A few weeks before the release of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan told Variety that “some people leave the movie absolutely devastated.”
My response at the time was—oh good, because I was looking for a reason to feel devastated. Who brags about this?
It should have been a tip-off. I joked with my friends that my Barbieheimer plan was to see Barbie first and let Oppenheimer cheer me up. Well, I wasn’t cheered up and I wasn’t devastated. Instead, I was left kind of flat—wondering whether there was actually anyone in there. Barbie’s the movie about the plastic doll, but it’s Oppenheimer that gives us a hollow shell of a human.
I realize I’m swimming against a very powerful tide of adulation here, but I found Oppenheimer to be a masterfully told dud. It has been praised for its taut pacing: we’d actually have been better served if the movie had slowed down once in a while so we could absorb what was going on. It tries to cover way too much territory, and trots along too quickly to let us absorb what ought to be major dramatic moments. The only truly patient scene in the movie involves an incredibly naked Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer and his mistress Jean Tatlock, quoting the Bhagavad Gita’s “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” while they grind away. A triumph of egghead erotica, sure, but what the hell was that?
That scene at least had some steam in it. The movie mostly stays in stodgier territory. The Manhattan Project is one of the great moral paradoxes of all time, with a charismatic and deeply complicated protagonist at its center; and yet we spend more than half the movie watching middle-aged men in skinny ties argue about the title character’s security clearance. The political martyrdom of Oppenheimer over his anti-nuke statements is a definite matter of historical interest—except that Nolan seems to think we should be in total suspense wondering who it was that ratted Oppie out.
Excuse the spoiler, but it was a guy named Lewis Strauss.
And if your first question is “Who’s Lewis Strauss?” my answer would be: exactly.
For the record, Lewis Strauss is a minor nuclear policy bureaucrat who became obsessed with payback after Oppenheimer snubbed him during a meeting with Einstein. He’s played to crusty perfection by Robert Downey, Jr. And that is literally all that matters about Lewis Strauss, and yet we spend nearly half the movie on him.
He was not the story. Even Oppenheimer’s security clearance was not the story. The bomb is the story: how they built it and what that meant for the souls of its inventors. Apart from the extended scene of the Trinity test—which is genuinely nail-biting, maybe the best sequence Nolan’s ever directed—we don’t spend nearly enough time actually dealing with the bomb or what was going on inside the hearts and minds of the men who made it. Particularly the guy whose name is on the poster.
Oppenheimer doesn’t invite us into Oppenheimer’s heart so much as give us a travelogue. There’s a brief scene where he convinces his future wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) to leave her husband for him, followed by another where he spends the night with Jean, followed by another where he gives his son to his neighbors because Kitty’s become an alcoholic. Followed by, followed by, followed by.
This is forgiveable: it’s not Scenes From a Marriage. Less forgiveable is how the movie commits the worst sin of any biopic—repeatedly having supporting characters tell us how brilliant the protagonist is without showing us that brilliance in action. The real Oppenheimer was brilliant, both as a physicist and as an organizer of genius. He was also charismatic, cultivated, funny (he frequently acted in comic skits at Los Alamos), not to mention narcissistic, manipulative, and frequently amoral, both in personal and political matters.
I don’t fault the movie for leaving out some of his less attractive qualities—though we don’t actually get to see much of the attractive ones either—but I do wonder why Christopher Nolan didn’t give us an answer to what should have been the movie’s central question. What kind of person does what he did?
And that question is devastating. I’m going to wager that it’s impossible to approach the subject of the atomic bomb without feeling some kind of moral terror. The Manhattan Project is the ultimate Trolley Test: Should we have built the bomb? And, having built it, was it absolutely necessary to use it? How guilty should the so-called “Father of the A-bomb” feel about the device he helped create?
It’s a darkly seductive scenario: a plucky band of brilliant minds working together in creative ferment and perfect harmony to unleash a monster on the world. These guys were not soulless Dr. Strangeloves. Many of the Manhattan Project scientists were refugees from Fascism; most were idealistic young men who genuinely believed that the awesome power of the atom would one day liberate humanity, and Oppenheimer was quite possibly the biggest idealist of them all. Then Einstein warned President Roosevelt that Heisenberg was working on a German bomb, the Army tapped Oppenheimer to lead their own project, Oppie built his lab conveniently close to his New Mexico ranch and invited hundreds of his brilliant friends along. Then: boom.
This is what J. Robert Oppenheimer meant when he said that “the physicists have known sin.” They went to Los Alamos so that they could stop Hitler from nuking London, and they wound up delivering a weapon that incinerated children. Until the day after Trinity (to borrow another of Oppenheimer’s famous phrases), it was still possible to believe that science was, if not a positive good, at least morally neutral. That argument became impossible to sustain after films came back of Japanese civilians with charred skin falling from their backs,.
Which is where Nolan’s Oppenheimer goes wrong. As many have pointed out, the movie devotes not one frame to showing us what Oppie’s magical bomb actually did to human beings. Somewhere deep in the second half of the three-hour epic, the script does a brief head-fake in that direction. In the wake of the bombings, Oppenheimer (a chilly Cillian Murphy) accepts the thunderous applause of his Manhattan Project colleagues. As he congratulates the team for their hard work, he’s suddenly struck by imagined images of them all horribly burned and disfigured by a nuclear attack. The moment leaves him deeply shaken, speechless.
Except that it didn’t happen. Oppenheimer did give a speech after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there was no freakout. And while movie-Oppie is haunted by thoughts of what the bomb could do to his friends and fellow Americans, there’s no grappling with the very real Japanese civilians who were killed and permanently maimed. All we get are the words that Oppenheimer really did say that night: “I bet the Japanese didn’t like it.” Yeah, Robert, I’m sure they didn’t like it at all.
At one point, the counsel for the committee reviewing his security clearance asks why Oppenheimer was in favor of dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, but against developing the H-bomb in 1949. This isn’t strictly true—Oppenheimer was initially skeptical about the hydrogen bomb, but supported the project once his technical objections were overcome. Nonetheless, it is correct that Oppenheimer came to be tormented by the bomb he and so many other brilliant minds helped to create. Clearly, the devastation did gnaw at Oppenheimer’s conscience. But when and how did the gnawing begin?
Pre-Hiroshima Oppenheimer was not squeamish about casualties. Not only did he forge ahead even after it was clear the German bomb program had failed—not only did he quash attempts by other scientists to petition against using the bomb—he even supported a plan to poison the German food supply with strontium, which would have been an act of genocide. And yet, four years later, he became one of the nation’s most eloquent voices against nuclear proliferation, an act of political courage that nearly ruined him. That is a story that demands telling.
Blake once wrote that “Each man is haunted until his humanity awakens.” Hiroshima and Nagasaki certainly qualify as a haunting. We are to date the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons against an enemy, and we used it against an enemy that was reportedly trying to surrender. As a nation we have still mostly failed to confront how, in the act of fighting the darkness, we risked becoming the darkness. Oppenheimer represents that struggle—till his death he maintained that the bombings were correct. While claiming that physicists had “known sin,” Oppenheimer never actually confessed to his own sins. He was always careful to spread the responsibility around, but was happy enough to accept the “Father of the atomic bomb” label.
There are moments when we come close to the heart of the matter, then quickly skip away. In one memorable scene, Oppenheimer visits the White House and tells President Truman (Gary Oldman, accent-hopping) that he feels he has “blood on his hands. By way of reply, Truman offers his pocket square. As Truman puts it, the Japanese don’t care who built the bomb, they care about who dropped it: the president bears the responsibility, not Oppenheimer. An excellent point, but we don’t spend much time dealing with it (At least we get to hear Truman tell his Secretary of War, “Don’t let that crybaby in here again.” Truman really did say that).
All of which left me feeling that we had been locked out of Oppenheimer’s mind… a mind much too fascinating too miss. It doesn’t help that Cillian Murphy is such a cold and precise technician—he works as a gangster or a psychotic Batman villain, but not as Oppenheimer, a person that his contemporaries unfailingly describe as warm and thoughtful. Go watch one of the video interviews with Oppie and you’ll see what I mean: imagine Mr. Rogers as a nuclear physicist and that’s Oppenheimer.
Probably the best moment in the movie is one I can’t spoil, because it’s literally the last scene. It involves a conversation with Einstein.
If you’ve seen it, you’ll recall the power of the movie’s final line, which is awesome but comes as too little, too late. If Oppenheimer had spent more time in that absolute moral territory and less in the cramped office where Oppenheimer lost his security clearance, I think we could have had a movie that was truly great.
Christopher Nolan specializes in movies that feel deep and morally complex, even when they’re not. A lot of people go for it, but the word I most often associate with his work is “cold.” With the exception of Florence Pugh’s affecting performance as Jean Tatlock—and Jack Quaid as a bouncy, Boimleresque young Richard Feynman—I felt that coldness, that distance, all the way through.
Nolan has described his movie as a horror story. I will give him that. The link between Oppenheimer and Frankenstein is hard to avoid, particularly since the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s novel is The Modern Prometheus and Nolan’s script is adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman’s American Prometheus. Both allude to the Greek myth of the titan who tried to help humanity by stealing fire from the gods, and wound up chained to a rock while a vulture ate his liver. Prometheus is the model of the modern scientist, losing control of the forces he unleashes. But Prometheus was absolutely the good guy, and the verdict on Oppenheimer is still out. In a real sense, the fires of Hiroshima are still burning, and they could still burn us all.
I realize I am in a tiny minority of people who think that such a (literally) titanic subject deserved more than it got. Other people have reported being deeply moved—a friend told me that the man beside him said “I need to get drunk” to his wife as the credits rolled—but I didn’t get there. I did not want the obscure, remote Oppenheimer that Nolan delivered. I wanted a broken, wounded hero like the real Oppenheimer, someone forced to carry his burdens until they killed him. I wanted Prometheus but the fire was missing. I needed Oedipus, but instead I got the Sphinx.
