One way to look at Oppenheimer is that Christopher Nolan, a filmmaker with real taste for explosions, has taken on scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man responsible for the greatest explosions humanity has yet produced. The result is far more nuanced than I expected.
It’s an endlessly tangled story. Nolan based the film on a book, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. In Greek Mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humankind. In return, the gods chained Prometheus to a rock, and an eagle came every day to eat his liver. A good metaphor for Oppenheimer’s story.
After the United States dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Oppenheimer the person became celebrated as the father of the bomb, the hero who organized the Manhattan Project, which in just three years developed the bomb. But in 1954, Oppenheimer was sucked into the McCarthy Red Scare, and some gnarly personal animosities aroused by Oppenheimer’s success -- and his arrogance. He lost his security clearance, which left him a broken man for the rest of his life. But the story is not that simple.
The film opens with roiling explosiveness, like the cosmic forces that Oppenheimer helped unleash, and then shifts nine years later to the intimate room where a committee interrogates Oppenheimer, intending to do him dirty over the security clearance. The committee’s lawyer asks tight, hard-edged questions, but Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) gives halting, circular answers.
This is how the film sees Oppenheimer. He’s a theoretical quantum physicist, who thinks about probabilities rather than certainties. But in the military/political world where people want concrete answers, Oppenheimer embodies ambiguity.
Like many scientists, Oppenheimer thinks it’s crucial to create the bomb, but then has profound moral concerns about using it on people. Working with Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), the general who commands the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer is a marvel of organization and a fabulously crisp thinker, but in his personal life he’s a messy womanizer.
When he’s just a physics professor, Oppenheimer shares sympathies with the Communist Party in Berkeley. It’s not a big deal politically, then, and he’s still given the Manhattan Project job. But he’s tone deaf about continuing his intimate friendships with party members.
The movie Oppenheimer is full of brief scenes and shifts in time, alternating between black and white, sepia-tinged color and the gaudy Technicolor of the 1940s and ‘50s. Minor slights early on reverberate into deep resentments later. Oppenheimer overrides physicist Edward Teller’s push for a hydrogen bomb instead of an atom bomb – and Teller helps ruin Oppenheimer’s life.
The one real villain is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) who early in the film believes that Oppenheimer caused Einstein to snub Strauss. Strauss festers with resentment – and years later, as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, he makes sure Oppenheimer does not get that security clearance. Downey Jr. is an exceptional actor, whose Strauss oozes from pretending to be Oppenheimer’s friend and ally to slowly revealing his own jealousy and malice.
That sense that contradictions are everywhere is the genius of this film. The picture is wracked by simultaneous triumph and guilt. America still debates whether it was right to use the atom bomb – in numbers, it saved lives of both Americans and Japanese, had the Allies been forced to invade Japan. But the moral questions persist. At the famous test of the bomb, called Trinity, it was not certain if the chain reaction would stop, or whether it would incinerate the atmosphere and destroy the Earth. But they did it. And within these gigantic questions are personal loves and hates, and the psychology of all the capable and imperfect people involved.
Oppenheimer is a remarkable film.
