Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan’s ambition turns to self-indulgence with his talky, overlong biopic of the father of the atom bomb.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was known as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, so it stands to reason that he would make a compelling protagonist. Christopher Nolan, the most cerebral of mainstream filmmakers, has never made a biographical film before and has drawn on his greatest powers for this historical epic. And, sure enough, it starts brilliantly. Opening with a quote of how Prometheus stole fire from the gods and paid dearly for it, the film snakes its way around Oppenheimer’s early days as a cack-handed student at Cambridge and on to a hearing in 1954 set up to discredit him. These were exciting times in theoretical physics and the titans of science orbited Oppenheimer’s world – figures like Niels Bohr, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi and even Albert Einstein (a marvellous Tom Conti). The life as lived by Oppenheimer is told in colour, while the dark unravelling of his reputation by the reptilian Lewis Strauss (an outstanding Robert Downey Jr) is relayed in monochrome. As ever, Nolan splits his narrative through the prisms of time, while the prosthetics department does wonders with the ageing of Cillian Murphy as ‘Oppie’.
As to be expected with a Christopher Nolan production, everybody is at the top of their game and Oppenheimer is a joy to behold purely for its cinematic mastery. But it is also 180 minutes long and after the first hour, it begins to flag. What is Oppenheimer famous for? For being the architect of the nuclear bomb and for facilitating the conflagrations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When a conveyor belt of middle-aged, overweight white men in various offices and boardrooms take over the third act, the movie feels as if it should have ended way earlier.
The urgent editing of Jennifer Lame and the propulsive music of Ludwig Göransson do their level best to keep the action moving, but by the climax, Göransson’s contribution (drowning out the dialogue) is just hysterical. It also seems strange that during the construction of the Los Alamos base in New Mexico (Nolan built the whole town from scratch) the real reason for its function feels so distant. The occasional newspaper headline doesn’t cut it. As the US Army scrambles to deploy a viable weapon to stop the Germans and the Japanese in their tracks, the war elsewhere is less than an unthreatening shadow. Nolan’s screenplay concerns itself more with the interior politics of the Manhattan Project, albeit providing Matt Damon as the director of the project, Leslie Groves, with some choice dialogue. Film historians may recall that Paul Newman previously played Groves in Roland Joffé’s Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), which covered the same ground.
Before Oppenheimer begins to resemble the monochromatic jigsaw framework of Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), the first hour encapsulates the brilliance of Nolan as director and scenarist. Oppenheimer was truly a man apart, learning Dutch in six weeks to deliver a lecture on quantum physics in Leiden. Another scene sees him reading directly from the Sanskrit the words, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” And as he does so, he is mounted by his mistress Jean Tatlock (a persuasive Florence Pugh), immediately blending the elemental concepts of death, sex and life. Nolan may live to regret the unwieldy structure of his first biopic, not grasping that a whole life cannot be satisfactorily compressed into one movie. Like Nolan, J. Robert Oppenheimer was exceptional, but a single chapter in his life would have been more than enough to spotlight his genius.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke, Dylan Arnold, Tom Conti, Gustaf Skarsgård, David Krumholtz, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Michael Angarano, Jack Quaid, Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Danny Deferrari, Alden Ehrenreich, Jefferson Hall, James D'Arcy, Tony Goldwyn, Devon Bostick, Alex Wolff, Scott Grimes, Matthias Schweighöfer, Louise Lombard, Gary Oldman, James Remar, Gregory Jbara, James Urbaniak.
Dir Christopher Nolan, Pro Emma Thomas, Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan, Screenplay Christopher Nolan, from the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Ph Hoyte van Hoytema, Pro Des Ruth De Jong, Ed Jennifer Lame, Music Ludwig Göransson, Costumes Ellen Mirojnick, Sound Richard King and Randy Torres, Dialect coaches William Conacher and Elizabeth Himelstein.
Syncopy Inc./Atlas Entertainment-Universal Pictures.
180 mins. USA/UK. 2023. UK and US Rel: 21 July 2023. Cert. 15.
