The road to the the apocalypse is paved with good science in Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer'
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn't exist.
Chances are you know about Barbenheimer, which will see two very different movies go head-to-head. It’s one of those marketing strategies that likely make history along with the films which are being pitted against each other, and it’s also based in a whole lot of truth. “Barbie” is saturated in pinks and femininity, while “Oppenheimer” is…Nolan.
It’s best not to ask Christopher Nolan to go against his nature, which includes removing his gaze from whatever tortured male protagonist grabs his attention. Or to be anything but self-serious. It’s not that Nolan can’t be funny, since “Oppenheimer” has plenty of very intentional dry humor that does indeed hit the mark. But if you’re not already a fan, chances are there will be little unironic enjoyment in a film that’s steeped in nostalgia for a simpler time, one in which our self-destruction was in the realm of the cold calculation of scientific control, rather than a planet driven to madness by sheer stupidity and carelessness.
Yes, “Oppenheimer” is a throwback in modern dressing, a Great Man biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played in all kinds of unsettling ways by Cillian Murphy), the complicated, enigmatic man who was a driving force of the Manhattan Project and could genuinely claim to be the father of the atomic bomb. And chances are my nature as something of an absurdist makes me an unlikely audience to begin with.
A film that kicks off with a brief nod to Prometheus, who was punished for giving mankind the gift of fire, could only be absurd to someone of my sensibilities, since this hardly seems like an apt comparison to make for a man who bears at least partial responsibility for killing off a sizable portion of humanity. Yet Nolan, who is clearly priding himself for bestowing the gift of complexity to his protagonist, refuses to extend that same generosity to many of the other characters, both friendly and not, who populate the film.
Universal Pictures
Part of that is the laser focus on his man throughout the three hour runtime, but he also falls prey to the classic conundrum of a skilled artist who suffers from the self-imposed blinders of identifying far too much with his protagonist. In that sense, Nolan’s true colleague in art may be Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose god complex is less obvious, but has also devoted a fair amount of drama to the aftermath of a violent act of creation.
Whether “Oppenheimer” will achieve the popular heights of “Hamilton” is yet to be determined, but there’s a boldness in how a great and terribly horrific beauty can be found even in the first nuclear explosion. There is awe and silence that was shared by the utter quiet in the screening I attended, where the power to engage in large-scale destruction was put in mankind’s hands, and the power that was only theoretical became real in the mushroom cloud that has since become a lasting presence in the life, imagination, and balance of power in the world.
Everything else would likely be small by comparison, but the lack of depth to pretty much anything not nuclear-related, including Oppenheimer’s subsequent persecution, is appalling, especially when it’s dismissed as punishing a man for his strong but unpopular opinions. It makes sense when applied to the Communist hysteria of the ‘50s, but it demands its own gray areas for reasons that lay beyond audience discomfort in the post-truth era.
Universal Pictures
If anyone unwittingly embodies the movie’s failings, it’s Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, the main mistress of the womanizing Oppenheimer, and whose work in psychiatry is dismissed in favor of numerous topless scenes and emphasizing her so-called volatility. Chances are many a woman will now have cringeworthy stories of male partners with aspirations to intellectualism requesting they hold a highly literary tome across their bare breasts for the purposes of foreplay, even if it likely won’t be in Sanskrit.
The most unintentional humor may come from the fact that men like this couldn’t perceive the logical ends that their work would be taken to. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” author Anita Loos certainly took this approach to Einstein (Tom Conti), whose role in “Oppenheimer” extends far beyond that of a cameo: “When, for instance, Albert Einstein evolved his world-shaking Theory and then admonished fellow scientists not to use it for the elimination of the species, it seemed to me the same joke as when a certain character in ‘Little Women’ told a group of children not to stuff beans up their noses; with the consequence they could not wait to find some beans and stuff them up their noses.”
Amen, sister.
Grade: C+
