Saw Oppenheimer last night with four others of my family, and we all loved it. It was longer than it needed to be, and there were a few times when I thought Christopher Nolan was too much in love with his own directorial brilliance, but on the whole I found it very fine. I cannot think of a single other movie that does so well with the character of a complex and brilliant person as Nolan and Cillian Murphy did with J. Robert Oppenheimer.
The film is disarrayed in time. It begins with a short overview of Oppenheimer's whole career, a series of ten-second snippets that array the whole life before you like a collage. That, I think, was part of Nolan's method, to reveal a life to you not so much as a narrative from start to finish but as a single object with many facets, a man, as he is, who moves through different circumstances but is always recognizably the same complex shape.
The cast is amazing. I guess that's another good thing about being Christopher Nolan, that you can do things like recruit Kenneth Branagh for a twenty-second turn as Niels Bohr. My children had fun recognizing all the former child stars who played the young physicists at Los Alamos. My favorite performance was actually by Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock. Tacklock was a beautiful communist with whom Oppenheimer was involved in the 30s and then saw a few more times when he was married, which was used against him in the infamous security clearance hearings. ("Why did you sneak off to visit this known communist in a hotel room?" Well . . .) Nolan and Pugh render Tatlock as the perfect crazily irrestible woman, sexy, irrational, unquittable. Once when Oppenheimer goes to visit her they end up fighting and she says, "I told you we can never see each other again!" "You called me!" "Stop answering the phone!" Perfect.
My one serious complaint about the film is that it doesn't give a very good sense of the work that was done at Los Alamos and how important Oppenheimer was to making it happen. I have read a stack of books about those years – the best is Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb – and I missed the nerd camaraderie of a hundred mostly young men working at the edge of science, and Oppenheimer as the father figure who somehow kept them all on task. For me there was too much politics in the Los Alamos scenes and not enough engineering.
I thought the film was actually better on the physics of the late 1920s, when Oppenheimer went to Germany to study the new world of the quantum. Imagine being a brilliant young physicist in that era, with astonishing new discoveries being published every year, everyone crowding in to lectures by Bohr or Heisenberg where they revealed earth-shaking advances, tearing open the latest journals to see what marvels they unveiled. That was the time to be a physicist.
Without saying so, Nolan seems to be pushing one version of Oppenheimer's decline and fall. I believe this comes from one of his recent biographers, although I can't remember which. The idea is that Oppenheimer was throughout his time at Los Alamos nagged by a sense that this was all a terrible mistake. After the war he pushed for UN control of nuclear weapons and when he failed to have any impact from that direction he engineered his own expulsion from the secret nuclear world, partly as self-punishment and partly so he would be an outsider again, a counter-culture sort of figure dabbling in left-wing causes, as he had been before the war. That, again, is part of what Nolan was trying to do, to show that Oppenheimer was the same man when he was a young physics star and leftist, when he was the magisterial figure making the bomb, when he was thrown out of that world and became a lecturer supporting disarmament.
It may not be true, but it is plausible, especially for the Oppenheimer that Nolan and Murphy have given us. I has been a long time since I felt blessed to have seen a film, but Oppenheimer gave me that feeling.
I'm struck by the difference between your report on the film, which I confess I haven't seen, and the take on Oppenheimer's fall that I got from the quite good docudrama, The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer. There the idea seemed to be that Oppie was a good immigrant climber who gave his all to the achievement system (and, you could say, became one of the 0.1%) and was then rejected by it. The film nods to security paranoia and Cold War hysteria, but presents the main reasons for his fall as the very personal hostility of Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller, mainly because of remembered slights (both of them would obviously figure prominently in any telling of the fall, regardless of the take it took).
ReplyDelete"Trials" downplays Tatlock, and Oppenheimer's sex life generally. After the fall, Oppenheimer is depicted as never the same again, indeed broken-hearted as if rejected by the love of his life, which in this version was something like his career, or maybe, as he once put it, "physics and desert country."
@David-
ReplyDeleteWhat you describe is what I was raised believing. Nolan's take comes from (I looked this up) "American Prometheus" by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, which is on my list of things to read now. As I said in my review, it may not be true.
But I think that I had already encountered the view that what "broke" Oppenheimer was not being driven out of power by Strauss but ever growing guilt over making the bomb; the film sets up the hearings as a sort of self-flagellation that everyone else told him to avoid by just resignging.