The loudest detonation, in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, doesn’t occur in the arid Los Alamos desert where the atomic bomb was created and tested. It instead takes place on Cillian Murphy’s craggy, sunken face as he contemplates having created the thing that might just become humanity’s undoing. Oppenheimer, as has been widely hinted, isn’t the average Christopher Nolan film. Sure science is part of the method here, but for once, it isn’t the hat that Nolan characteristically pulls pseudo rabbits out of. Instead this is a talkative, meditational study of a defining period in the world’s history, headlined by the man whose ideas may have helped shaped the future. But not without disfiguring his own personal present.
Cillian Murphy plays Robert J. Oppenheimer, a troubled but maverick scientist gradually working his way up in the world of physics. From European cities where he trades niceties with the likes of Heisenberg, Oppenheimer heads west, to the place where he would eventually head The Manhattan Project.
Typical of a Nolan film, time is again moulded and shifted around to create a puzzle box of plotlines. Linearity, Nolan exemplifies, might be the biopic’s greatest weakness. He brings Dunkirk’s clever, macro approach to Oppenheimer’s life. We see him being tried by a modest jury for treason, while another timeline deals with the filings of Lewis Strauss, the man thought responsible for discrediting Oppenheimer. In the default junket, he and his band of geniuses that includes the likes of Feynman, Teller and others, builds the bomb that is eventually dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to catastrophic effect.
Murphy disappears into the historical figure, as a flawed but motivated man who can’t discern politics from science until it shows up at his doorstep dressed in the fabric of consequence. As a man who readily gives into impulse and lust, the scientist is framed as a man capable of the unimaginable but susceptible to the banal. He can build the bomb, but not foresee it for the cataclysmic act of human subjugation it eventually becomes. At least not soon enough. To an extent, his genius clouds his moral vision. “Brilliance makes up for a lot,” he says to a military man who questions his resourcefulness. Murphy is superlative in a role that would take some beating in the awards season.
He is also assisted by a terrific cast constituting some of the finest actors walking the planet. Matt Damon is brilliant as the patriotic, but loyal Leslie Groves. Emily Blunt finds just the right pitch as the scientist’s wife Kitty, who though undermined by her husband’s matter-of-fact approach to life and relationships, pushes herself to see the bigger picture. A picture that she often urges Robert to see for the country’s sake. Most impressive but maybe least surprising, however, is Robert Downey Jr’s Strauss, a complicated bureaucrat who makes diplomatic word-gurgling look and sound fascinating. It’s the usual loquacious brief, but Downey Jr brings a sense of fragile masculinity to it, as the cornerstone of not just his war against a scientist’s recently discovered humanity, but maybe every war ever.
Between genius and reckoning here, there’s a straight route that could so easily be painted in American bravado and white guilt. While much of the film, by design, has to be cast through that lens, Nolan bends the narrative, to extract a precise moment that reveals not the misery of a man’s extraordinary rise and decline, the hidden deterrents to his continued propulsion into world popularity, but the thing that his eyes for all their scientific faculty could not see. It’s a losing moment painted through a winner’s perspective. “Genius is no guarantee of wisdom,” a character in the film says, as we watch Murphy and Co., recreate a period that testifies to greatness as a source for epochal ache. It’s as much a creational myth as a scientifically proven truism.
Oppenheimer, against all odds, has some signature Nolan elements. The time jumps sustain, the drone-like music crescendos into moments of blinding beauty and Nolan’s famed IMAX cameras capture both landscapes and faces in breath-taking detail. Murphy’s face, quite literally becomes a courier for guilt and grief. It’s as much a physical performance, as it is an emotive one. Perhaps the only bone to pick with the film is its lengthy epilogue, where the Strauss v Oppenheimer battle takes prominence to the point where ideological quarrels, begin to weigh down upon a narrative with global implications. But despite its length, and the trademark tricks that refuse to leave the director’s armoury, this is a cinematic evolution that maybe Nolan was always working towards. It probably isn’t his finest film but it sure embellishes his adaptability, as maybe the only filmmaker living, who could mainstream a story that is in Oppenheimer’s words, ‘a terrible revelation of divine power’.
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