‘Oppenheimer’ Review: Bombs Over Biopics

Though Oppenheimer shares visual and thematic touchstones with Christopher Nolan’s other films, its most obvious point of comparison may be Miyazaki Hayao’s The Wind Rises. Both films are about technical wizards for whom science and engineering are effectively akin to artistic practice. And both are ultimately about the ways in which their subjects’ work is inextricably tied to legacies of real-world harm and devastation.

Nolan indulges his fondness for nonlinear plot structures in the film, but the story of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) particularly benefits from this approach. Dispensing with the plodding routines of the average biopic, the filmmaker eschews a slow, steady march toward Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II, opting instead to orbit the two most prominent touchstones of the scientist’s life: the creation of the bomb itself and the security hearing to which he’s subjected in the 1950s for his subsequent and quite public renunciation of nuclear weaponry.

Throughout, Oppenheimer jumps back and forth between color and black-and-white photography, along the way catching glimpses of its protagonist’s early theoretical work and its later practical application. It also sheds light on his youthful dalliances with leftist, even communist, politics and the way those worldviews come back to bite him after the war.

Nolan has been operating in an epic mode since Batman Begins, and the elaborate, almost byzantine staging of his blockbusters tend to overwhelm the characters within his frames. That method is superficially reproduced in Oppenheimer, but this is also the first of his large-scale works to also feel as if it’s radiating outward from its main character’s very psyche.

Nolan has assembled a staggeringly large cast of name actors here, many of whom appear on screen for just enough time for us to recognize their faces, reflecting how many important figures crossed paths with Oppenheimer throughout his tumultuous career. The man is merely the nucleus around whom so many of these people orbit, and as fellow physicist Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) tells the snobbish Oppenheimer as the latter is being recruited by the government during WWII, “You’re not just self-important, you’re actually important!”

Nonetheless, Nolan never allows the film to dip into the historical tropes of the great-man biopic and suggest that Oppenheimer was larger than life. The man’s hubris is regularly shown to be his worst asset, forcing him into a series of tactical errors when it comes to navigating the fraught political terrain of WWII, during which the United States was briefly allied with the Soviet Union, even as our nation was waging ideological war with communism.

Military attachés inadvertently inflate Oppenheimer’s sense of his political invulnerability while giving him free rein over the Manhattan Project, with the man occasionally making bold demands for personnel, security access, and resources. But Nolan always slips in subtle reminders that the Pentagon brass are the ones really holding the leash and whip in this relationship. And when the physicist finds himself embroiled in a witch hunt sneakily orchestrated by a rival, Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr., in an icy, venomous performance that counts as his best work in more than a decade), Oppenheimer’s lifetime of assumed authority is turned against him with sickening ease by the same government who relied upon him to end the war and intimidate the Russians.

Oppenheimer places us firmly and operatically within the twin pressure cookers of the Manhattan Project’s race to end the war and our agonized hero’s personal martyrdom against McCarthyite purges during the postwar Red Scare. Nolan depicts with pinpoint precision the detonation of the test bomb in the New Mexico desert where Oppenheimer and his team conducted their research, but he notably avoids showing the bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s a moral choice, and it’s one that perfectly sets up the remainder of the film’s depiction of Oppenheimer’s personal terror at what he had unleashed and his subsequent devotion to nonproliferation. By refusing to turn historical carnage into spectacle, Nolan keeps the true focus on the profound philosophical and moral questions imposed by the existence of the bomb and the way it’s shaped international politics ever since.

Oppenheimer is also the latest Nolan film to proudly fly the flag for celluloid in an attempt to stop a digital-only future for cinema. In truth, his fetishism in that regard has often seemed a bit perfunctory given that he tends to put all the properties and possibilities of celluloid toward aggressively gray and flatly composed images. But Hoyte van Hoytema’s luminous 70mm photography here brings new levels of beauty to Nolan’s stark aesthetic.

Across the film, light casts deep shadows into research labs and bureaucratic backrooms, conveying the vice-like grip of Oppenheimer’s ivory-tower isolation during his research and the political subterfuge at work to exploit the fruits of his labor. At times, Nolan even blows out the frame, anticipating the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings even before the first tests have been launched and, later, reflecting the psychic toll that those bombings had on Oppenheimer. Elsewhere, the sharply rendered tones of earthen brown and incandescent-bulb yellow create an at once warm and suffocating atmosphere. This subtly mirrors Oppenheimer’s loving but mutually destructive romances with Jean (Florence Pugh), a depressive graduate student whom he meets at Berkeley, and eventual wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), a dilettantish leftist like him but whose clear-eyed assessment of her lack of drive leads to alcoholism and melancholia.

For better and worse, Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one particularly traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work (The Prestige, Interstellar) ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder.

Oppenheimer joins the ranks of those films not for preserving the apparent inexplicability of nuclear physics, but by undermining the idea of science’s objectivity. Oppenheimer’s research and development may obey fundamental laws of the universe, but science has been and likely shall remain forever subject to manipulation by humans who usually don’t even understand it.

But that, too, is an indication of Oppenheimer’s failures as much as the predations of power brokers. Throughout the scientist’s trial by kangaroo court in the 1950s, his friends and loved ones ask him why he keeps subjecting himself to this abuse instead of admitting defeat. Only in the final moments of Nolan’s film does the man’s reasoning become clear, and it recasts the drama as an act of willful atonement as much as external persecution.