Of course Christopher Nolan would want to make a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer. His cinema exists—and often excels—at the intersection between mastery and masochism; his most memorable characters are men whose attempts to devise foolproof mechanisms tragically boomerang back on them. Ever since the perfectly executed existential detective story of Memento—still his most crystalline study of what it means to be a prisoner of one’s own device—Nolan has been steadily increasing the scale of his self-destructive fables, whether yoking his anxieties to sturdy genre structures (as in The Prestige, Inception, and Tenet) or superhero tropes (the Batman films), with one Spielbergian detour into stolid combat docudrama. But even Dunkirk’s ticking-clock suspense tactics were ultimately just a stainless-steel container for its maker’s usual thematic preoccupations—namely, the ethics and efficacy of integrity in a world built on contingency. To paraphrase Michael Caine in The Dark Knight: How do you try to save the world when there are those who would simply watch it burn?
The nightmare tableaux of a world in flames is J. Robert Oppenheimer’s legacy; the Pulitzer Prize–winning book that served as the basis for Nolan’s script is called American Prometheus, invoking the ancient Greek fable of the trickster who stole Zeus’s thunder and used it to hotwire human civilization, only to be caught and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in agony. It’s easy enough to see how this story of hubris and torment applies to Oppenheimer, whose name-brand notoriety as the father of the atomic bomb made him one of the most ambiguous and reviled figures of his era: a prophet of apocalypse who put the fear of God (or something even bigger) into his countrymen as well as their enemies, and a martyr-slash-scapegoat for an international scientific community reckoning with the blood on their hands. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Nolan—who is not not pretentious, starting with his estimation of his own work—said it’s “easy to make the case for Oppenheimer as the most important person who ever lived,” a description that neatly contextualizes the mythic striving of the movie made in his name. In addition to the requisite Olympian allegory, Oppenheimer piles on Judeo-Christian metaphor when it dramatizes the infamous—and quite bizarre—episode wherein its protagonist secretly injected liquid cyanide into an apple proffered to his overbearing tutor at Cambridge. Not just an American Prometheus, Oppenheimer is like Adam, Eve, and the snake rolled into one; the text is so rich with subtext that not even the ridiculous presence of Kenneth Branagh, flashing a hearty Danish accent as the famed physicist Niels Bohr, can ruin it.
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The all-star nature of Oppenheimer, which features dozens of famous or familiar actors orbiting Cillian Murphy in the title role, is part and parcel of Nolan’s fetish for scale, and what’s good and bad about the film comes out of the director’s need to stretch and swell his material into epic shape—to live up to the declaration of the U.S. Army general (Matt Damon) who bellows that “[this] is the most important thing that’s ever happened in the history of the world!” Structurally, the film is as fussily intricate as anything Nolan has ever devised, which is saying something; alongside the dream logic of Inception and the temporal-pincer shtick of Tenet we can now add a rigorously atomized, color-coded form of cross-cutting that brushes past Aaron Sorkin and Oliver Stone en route to something like the dreamy, synaptic omniscience of Alan Moore’s Watchmen comic—specifically the section following the tragic, Oppenheimer-inspired Doctor Manhattan, whose ability to occupy multiple timelines simultaneously has left him psychologically and emotionally fragmented.
Working with the superlative editor Jennifer Lame—who, in addition to stitching together Tenet, engineered the jump scares in Ari Aster’s horror movies and gave Judas and the Black Messiah its hum—Nolan employs a double-helix structure, interlacing his subject’s student-age discoveries of quantum mechanics and socialist politics in the 1930s with his ultimate expulsion from America’s national-security community two decades later via an unpublicized government hearing engineered as an act of character assassination. In between, he rubs elbows and (chipped) shoulders with the leading lights of his field, a few of whom already suspect they’re destined to become footnotes in his story. Somewhere in between we get an extended look at the origins and handiwork of the Manhattan Project, including the so-called Trinity test in the New Mexico desert that moved its shaken architect to liken himself to the angel of death. It’s as if Nolan had set himself a very particular challenge: to include all of the social, historical, and celebrity iconography that would make people want to watch a movie about Oppenheimer—including his friendship with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) and dressing-down by Harry Truman (Gary Oldman), who derided him as a “crybaby”—but in the most discombobulating configuration possible, a complexity which serves in turn as proof of Nolan’s idiosyncratic approach to authorship.
Without getting too pithy about the possibility that Oppenheimer’s tale of a preternaturally gifted savant crumbling under the weight of his own genius—and the demands of managing an expensively subsidized project—is autobiographical, Nolan deserves credit for being one of the few Hollywood filmmakers with blank-check resources who’s learned to stop worrying about whether or not he’s making a (commercial) bomb. Say what you will about his need for A-list gigantism on every level, but at least he’s willing to risk $100 million on a series of alienation effects. For instance: It’s hard to imagine another American movie of this size spending this much time talking about—and through—the ins and outs of Communist organizing (which really only got a drive-by in Mank), or contemplating the aesthetics or ideology of modernist art. Hannah Gadsby would surely find the sequence where Murphy gazes at a blue Picasso canvas Pablo-matic, even as it implies the possible links between experimental aesthetics and lethal innovation. In the scenes set in and around the corridors of American political power, Nolan expects—or demands—that his audience pick up on allusions rather than spoon-feeding them (the one exception being a hilariously heavy-handed reference to JFK that belongs in a Walk Hard–style parody).
There’s also something to be said for Nolan’s reluctance to make his characters particularly likable, starting with Oppenheimer himself, whom Murphy plays as a man who exists at a double remove, separated from all but a few of his brightest colleagues by his singular intellect and then again from himself by his paralysis about his life’s work and its meaning. Typically, Nolan’s movies work best when they get inside their heroes’ protean contradictions—like Hugh Jackman’s death-wish showmanship in The Prestige—and at first Murphy captures the excitement that goes with living and working inside a hermetic yet limitless world of ideas. Careening from lecture to lecture, measuring himself against scientists working halfway around the world, he has a fanatical gregariousness that’s contagious, and probably the smartest aspect of Nolan’s script is how it conveys the excitement of impossibly complex scientific breakthroughs while sprinkling in retrospective shivers of dread about their eventual application.
As Oppenheimer barrels on, Murphy begins hollowing himself out, starting with those gelignite eyes, which go dead around the same time he hears the radio reports from Hiroshima about a city vaporized on the spot. As a show of technique—of physical and behavioral control—Murphy’s work is impeccable, and yet it results in a performance that’s ultimately a bit too studied or opaque for its own good. Working in good faith and at the behest of a director who almost always gets what he’s looking for from actors, Murphy buries Oppenheimer’s angst so deeply that he becomes a cipher, forcing the dialogue to overcompensate.
At the other end of the tonal spectrum—and somewhere in the upper reaches of his own body of work—Robert Downey Jr. makes for a superbly Shakespearean villain as the American businessman, philanthropist, and would-be federal power broker Lewis Strauss, who sparred with Oppenheimer during his appointment as the commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission. Leaving aside the very real wit of casting Tony Stark as an architect of the real-world military-industrial complex, Downey makes his comeback count by acting slightly outside his quippy comfort zone: his Strauss—who, in, accordance with the carefully blueprinted schematism of Nolan’s script, has his contentious Senate confirmation hearings intercut with Oppenheimer’s own kangaroo-court humiliation—isn’t so much quick-witted as reptilian, resulting in a strike with a very precise (but still deadly) blast radius. It’s not a spoiler to say that Oppenheimer has been designed as a kind of fake-out, with the Trinity test deployed near the end of the second hour as a false—yet still chillingly and perversely “satisfying”—climax before committing to full-on chamber drama in the homestretch. On one level, it’s a daring move, deemphasizing spectacle to focus instead on ideology and fallout; on another, it’s risky, presuming as it does that it’s still possible to parse or care about the fractious interpersonal dynamics of white-collar government employees after being assaulted by IMAX-sized presentations of billowing mushroom clouds and spiraling columns of fire.
“It’s kind of a horror movie,” Nolan told Wired magazine, sounding a bit like the old-school shlockmeister William Castle (who installed buzzers in theater seats) when he talked about the possibility of making audience members viscerally ill during the detonation sequence. Fear is subjective, and everybody’s trigger point is different, but while suspense, dread, and revelation are all in Nolan’s wheelhouse, horror—the kind mastered in different ways by directors from John Carpenter to Claire Denis to Kiyoshi Kurosawa—is not. Great horror is uncanny, irrepressible, inexplicable, and Nolan isn’t adept at conjuring images that lodge in the unconscious. Even when he was literally making a movie about dreams, his mise-en-scene remained chastely geometric and orderly, more M.C. Escher than Hieronymus Bosch. Even when he reaches for literal horror movie effects in Oppenheimer, the effect is weirdly feeble: neither subtle enough for genuine artistry nor scary enough for cheap sensationalism. (He’s got nothing on James Cameron’s end-of-the-world vision in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.) The shimmering interstitials meant to signify Oppenheimer’s fluctuating brain waves recall—but never equal—the abstract interstitials of The Tree of Life; when, in the aftermath of the Trinity test, soldiers box up their new weapon of mass destruction in order to send it to the Pacific theater, the staging recalls the coda of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but lacks its pulpy friction.
If it seems unfair to criticize Nolan for the things he’s not—poetic, spontaneous, good-humored—let it be said that some of his trademarks are also getting tiring. Exhibit A: For a guy whose famously elaborate and self-indulgent movies are produced by his wife, he’s weirdly determined to become the auteur equivalent of Henry VIII, ritually sacrificing spouses on the altar of alpha-male character development. As Oppenheimer’s doomed love interest, whom he met during his California campus dalliance with radical politics, Florence Pugh gets to be sultry and funny for about 30 seconds before stripping down and straddling Murphy in the most portentous prestige-movie sex scene since Munich (suffice it to say that the Bhagavad Gita is involved). As for Emily Blunt, who plays his wife, Kitty, she’s there mostly to bemoan things, whether it’s her husband’s absence in the domestic arena or his shabby treatment in the aftermath of World War II. It’s a glum, thankless part, and way less compelling than Blunt’s press-tour stories about the methodical Murphy subsisting on a single almond a day to cinch his character’s emaciated presence.
Ultimately, Oppenheimer casts its lot with its star’s pale, living-dead presence: Even as Nolan ramps up the editing rhythm in the final act—tightening the visual and dramatic parallels between the timelines until they seem to overlap—the emphasis is on Murphy’s slumped, angular passivity. Why, wonders Kitty, won’t her husband stand up for himself when his transgressions—real and exaggerated—are being read into the record for all time? “Isn’t somebody going to tell the truth?” she wonders. And while Nolan takes pains to point out that Oppenheimer’s persecution was technically separate from Joseph McCarthy’s contemporaneous Communist witch-hunting expeditions, it’s clear that his film is commenting more generally on the theatrics of the Cold War, and the climate of paranoia that makes pariahs out of anybody who refuses an absolutist worldview. Whether or not Nolan sees his accomplished, thoughtful, and strangely underwhelming biopic as some larger act of truth-telling is up for speculation, but as the final passages make clear, it’s not up to him to grant absolution. Instead, Oppenheimer ends on the troubling idea that some things transcend condemnation or forgiveness—they simply become a fact of life, and not just for their creator. It doesn’t matter whether Oppenheimer wanted to watch the world burn or to prevent that immolation from happening; he started the fire, and he had to live with that. So do we.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
