You know those Best Picture nominee clip reels they present periodically throughout the Oscars ceremony, the ones that play a bunch of the loftiest parts of the movie in a sequence with the film’s score laid over it? Well, Christopher Nolan made a three hour one and called it Oppenheimer.
Forgive my facetiousness. I haven’t the unwavering awe and wonder for Christopher Nolan’s films that so many audiences and, most importantly, he himself has. The sad irony is that the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer feels destined to be adapted by Nolan, but at this stage in his career, his personality overshadows the story.
There should be no ironclad rules when it comes to adaptation, but in this case, Nolan’s megalomaniacal vision does a disservice to the source, which would have benefited with more constraints. I wish for a film like this to be approached with consideration for how best to present the material as opposed to how best to present Nolan’s flashy mechanics through the vessel of history. It became immediately clear as the film’s opening moments came ripping onto the screen that he’d set out to tell the epic story not of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) but of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Some directors make films that way. Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson— none of them would be expected to hide behind the camera and put their personality second to the story at hand. None of them should have to. Who goes to see a Wes Anderson movie hoping he’ll trim back his aesthetic in service of the nuts and bolts? No one, of course. But Christopher Nolan, to put it harshly, does not have an interesting enough style to be afforded this concession.
Early reactions to Oppenheimer have been mostly positive, with a few detractors tending to criticize its focus on Oppenheimer’s activities in the communist party and later blacklisting by vindictive Eisenhower cabinet nominee Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.). Evidently they feel it detracts from the “meat” of the story, the building of the atomic bomb. I can only surmise they wanted more of a Hidden Figures treatment. Said division puts this critic in the outside camp of agreeing with neither consensus. Oppenheimer is by no means a bad movie, but it has major flaws that sink it far below Nolan’s best, and those flaws have nothing to do with its focus on the fascinating political intrigue that surrounded the Manhattan project and scientific community during the Cold War era.
Oppenheimer’s political dalliances and later struggle against the anti-communist American government in the post-war years is not only just as interesting as the scientific work done on the atomic bomb, but integral to the illustration of the dichotomy between Oppenheimer’s conscientious, humanistic moral center and the depths of his occupational fervor and relentless pursuit of scientific advancement. Although a labor organizer at heart, and an honest and ethical man in spirit, Oppenheimer is shown in this expansive telling of his life to have an opportunistic streak. An early scene shows him poisoning an apple belonging to one of his professors as revenge for a humiliation in that day’s class. The transgression keeps him up the entire night and, the following morning, he rushes to dispose of the apple just before it’s consumed by his idol, Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh).
This incident illustrates the later position he finds himself in. It is only after getting swept up in his machinations that he considers the moral implications of them, only after years of working on the atomic bomb and the delivery of it into the hands of the United States government does he give himself the chance to reflect on the human cost. This comes down to what seems an immutable characteristic that Nolan zeroes in on. A genius and visionary, Oppenheimer was also a myopic man, partially blinded by an adherence to the hypothetical and a zeal for his work. As his contemporary at UC Berkeley and collaborator on the Manhattan project, Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), says, “theory can only get you so far.” In context, this refers to the fact that it takes experimentation, leaps of faith, even, to bring scientific advancement to a level unsupported by mere calculations. But what this really hits on is the fact that the question of what we can do with science and technology too often fails to consider whether or not we should do those things. For Oppenheimer, that consideration comes far too late.
The agonized laments which plague Oppenheimer in the wake of this belated realization comprise the greatest moments of the film. A scene where he addresses an auditorium full of people at the Los Alamos testing site following the bombing of Hiroshima is in equal amounts formally dazzling and horrifying. These scenes are what make Oppenheimer impossible to dismiss, but they’re also what’s missing from the film in total, the key word being “scenes.”
Nolan makes the frustrating decision to direct the majority of the film as a series of montages, breathlessly sailed-through sequences that make sense for certain segments of the film, but that drown the emotion and rhythm of everything else. Most annoyingly, these overpowering amalgams of flashbacks, flashforwards, and thematic inserts of technical wizardry come with an incessant musical score by Ludwig Göransson, whose inclinations lean more towards superhero climax music than what Nolan’s previous collaborator, Hans Zimmer, might have come up with. I never thought I’d actually say that the BWAAAAHMS would have been preferable, but here we are. All together this approach makes the film more of an extended trailer, both overly-impressionistic and overwrought, the easily-distracted man’s Terrence Malick film.
What really saves the film from overproduced, overedited bombasticity is Nolan’s genuine interest in these political and moral sides to Oppenheimer, and the central performance by Cillian Murphy, who affects his entire cadence and presence to recreate Oppenheimer as a historical figure and as tortured soul whose shortcomings form an object lesson in the necessity of holding ideals up to the light of morality. With every advancement comes a benign and a malignant application. Nuclear fission forms both the potential to power entire cities without dangerous fumes, but also has the power to destroy entire populations in an instant and make the world uninhabitable. From the industrial to the digital revolution, advancements have been made with no regard to the tangible impact on society. Oppenheimer, although mired in the ego of its creator, admirably warns against such shortsightedness. | Nic Champion
