Courtesy Universal Pictures
Most New Mexicans who viewed Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer had a head start on other moviegoers. Whether they had read the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer or had learned about the state’s role in the birth of atomic war in grade school, they also carry other connections to the enduring legacy of the story.
That didn’t make the epic retelling less epic. In fact, the insider knowledge makes the three-hour drama feel more dramatic to local viewers.
Nolan’s script adapted from American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin unfolds as three storylines: Oppenheimer’s rise to become director of the nation’s new secret weapons lab and the subsequent removal of his security clearance; the birth of the bomb itself from the chalkboard to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II; and one-time Atomic Energy Commission Director Lewis Strauss (played by an age-appropriate and riveting Robert Downey Jr.) as the story’s true villain with a tangled timeline.
Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) disappears into J. Robert Oppenheimer, delivering a performance that captures the fresh and frantic graduate student in the pre-war days all the way through to the ghoulish, battered “father of the atomic bomb” phase as he undergoes a Red Scare beat-down of his reputation.
Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson’s original score triumphs in its emotional gravity, relating the delicate dissonance of discovery, the swelling chords of inertia and the confounding clash of political and moral conflict. Nolan also puts the strategic absence of sound to work on two occasions (we’ll let you guess which ones).
The hopscotch through time can be confounding, though expert costuming and makeup help sync the logic, as do shifts between black and white and color photography. The sheer number of characters in the story has a tendency to overwhelm. Many of the men on the screen are never identified, and other characters’ names and significance only reveal themselves toward the conclusion of the story.
Matt Damon plays Gen. Leslie Groves, who offers somewhat of a foil to Oppenheimer as his military counterpart in the project. Damon’s smirky delivery of one-liners comprises some of the only short moments of humor in the script, but even though he’s ever-present in most of the movie, there’s also little room for development of Groves’ individual motivation.
Women take a decidedly backseat role in this version of the story. Emily Blunt has a few powerful moments as Oppenheimer’s troubled and alcohol-dependent wife Kitty, especially in her testimony before the secret kangaroo court known as the Gray Board. But Nolan’s choices around how much Jean Tatlock appears in the script and onscreen don’t quite add up. Oppenheimer’s enemies use Tatlock, an also-troubled early love interest and member of the Communist party, to help make the case against him. It’s a pity the majority of Florence Pugh’s screen time depicts Tatlock as nude and/or neurotic. Kai and Sherwin’s book portrays both women as troubled, but doesn’t attempt to draw such a tidy bow on their disparate relationships with Oppenheimer or cast them as antagonists the way Nolan does.
The film acknowledges New Mexico’s role in the project but doesn’t offer a true sense of place. Oppenheimer had visited Northern New Mexico often in his teen and early adult years, which led to his advocating for Los Alamos as the location for the lab. Nolan smartly filmed on-location, even using some existing lab facilities and the iconic Fuller Lodge and having characters ride horses through the sagebrush with Cerro Pedernal in the background. The script, however, contains little mention of the contributions locals made to the project and no mention or even allusion to the vast ongoing environmental damage wrought by the Manhattan Project and the people who suffered and died from radiation poisoning due to the secret Trinity test detonation near Alamogordo and activities at the lab.
Even the attempts to explain how Oppenheimer reacted to the death and destruction in Japan and the terror of the inevitable arms race feels diminished under the number of minutes the film devotes instead to men in suits wielding political power. And the nods to human suffering aren’t overt, they’re quick hallucinations of a ghastly awareness that success meant destruction, or they’re flashes of light against Oppenheimer’s face as he turns away from images of bomb damage.
Could there have been fewer esoteric sizzles and sparkles to depict Oppenheimer’s mind? Less time with explosions and mesmerizing flames blooming across the screen? Shorter sequences of debate and cross-examination in laboratories, board rooms and even the oval office? Certainly.
Yet, the story of why and how the United States developed the atomic bomb is itself more than complex, and Nolan’s film takes an admirable stab at unpacking the overlooked historical tick-tock. While Oppenheimer amassed a team of scientists to undertake the mission as Nazi Germany blitzkrieged across Europe, Hitler had long surrendered by the time the weapon was ready and the US instead used it against Japan, by most accounts as a way to convince Russia to stay in its lane.
In tandem, while Oppenheimer was hailed a hero for his leadership role in developing the world’s most destructive weapon, the same national government rapidly recoiled and cast aspersions on his character when it removed his security clearance. It’s puzzling, however, why the closing credits fail to reveal the posthumous reversal of that decision late last year.
One can hardly contemplate media coverage of director and writer Nolan without encountering the word “complex,” and that word rises to the mind repeatedly in any analysis of Oppenheimer. Though his widely acclaimed 2017 Dunkirk notably focused on a short period of time, the story of the atomic bomb and the political fallout for its architect takes on a decades-long arc. And the story continues.
7
+ Important history; epic arc of time
-Very full dance card; little NM context
Oppenenheimer
Directed by Nolan
With Murphy, Damon, Downey Jr. and Blunt
Center for Contemporary Arts, Violet Crown, 180 mins.
