativity to the next level.

I knew about the Trinity Test.  I've see videos of it all my life and own a documentary that contains the footage.  I knew they built a town and housed the scientists and isolated them from the world so they could do, in about two years, something no one ever before knew how to.  They created a weapon that changed the world.

“Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds.”  I knew Oppenheimer quoted those words from the Bhagavad Gita and have seen video of him saying them for most of my adult life.  It is almost like a historical meme, if you can call a statement from the early 1960's a meme.  But, I really didn't know all the myriad of fascinating details about his life until Christopher Nolan made Oppenheimer.  

Nolan has produced another film in truly grand style.  The acting, the cinematography, the musical score, the shot selections, the pacing and editing, the intricate, compelling, and complex (and perhaps slightly flawed) script all combine to produce a movie that is probably more affecting than it is entertaining.  It is also the best film I have seen in the last five years.  But I don't get out much for cinema these days.

I went to see it last weekend at an IMAX theater near Atlanta.  Jeffery made the trip down with me.  We talked about seeing the premiere of Nolan's Inception together in this same theater, which I blogged about in 2010.  We met Avery and her new beau and all watched a matinee together.  I was anticipating something special.  Much of the film was shot in black and white.  The film stock had to be invented.  No one had ever shot an IMAX film in black and white before.

Memento, Nolan's first major film (for which I give him a 10), was shot in mixed black and white and color.  In that case the different stocks represented different timelines.  The black and white shots were telling a normal, forward unfolding, linear story.  Color was used to tell a related story backwards.  You saw the end before you saw the beginning of it.  This strikingly created the effect of short-term memory loss on the audience, which is what the main character is suffering from as he tries to investigate the murder of his wife.  Memento hooked me on Nolan.

That is sort of the way he uses the different stocks in Oppenheimer.  The color story is a telling of the physicist's amazing life up to the Trinity Test.  Black and white is reserved for some things that happen after that, Oppenheimer's relationship with Lewis Strauss - played brilliantly by Robert Downey, Jr.  There is another use of color in the film related to the political proceedings involving Oppenheimer during his post-bomb downfall.  The film begins with all three of these “phases” of the narrative being mixed together by Nolan.  The viewer has to be attentive as if this were an action film.  The pacing is relentless from the beginning and it is all a bit disorienting until you understand how color and black and white is being used and what the various story elements are.

Gradually, this becomes clear over the three-hour film's first 20 minutes or so.  Oppenheimer was a brilliant up and coming academic, master of his own university department.  He had a intensely passionate relationship with an ardent Communist woman who later committed suicide.  He married an ex-Communist woman (wonderfully portrayed by Emily Blunt) who was married when he met her.  Their relationship turned out to possess a strong dynamic that is plainly brought out in the film.  These are some intimate moments in the film filled with the emotive resonance that transforms these actors into vibrant characters for the audience.  For whatever else this film might or might not be, it is Nolan's best acted film ever.  Which probably solidifies him at the elite level of film directing.

Cillian Murphy gives us a sensational performance as Oppenheimer.  The IMAX cameras allow for Nolan to get extremely close and fill the gigantic screen with this wonderful actor's face.  You can read everything about it a way no other format allows.  Subtle facial movement fully develops as part the actor's performance.  This would require a more intense close-up shots in another format.  In IMAX it is all there in-camera.  Murphy took full advantage of this and delivers a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination;  Downey, Jr. for supporting actor, while we're at it.

The film has two hallmarks of Nolan-like film-making: intimacy and time.  Throughout his career, Nolan has used this combination, among others, to establish himself as a unique film director.  I mentioned some of the film's sense of epic intimacy (this is IMAX, after all).  Nolan's first use of sex scenes in his cinematic career are warmly lit and beautiful to behold.  Dialog afterwards in the same warm glow is punctuated with his lover's conflicted personality, giving this sensual intimacy a Nolan twist that makes it complex and anxious, a strange moment.  Florence Pugh plays a fervent but neurotic Jean Tatlock.  Another example of a fine performance in a movie filled with them.

Then there's the intimacy of Oppenheimer with himself.  Nolan often takes us inside his psychology and scenes are expressed in a surreal manner that invokes an affect on the viewer similar to the slightly disturbing sex scenes.  He doesn't know if America can be trusted with a weapon of this power but he definitely knows the Nazi's can not.  That is the initial motivation.  But he ends up carrying the weight of hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and knowing that he probably unleashed a nuclear arms race.  The man becomes so conflicted during the course of this film that it is somewhat heartbreaking to see.  Again, Murphy's performance is the backbone for all of this.

Oppenheimer surprised me in a couple of ways.  It turns out that the actual test at Los Alamos was not that big of a deal compared to the build up Nolan gives it.  I was expecting something more but what he gives us is a simple historically accurate telling of it.  The film opens with this vast slow-motion explosion of fire filling the entire screen.  You can see the heat on the huge image.  The theater is filled with a dance of light.  But when it comes to the actual test, Nolan chooses history over drama.  The explosion is shown in a factually accurate rather than poetic way and it does not really match similar shots in the beginning of the film.

Admittedly, the history is fairly dramatic anyway.  And the scene is suspenseful with complex thoughts and emotions going through several major characters.  But, other than a brief but blinding flash, the Trinity Test itself was a fairly small bomb.  So, depicting it as it historically happened means that explosion and resulting mushroom cloud just didn't make my mouth gape open.  Of course, I keep in mind that no one had ever seen anything like that before.  Visually it was not as spectacular as the opening (or closing) of the film though I am probably tainted by having seen video of so many nuclear explosions in my life.  What was surprising was how long it took the shock wave to reach the scientists positioned miles away from the site.  It was a good 30 seconds of near silence until the BOOM! arrived.  Cool.

Another surprise for me was that the film isn't really about the bomb or even its use upon Japan.  That is what propels the narrative and stitches everything together.  It is about Oppenheimer's life and his heading of the project, of course.  But is it also about Lewis Strauss.  Downey's role in the film, while clearly supporting, is the substantial subplot of the Nolan's narrative.  He is in many excellent scenes and the extent of his story was a wonderful surprise for me.

Nolan's script is incredibly intricate, dense, and proceeds with a sense of urgency in everything.  Were Oppenheimer's personal relationships truly this fast-paced?  Maybe so but there isn't a moment in the entire three hours when anyone pauses and reflects.  The audience never gets a break except for three or four brief humorous shots or lines. Everything comes in a pressure cooker, which I am sure is Nolan's intent, but I found the film a tad exhausting when it ended.  Though I am sure that is Nolan's intent there is a price to be paid for enduring it.  Oppenheimer is certainly affective to watch.  

Minor weaknesses in the script include the convenient way Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) always appears at just the right moment.  Alone, or practically so.  Always being a sage more than a person.    I felt the film made him into a convenient prop.  I also didn't care for the pointed mention of John F. Kennedy as “the junior senator from Massachusetts.”  I have no clue why Nolan made such a forced effort to work Kennedy's name into the film.  He had nothing to do with anything depicted.  Perhaps it is a nod to the fact that he wanted to publicly recognize Oppenheimer later when he was president but it all felt fairly cliché in the film.  While the script successfully handles a complex array of details, given the number of facts and choices involved in the film, it would be unlikely that Nolan could write it all without a few questionable decisions.

Oppenheimer contains another hallmark Nolan moment.  A seemingly small scene that becomes increasingly significant as the film goes on and whose full revelation is hidden from the audience until the end of the film.  This is something he did with fine effect in Tenet, for example.  Here we see Oppenheimer meet Einstein as Strauss approaches from afar.  When he gets close enough Einstein walks past Strauss as if he is ignoring him.  Being the narcissistic politician that he is, Strauss immediately assumes Oppenheimer said something to Einstein negatively about Strauss.

The reason for him thinking this is part of the secondary plot of the film but, as it turns out, what Oppenheimer said had nothing at all to do with Strauss.  According to the film, there was a time when Oppenheimer showed Einstein some equations that theoretically indicated an atomic explosion might cause a chain-reaction over the entire Earth.  Luckily, that turned out to be wrong, of course.  But, as a result of that, the intimate moment between Einstein and Oppenheimer before an approaching Strauss took place.  What Oppenheimer, in fact, said to Einstein had to do with the old worry of a chain-reaction.  Only now he is applying it to the inevitable global nuclear arms race that is the consequence of his actions in making the bomb.  The karmic weight of this is fully captured by Nolan in the way this scene is connected to the rest of the film and it makes for an unsettling end.

The movie is filled with marvelous performances by top-named actors.  Many of them are only in one or two scenes.  One such one-scene performance is given when the scientist meets President Harry Truman played perfectly by Gary Oldman.  The president turns from warm and welcoming to cold and hostile when the head of the project confesses that he feels he has “blood on my hands.”  Truman takes his handkerchief from his lapel and waves it about Oppenheimer's face, telling him that the Japanese do not “give a shit who invented the bomb.”  They only care about who dropped it.  "I did," says the president.  As the physicist leaves the room Truman says “don't let that crybaby back in here.”  It is a powerful scene and another hammerblow upon Murphy's portrayal and the audience's connection with it.  The coldness of political reality slaps us all in the face.  Highly affecting.

The only question is, will enough film-goers find such a complicated story and film worth seeing and, if so, seeing it more than once?  Oppenheimer demands a lot of its audience.  It is not a set back and enjoy while your mind is blown film the way Inception and Interstellar were, for example.  For the story to make sense, you have to either know all this stuff going in (which was only slightly my case) or you have to let the film inform you along the way (which was definitely my case).  I can't imagine a lot of people knowing nothing about any of this seeing the film in droves, but it would be a wonderful world were that true.  I want Nolan to succeed and teach with his fine effort.

I haven't given it a firm rating on one viewing but it is at least an 8 and possibly a 9.  Online reviews and audience reaction at Rotten Tomatoes is overwhelmingly positive (94% critics and 93% audience ratings as of this post).  It enjoyed one of the highest grossing premiere weekends ever for an R-rated movie.  I have to evaluate it as the film remains resonant in my mind here only a few days after seeing it.  Like I said in the beginning, for me, the film is far more affecting than it is entertaining.  I don't feel “entertained” in the way I did with all of Nolan's previous efforts.  I know why initial preview audiences were described as “devastated” upon seeing it.  That is close to how I felt when I exited the massive theater.  

Nolan has crafted a terrific story, well-told, about an extraordinary man who essentially changed the world and was deeply conflicted as a consequence.  A man who weaponized atomic power.  A man who was free and open with his life choices and ideas in a time when you were supposed to choose sides.  For that they persecuted him despite the fact there was absolutely no evidence that he was ever Communist himself.  In the meantime he has incredible relationships with Einstein, two (actually three) women who are or were Communists, a powerful military general (Matt Damon), and a ruthless politician friend turned enemy.  There's plenty here to sink your teeth in to in addition to the fact that this incredible bomb is being made literally from scratch.  

I know I'll be seeing it again.  But I have to wonder how many other people don't mind being devastated by a film.  As I said, the movie is relentless in its pacing and has a lot of story elements.  I keeps your mind highly engaged.  This ain't Barbie where you are passively and happily entertained.   This is a psychological gut punch by an extraordinary true story.  I hope there are enough of us to make this Nolan project a hit.  He obviously put everything he had into this picture.  For his considerable effort, he has given us a true spectacle of the mind worthy of the IMAX film stock upon which it was shot.

Oh yeah, and it felt great to have a cinematic experience in a nice theater for the first time since before the pandemic hit.  It is still a magical way to spend some time.

Watch a good spoiler-free review of the film here. 

Watch a good spoiler-filled telling of the film's complete story here.

 

Note: The Trinity Test happened 78 years ago this month.

Late Note: I saw the film again the next Saturday afternoon.  I enjoyed it as much if not more so.  Since I was "pre-oriented" to the mixed story lines, I noticed other aspects of the film that impressed me.  I was more attentive to the score, which is awesome, Academy Award worthy.  There are two moments, one under the starlit sky of New Mexico and the other during the last sex scene where the movie does slow down and let the viewer have some mental space.  So there are brief moments of repose in the otherwise action-movie pacing of the film.  The shots of New Mexico before the town was build are grand like the film.  Emily Blunt's performance deserves much higher praise than I initially gave.  Yeah, a Best Supporting Actress nod for her.  

The script is actually a tad more humorous than I thought.  I missed a few little quips the first time through.  The first one, which strikes me as the funniest moment in the film, is where Oppenheimer takes a poisoned apple from his idol Neils Bohr (Kenneth Branagh is terrific in this small role).  As the young physicist tosses it into a garbage can he utters the excuse "worm hole."  Now, of course, he means there was a worm in the apple (which there wasn't).  But this one utterance in the context of who utters it in a film based on quantum physics is halarious. 

Very Late Note, September 7:  I guess movie goers appreciated this well-made film enough to be "devastated" by it after all.  Oppenheimer has become the third highest grossing film of the year and the most financially successful WW2-related film of all time!  As of today it has grossed over $850 million globally.  Very impressive and certainly deserving.  Christopher Nolan has done it again but this time with a film totally different from anything he has previously made.  Another winner for my favorite living director.  A solid career that should give us many more stellar films to come.  I hope at least one of them features Robert Downey, Jr. again.