Director: Christopher Nolan (USA, UK). Year of Release: 2023
A lab in Cambridge University. The teacher is berating one of his students, Robert Oppenheimer, for his clumsiness and lazy behaviour in labs. When Oppenheimer is ordered to clear up his latest mess, he protests that the Niels Bohr lecture is about to start. “I forgot about that”, says the lecturer, and leads his class out towards the lecturer. “Not you though, Oppenheimer”, as the hapless student is left to continue cleaning up.
Sulking because he’ll be late to the lecture, young Robert does what anyone would do in his situation. He picks up an apple on his teacher’s desk, gets a syringe and injects the apple with potassium cyanide. In the morning, he wakes up in a panic and rushes to the lab … where he sees Niels Bohr just about to bite into the apple. As Bohr congratulates him on the question that he asked at the lecture, Oppenheimer whisks the apple out of Bohr’s hand muttering “wormhole”.
Metaphor alert! This incident retells a true story, but distorts it to highlight Oppenheimer as the man who brought us the poisoned apple of nuclear weapons. In case we have forgotten, we are in a Christopher Nolan film which uses spectacular bangs, unnecessarily disjointed time sequences and clumsy metaphors to make us feel very clever indeed. Although unlike earlier self-important Nolan films like Inception, say, Oppenheimer does have some interesting things to say.
Oppenheimer is being head hunted to lead the Manhattan Project to develop the US’s nuclear bomb, but the authorities are worried about the company he keeps. His brother and girlfriend are both considering joining the Communist Party, and although Oppenheimer never joined the party, he donated to many CP front organisations. Later we hear that Oppenheimer was donating to the Spanish Civil War until 1942, quite spectacular for a war which finished 3 years earlier.
The first hour of the film is very impressive, showing the conflict between Oppenheimer’s belief as a European Jew that Hitler must be stopped at all costs, with the knowledge of the world-threatening implications if his project were to be successful. In fact, Oppenheimer’s radicalism was never more dangerous that the liberal patriotism of the 1930s Communist Party and its fellow travellers, but this did not mean that the US ruling class was not very afraid.
As the war concludes, and McCarthyism gains steam, parts of the Establishment go after Oppenheimer. They cannot frontally attack the “father of the atom bomb” who is now a respected scientist and Time cover star, so they subtly try and chip away at his reputation. While this is happening, we move back and forward in time to show the early tests for prototype nuclear bombs (Christopher Nolan has many faults, but he is a safe pair of hands for a 3, 2, 1 BANG scene).
Oppenheimer, the film, raises various moral conflicts. Should one build an atom bomb to counter Nazism? Why bomb Japan when the war was already won? Is Oppenheimer’s scientific brilliance an excuse for his general shittiness as a human being? No answers are offered to these questions. Sometimes this is fair enough – a director shouldn’t do all our thinking for us – but way too often, the film raises a talking point and then moves on to something else before we have time to think.
Oppenheimer is essentially a film about white men in suits. Now let’s parse that description, one part at a time. Firstly, seeing as this is a film about US American academics and politicians in the mid Twentieth Century, then of course there’s a colour bias. But that’s not all the film is about. It also features the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although these acts are only seen through Oppenheimer’s eyes (quite literally, the camera focusses on him watching newsreel footage).
Later on, we see Oppenheimer addressing a patriotic rally, where people are waving US flags and loudly cheering the fact that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians have just died in the most barbaric fashion. While uttering platitudinous statements that it’s great that all these Japs died, and it’s just a shame they were too late to similarly annihilate the Germans, Oppenheimer has a crisis of confidence and envisages skin peeling from members of his audience – who are all white.
The film also drips with testosterone, featuring just about every famous actor you could name – as long as they piss standing up. The only female parts of any note are both of women who slept with Oppenheimer – his mistress Jean, who is largely filmed with her tits out and is allowed to slowly go mad and suicidal, and his wife Kitty – an alcoholic who snaps at her husband for not confronting his accusers and then crumbles when called to testify herself. Neither woman is given a personality.
And the suits? There is one exception – an Albert Einstein who is excluded / excludes himself (delete as required) from the Manhattan Project. Everyone else is a good solid well-dressed professional. This is heightened by the dual hearings between which the story regularly swaps – that of Oppenheimer trying to regain his security clearance and of right winger Lewis Strauss, a long-term adversary of Oppenheimer’s trying to gain a ministerial post.
This is how a film which is over 3 hours long, and whose subject matter is (literally) one of the most explosive events in world history, spends the bulk of its time on points of order and clever lawyers. It opposes McCarthyism and nuclear war, but it does not look to the people who marched against the atom bomb and Vietnam, but an up-and-coming senator from Massachusetts called John F Kennedy. This is very much an establishment film. A liberal film, for sure, but not by or for us.
The film is too long, but for its first half at least, it is fascinating. The problem is that, as it goes on (and on), we get more and more procedural court scenes which lost my interest. The soundtrack is also often intrusive, SHOUTING at us to make us aware that something Important is going on. Maybe some people are interested in the minutiae about the difference between the A bomb and the H bomb, but the more the film went on, the more it left me cold. But it did start well.
CinePhil 