Oppenheimer

#6 in my ranking of Christopher Nolan’s films.

#36 in my ranking of the Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

There’s something about how Christopher Nolan approaches making films that makes them seem incredibly ambitious. A biopic (honestly, my least favorite genre) that jumps back and forth in time between as many as four different timelines that includes the Trinity test and is mostly just people talking in a couple of rooms ends up feeling thoroughly cinematic. His approach to making films is heavily reliant on editing to feed his time-jumping sensibilities, all while he provides a very tactile physical reality for everything that plays out. It’s also interesting because these things tend to try and distill complex characters into essentially soundbites, but Nolan completely embraces the contradictions of the man at the center of it, providing few easy answers (those tend to be my niggling issues with the film).

The film moves back and forth mainly using two events as the springboards, the first is the hearing for the renewal of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) Q clearance in 1954 and the second being the committee hearing in the Senate for the approval of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) to Eisenhower’s cabinet in 1959. The conflict between the two men is multifaceted and, despite some characters insisting that it’s purely from personal pique on the part of Strauss, involves a lot of moving pieces that Nolan is completely unafraid of digging into the details. They range from Strauss’s insistence that Oppenheimer turned Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) against him to Oppenheimer openly humiliating Strauss at a committee hearing regarding radioisotopes to Oppenheimer’s automatic insistence at all times to try and influence policy leading to the sharing of nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

That last one is the nucleus of most of the interpersonal interactions we watch in the flashbacks over Oppenheimer’s life from his college days through his early university postings to his recruitment to lead the Manhattan Project by General Groves (Matt Damon). At all times, Oppenheimer is flirting with communism, like trying to help the lab workers unionize at Berkeley, much to the chagrin of his coworker Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) or attending communist gatherings with his brother Frank (Dylan Arnold) where he meets Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) with whom he has an affair. He’s constantly surrounded himself with communists, toyed with the ideology, never officially joined the party, and is happy to trust any physicist as a scientist first and foremost, even Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham) who ended up being an actual Soviet spy on the Project.

It’s kind of funny that the dramatic core of the film is the secret that Strass, embittered personally and frustrated with Oppenheimer for other reasons as well, secretly handpicked Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) to lead the inquiry into Oppenheimer’s Q clearance, essentially turning it into a trial without evidentiary procedures. He also leaked the American Energy Commission’s file to William Borden (David Dastmalchian) who wrote up new conclusions based on existing confidential evidence, sent it to J. Edgar Hoover, and ignited the whole need for a hearing on his Q clearance in the first place. It’s all so inside baseball and behind closed doors, and the manic pace that Nolan sets the entire film along with his penchant for time jumping through editing makes it all really compelling.

I’ve seen a bunch of criticism that says that the film flags after the Trinity test, and I have to disagree. I found the presentation of the culminations of the two hearings to be riveting. I also really appreciated that the film really does embrace this portrait of Oppenheimer as a complex man, that maybe some of the criticism against him was perhaps valid, especially his blindness to the politics of his fellow travelers on the left and their loyalties to an alternate mode of governance than American republicanism.

Also, the middle hour or so dedicated to the Trinity test, the building of the bomb, the testing of different aspects, all while the focus never really flags from the potential conflicts at the heart of Oppenheimer’s vision of the world, is great. It’s this steady build, helped in no small part by the nearly operatic score from Ludwig Goransson, towards a specific goal, given great flavor by building up the near zero possibility that the detonation of an atomic bomb could ignite the atmosphere and destroy the whole world. Nolan is a showman, and he plays that up great. It’s tense, intricately assembled, and really well executed.

This is a huge film with the canvas being a single man. I think it approaches the portrait of him without resorting to easy answers (though Strauss ends up too easy a villain, I think, my only major complaint of the film) while dramatizing events that presented more traditionally might not have been nearly as compelling. Acting is very good all around with the two leads (Murphy and Downey Jr.) dedicating everything to portraying their characters. The supporting cast all the way down is equally good as well.

I love Nolan’s ambition. He’s got this expansive view of how much he can tell in the cinematic form, propulsively moving the story forward at all times, making 3 hours feel like 2, all while embracing complexity in multiple forms. I don’t think this is his best film or the top tier of them all, but it’s probably the most ambitious and ambiguous. That’s something to admire.

Rating: 3.5/4