Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Before I give it a slow death by a dozen paper cuts, I will admit that I found Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer to be one of his more watchable films. Nolan is at ease with a large scale format and knows how to choreograph his players. Most of the casting is apt and in some cases, particularly Benny Safdie's Edward Teller, this leads to outstanding performances. I was never bored during its three hours, though I was often befuddled by Nolan's choices.

The film has a hurtling momentum that enables Nolan to cram in a lot of info during its running time; perhaps too much. The project might have benefitted from the mini-series format. The rapid pace, jumping back and forth through time, flattens the dimensionality of the film's characters. As usual in a Nolan film, the female characterizations are the most indistinct. Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh, as Kitty Oppenheimer and Jean Tarlock, do their level best, but their roles are sketchy. Important aspects of Tarlock's character, her sapphism and depression, are barely hinted at. She exists as attendant to the Great Man. Blunt and Cillian Murphy are given a scenic New Mexican horseback ride to show the genesis of their love. However, Nolan is not a romantic director and the sparks of passion never fly. Kitty is reduced to domestic drudgery and she responds, depressed, with dark fulminations and a dependence on alcohol. Every time we see the Oppenheimer children, one of them is screaming his head off. This may be an attempt to be real, but it is manipulative, a variation of what Manny Farber called "The Gimp". There is not one comforting or sweet domestic scene and Murphy all too ably plays the distant Dad.

The only convincing relationship in the film is between Oppenheimer and Matt Damon's General Groves, Oppenheimer's military liaison. The push and pull between Murphy's ivory tower pomposity and Damon's sputtering Dale Carnegie conviviality provide what little humor and warm camaraderie the flick has to offer. I liked nearly all the supporting performances except Robert Downey Jr's Lewis Strauss. Downey is the most talented performer onscreen, but has little to do except stroke an imaginary mustache. Nolan has stated that he wanted the relationship between Oppenheimer and Strauss to resemble that of Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus. However, Salieri was given enough human foibles to make his villainy believable. Nolan's Strauss is all resentment and overweening ambition. Tony Stark has more ambiguity than Strauss does.

There is a lot of pretentious clutter in Oppenheimer. Kitty Oppenheimer's vision of Tarlock humping her husband on a chair amidst an AEC hearing seems more silly than disturbing. The film switches back from color to black and white, presumably to give it a newsreel feel (You Are There!), but usage of the effect seems arbitrary. Oppenheimer's vision of a nuclear apocalypse or atoms colliding in his mind's eye pop up every once in a while, adding to an overall sense of overreach. Ludwig Goransson's score saws and hammers away incessantly. A minimalist score would have been more appropriate to this project, but Nolan is a maximalist.

Oppenheimer has the value of good intentions. We certainly are transported as an audience to the gates of hell. Nolan's juxtaposition of the closed AEC hearing with the public hearing on Strauss' nomination to be Secretary of Commerce demonstrates how democracy needs the oxygen of open air debates to thrive. The film, designed to reap rewards, again displays Nolan's strength and limitations.