Review: Oppenheimer

Director:  Christopher Nolan

Stars:  Cillian Murphy, Benny Safdie, Robert Downey, Jr.

“Murder your darlings” said Arthur Quiller-Couch so famously of the creative process, referring to how harsh one must be with a precious creation. Unsentimental. Unflinching. Without pride. But all those who create imagine vividly, and it is sometimes hard not to toy with the idea of one’s darlings taking flight. Capturing others’ imaginations as they have your own. But what if one’s darlings aren’t darlings? What if they’re monsters? Abominations?

They can feel like abominations, too, during the making, and one senses that Christopher Nolan understands this keenly. His giant biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer shows us the scientist – the proto destroyer of worlds – orchestrating his work like a director of a film, complete with a set; a hastily constructed town not a million miles, one imagines, from the fairy tale Asteroid City. Like Wes Anderson’s cutesy latest, Oppenheimer is about the physical toil and mental anguish of bringing a vision to bare, and of being held accountable for its existence.

For most of us the things we create will be forgotten, but for the few – the extraordinary – longevity leaves a cultural footprint. For the truly exceptional, cultural change. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a biopic of the man, fitting neatly and conservatively into that category, but it is also about a literal change in the nature of the world. The man who moved the Earth? Yes, in the sense that Oppenheimer ushered in a new era. A new zeitgeist in the most genuine sense. Few people in history have had such a demonstrable effect.

And yet the film is also so clearly about Nolan. About making movies. About looking through the lens and being blinded by what can be seen.

Nolan stalwart Cillian Murphy takes centre stage as the American theoretical physicist, corralled into the Manhattan Project by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) after having made a name for himself among the living giants of his field. As is de rigueur for Nolan, none of this is played in a standard chronological format. Rather Nolan dances back and forth along a timeline, with the post-war McCarthyistic character assassination of Oppenheimer played out in crisp monochrome. Everything before the bomb is painted in rich living colour, yielding an appreciable earthiness akin to P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (a film with which it shares a handful of motifs). In a manner similar to the aforementioned Wes Anderson, Nolan peppers his telling with an absurd and occasionally distracting roster of famous faces, some from his established stable (Branagh, Oldman) but mostly fresh additions (Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie and many, many more).

Nolan sticks to his trademark flightiness. Rare or exceptional is a scene that lasts longer than 30 seconds. Oppenheimer is as much a dizzying tapestry of cuts across time as prior successes such as The Prestige (the film of his that this one most resembles, not least in its preoccupation with strange and terrible new technologies). Working from an historical text, it can often feel as though Oppenheimer is restlessly, relentlessly cliff-noting. But then, the man did create an awful lot of history.

It’s almost a joke how strangely sexless the cinematic world of Nolan has been. Oppenheimer changes all that, but in a manner that makes you wish he hadn’t dared challenge his naysayers. Hilariously, these scenes still don’t last longer than 30 seconds, but in the case of the second particularly you may pray that it had been excised altogether. The nervous laughter and seat shifting in the screening I attended was palpable. Still, it stands as about the weirdest Nolan has ever been, and after Tenet that’s at least faint praise. Poor Florence Pugh, though.

While largely pacy in its opening act and buoyed by a welcome return from Josh Hartnett (channelling major Kyle Chandler vibes), it is Groves’ entry and the run-up to the Trinity test that truly focuses the film and drives it forward. Still, it occurs in fits and starts. When Oppenheimer runs the clock down to test day it carries the momentum of a mission movie. When it strays from this into leaks, paranoia, conspiracies and espionage, the machine stutters. It comes to feel like a mess and a mire in the midsection.

Six years ago David Lynch reconfigured perceptions of television with his staging of the White Sands atomic test in Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, creating a dark Malickian nightmare odyssey out of that infernal moment in history. Ever since announcing Oppenheimer there’s been speculation/apprehension/excitement over how Nolan might top Lynch’s small screen expression of the birth of a new evil. In a sense, he doesn’t even try. At it’s bombastic fulcrum, Oppenheimer is surprisingly anti-spectacle. Yet here, again, Nolan uses this historical event to reflect on the dawn of cinema itself. Picture first. Then – overwhelmingly – sound. Time and again Oppenheimer feels like a method of musing on an entirely different world-changing industry of the 20th century.

The final hour is the thorniest, hardest and arguably best, as Oppenheimer’s journey from physicist to politician to celebrity completes itself. For much of the ‘mission’ part of the movie, morality was sidelined in favour of necessity. In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the weight of the world lands on his shoulders. All that prior posturing and self-importance is humbled by his very real complicity in an astronomical death toll. Nolan presents some of the most vivid work of his career in a sequence in which this realisation overwhelms Oppie and the film itself. A psychological bomb going off. It feels Spielbergian. Later attempts to repeat this success, however, yield more dubious results.

While Murphy is the rudder that steers the ship, this third act allows some of his disparate cohorts to shine. Robert Downey, Jr. is particularly slithery as surprise nemesis Lewis Strauss, out to ruin Oppenheimer for his own safety (of course). It is welcoming to see Downey, Jr. taking on such substantive work again and evidently relishing it. Elsewhere, though he chews through several different accents, Benny Safdie throws in another memorable supporting turn as fellow physicist Edward Teller.  And while the women are as marginalised as one would expect from Nolan, Emily Blunt sashays in at the finish line with a scene that almost steals the entire picture.

While Oppenheimer operates through peaks and troughs, it’s a fascinating and thought-provoking work, and easily Nolan’s most eminently interesting film in years. There’s a lot of it, and while some of his handling of the many, many conversations recorded here is a little stilted, it’s the meatier questions that linger. Oppenheimer is a weighty film that dares consider our collective megalomaniacal death wish, dualities of intention, the price and folly of innovation and much more besides. Cushioned by a far dreamier score than usual for this director – courtesy of Ludwig Göransson – the net result is a roiling, intellectually provocative and occasionally stuffy behemoth in the modern blockbuster landscape.