Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. He will be contributing a series of "critic's notes" to the Scarecrow blog—a chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connecting them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
In the three-hour rush of Oppenheimer, writer-director Christopher Nolan takes time to include an early scene of the title character gazing at a Picasso. The painting (Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms, 1937) deconstructs reality and reassembles it in a fresh way, forcing us to think anew about its subject, perhaps confronting us with an assertion that the old ways of seeing are not enough anymore. Or, Picasso echoes quantum physics by breaking the image apart and exposing it as a collection of pieces. The nucleus no longer holds.
We don't know what is going on in the head of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as he gazes; the film wants us to understand that JRO responds to the fragmentation of early 20th century art, citing also The Waste Land and Stravinsky. Maybe he has the wistful yearning of a scientist who wishes he were an artist. I suppose it's too easy to pin this moment as autobiographical, but after all Nolan is a highly cerebral director of films that deconstruct cinema in clinical ways: a noir told backward, a World War II story that evolves in parallel but inexact lines, a story of manufactured dreams built like a nesting doll. Excited young cineastes like to call Nolan this generation's Stanley Kubrick, but he's really David Lean turned inside out, a master of spectacle, one who can't resist disassembling the pieces of the spectacle and pondering their individual parts. (And like Lean, the observations at the heart of the spectacle tend to be of the mid-brow variety.)
The New Yorker's Richard Brody called Oppenheimer "a History Channel movie," a puzzling description of a relentlessly experimental project.* Maybe Brody was thinking of the film's tendency to put its cinematic zest in service of some incorrigibly cornball moments ("What do we call the first atomic test?" "Let us call it … Trinity," or words to that portentous effect). Otherwise, Oppenheimer is shaped as an experience, an onslaught of sound and image and ideas, arranged musically. Although it has one very loud bomb going off halfway through, most of it consists of people talking in rooms, yet Nolan presents the film as a roller coaster ride, throbbing with Ludwig Göransson's score—which, with Nolan's usual cavalier attitude toward dialogue comprehension, thoroughly fuzzes what people are saying at various points—and darting in and out of color.
Do we learn much about J. Robert Oppenheimer? Not really, not biographically, not spiritually. This is not the fault of Cillian Murphy, whose haunted eyes beneath the deftly-deployed hat were made for this kind of existentially conflicted role, although—and this is sheer historical prejudice on my part—I could never get used to seeing Oppenheimer as a short man; the real Oppenheimer's lanky tallness had to have been part of his rather lofty, dreamy personality. Oppenheimer is not a character study but a political film, a look at the back-and-forth of government process, from the building of the bomb to the security-clearance hearing that Oppenheimer had to endure in the 1950s when his leftist sentiments made him suspect during the Red-baiting era.
In its structurally bizarre final hour, which crosscuts between Oppenheimer's security investigation and a later cabinet-appointment hearing for Oppie nemesis Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), Nolan gives us the American nightmare and a more upbeat example of justice being served, however obscure Strauss might now be as a historical figure. On the latter point, Nolan is surely catching the zeitgeist feeling/fantasy that something, at long last, might happen to the 45th U.S. president, something like accountability. I don't doubt that the energetic whoosh with which Nolan puts all this across is genuine excitement on his part about making these events come to cinematic life, although they are also more than a little exhausting.
Oppenheimer might be less taxing if its points weren't so exactly and precisely worked out. With Nolan, things are on the nose, with only occasional spots of mystery and uncertainty (like the brief, dangerous intensity of Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer's sometime girlfriend, or the suggestion from Niels Bohr [Kenneth Branagh] that Oppie should metaphorically "hear the music" rather than just read notation.) Even the film's excursions into expressionism, like a triumphal post-Hiroshima talk Oppenheimer gives to his Manhattan Project colleagues—where his can-do words contrast with visions of melting faces and nightmare sounds—are so carefully calculated that they have the exact meaning Nolan wants them to have, and nothing else. Nolan's style tends to reduce things to a simple idea, no matter how complicated his time-arrangements or aspect ratios are.
Being able to articulate exact meanings isn't a negligible talent, and so the film is often engaging. The room where the security hearing takes place is one of Nolan's best conceptions, a weirdly cramped, rectangular, featureless chamber where the deck is stacked against the onetime American hero. Like the climactic scene in Barbie between doll and inventor (see, I found a way to connect the two films), the space is a pale sort of void, a purgatory. Here Oppenheimer will be grilled (mostly by an Atomic Energy Commission counsel, played by Jason Clarke) and defended (Macon Blair—such a human presence—is his attorney), his wife (Emily Blunt) will hear him talk about infidelities, and his wary military partner Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) will shun him as Oppie sits off to the side, disappearing in space. The room is like one of those places in your dreams where the dimensions are wrong, a recurring location of threat and confinement.
There is so much on the table in Oppenheimer that Nolan's habit of settling for neat conclusions is especially disappointing. It is a noble try, an interesting experience, and an absolutely fascinating example of the director as superstar (a movie about a mid-century scientist had an $80 million opening weekend?!?). As to the post-opening-weekend comments that the film glosses over the effects of the bombing of Japan in favor of white man angst: It's tempting to say that those complaints are from people who didn't see the movie, except that in this era you can actually see the movie and still bend it to your purpose. No, there is no documentary footage of Hiroshima. And yet, Oppenheimer is deliberate about conjuring horror. During that aforementioned Oppie "victory" speech, there's a single tortured scream that cracks out of the audio mix, a hallucination that justifies Nolan's complicated sound design. It sears your brain. I said these three hours are exhausting, partly because they are so crammed with things, but ultimately there is blunt power in those things: equations, hats, screams.
*Actually I just read Brody's piece, which is thoughtful and not far from my own estimation of the picture—but still, the phrase is misleading.
August 25, 2023
Robert Horton is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
