THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE.
by Jarrod Jones. Christopher Nolan isn’t the type to play fast and loose with anything he directs; even his more fantastic outings are executed with an eye for excruciating plot detail. It doesn’t matter if he’s showing us how a mind-thief pulls off a dream heist or the way a possibly insane billionaire playboy throws himself off rooftops, Nolan’s films have always been serious business, even when they’re in service to more conventional, not to mention box-office friendly, genre fare. That prickliness has made his stories more coherent for wider audiences — or less so, depending on the picture. (For instance, I still can’t parse whatever happened in Tenet.)
Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known the world over as the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a serious-minded true-life movie, the kind the Hollywood studio system used to make more enthusiastically — think of the reflective auteur-centric culture that wrought films like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, or Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. (Oh look, here comes Ridley Scott’s Napoleon with Joaquin Phoenix later this year. Maybe something’s in the water.) Interestingly enough, pairing Oppenheimer with any of those films would make a truly incredible double feature — apologies to Barbie.
I say that’s interesting, not because all those films share a similar purpose — which is to convey a historical figure’s legacy in a way that speaks to our currently fraught cultural moment — but because Oppenheimer is constructed with an epic-length clarity that encourages comparisons to those other films while also far surpassing Nolan’s prior work. Looking at all the game-day faces painted on the film’s assemblage of tremendous character actors (most of whom have worked with Nolan in the past), coupled with all the analog tricks of the trade he’s accumulated since his first outing as a director (1998’s Following), it’s difficult not to get the impression that everything the 52-year-old filmmaker has done up to now has been in service of making this.
The story follows Oppenheimer (an astonishingly hungry Cillian Murphy) from his anxiety-riddled days as a student at Cambridge to his distinguished (if controversial) ascent in the academic realm of physics, followed by his most consequential years spent on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, building the bomb meant to end World War II. Perhaps unsurprisingly, especially to students of American history and other human drama enthusiasts, the film doesn’t end with its detonation but continues into the years afterward when the US government decided it no longer had a use for Oppenheimer and considered him a liability in its unimpeded proliferation of what we now recognize as the military-industrial complex.
As this is a Christopher Nolan film, the chronology jumps around quite a bit. The conflict between Oppenheimer and former Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr. on a perpetual simmer), particularly their differing viewpoints of the time leading into the Manhattan Project and the quieter but no less destructive years following its apocalyptic successes, are shot in vivid color and stark black and white. Fittingly, these contrasting accounts are presented as Fission (color) and Fusion (b&w) — the former meant to stand apart from the other, while the latter blends the two into a more objective light. It’s said that Mr. Nolan’s film was the impetus behind the development of 70mm black and white IMAX film stock, a first for the format. The innovation pays off.
Nolan also employs tools used in his more action-oriented films. The score, by Tenet composer Ludwig Göransson, is designed to be propulsive, turning the film’s many gripping discussions (more often arguments) between Murphy’s J. Robert and Nolan’s deep bench of high-octane support players into pitched intellectual contests. (Josh Hartnett and Benny Safdie are standouts among a battalion of ringers.) In the film’s build towards its biggest set piece, a massive in-camera explosion executed to resemble the sanity-stripping mushroom cloud of Los Alamos, Oppenheimer ticks along to the soundtrack of Geiger counters and a thundering slamming of feet — or is that the sound of an impending railroading courtesy of Robert’s beloved America?
In effect, the film later takes on the shape of a political thriller, compounded by the paranoia and existential doom brought about by the Atomic age. It’s a feeling Nolan’s generation felt keenly in the 80s when the Russian/US Cold War was heading toward its final years and nuclear anxieties were a widely covered (and contentious) topic. Perhaps it’s because of his healthy fear of the bomb that Nolan isn’t interested in rendering its fallout. Nagasaki and Hiroshima are evoked through dialogue but are never visualized; he even has Oppenheimer shut his eyes when shown the bomb’s aftereffects on human casualties. His choice doesn’t diminish the appalling loss of human life but accentuates it in a way that presents the human point of no return, brought about by one of America’s most egregious and unforgivable sins.
The tackling of such potent and daunting subject matter seems to have loosened Nolan’s notoriously stiff shoulders. His approach to sex, for instance, has become less conservative; Florence Pugh (playing Jean Tatlock, a paramour whose proximity to Oppenheimer ties him disastrously to the Communist party) shares two intimate scenes with Murphy. One establishes Oppenheimer’s familiarity with the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” The other is deliberately cold, representing a personal, humiliating, and final rending of Oppenheimer’s soul. In the latter case, Nolan enjoys a few impactful dalliances with surrealism. Through a shuttering of environments and spliced-in bursts of atomic horror, he toys with our perception of the scene’s events and reveals every one of his lead’s interior agonies.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Oppenheimer may prove to be Nolan’s masterwork, a culmination of all his filmmaking ticks, byzantine story structures, and fruitful collaborations, made just as reality-beleaguered moviegoers begin once more to seek something heftier to grapple with in their entertainment. It’s also his longest film, yet through skill and sheer tyranny of will, its stout 180 minutes run at a steady, engrossing clip. It’s a monumental filmmaking achievement, operating simultaneously in complex and simple terms; while it functions as a fairly tidy three-act structure — before Los Alamos, during it, and what happened later — Nolan deploys Oppenheimer’s bomb as a clear demarcation between birth and entropy. There was life before the bomb; now, there is only doom under it.
9.5 out of 10
Oppenheimer is in wide release now.
Directed and written by Christopher Nolan.
Cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema.
Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey, Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck. Rami Malek, and Kenneth Branagh.
Produced by Emma Thomas, Charles Roven, and Christopher Nolan.
Rated R for atomic terror, some naked sexy time, and pissed-off scientist language.
More DoomRocket Reviews:
Barbie: Angst is accessorized in Greta Gerwig’s vivid and fun summer movie
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: Whoops, out of headline
To understand Far Distant, consult your emotions and don’t trust your eyes
