Movie Review: 'Oppenheimer'

Oppenheimer (2023)

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Written by Christopher Nolan

Starring Robert Downey Jr, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett

Release Date July 21st, 2023

Published July 21st, 2023

Oppenheimer is the kind of epic filmmaking that we've not seen in years. It's expansive, expensive, and visionary work that encompasses American history within a singular story. The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of contradiction and controversy. Oppenheimer gave the humanity the ability to destroy itself and placed that power in the hands of egomaniacal world leaders. Then he spent his life trying to convince people to use this power responsibly. He was somewhat successful, most of us haven't been incinerated by Oppenheimer's creation. But that is cold comfort, Oppenheimer's creation still hangs like the sword of Damocles over all of our heads, even as we all do our best to ignore it.

The expansive story of J. Robert Oppenheimer exists in movie form in three separate threads. In the first thread, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) is facing a Congressional hearing over his appointment to a position in President Eisenhower's cabinet. Though a top aid to the President, played by Alden Ehrenreich, assures him that his confirmation as Commerce Secretary is a near guarantee, Strauss is concerned that his past interactions with J. Robert Oppenheimer, a former friend and subordinate, will cost him his position. As this story plays out, there were many twists and turns in the relationship between Oppenheimer and Strauss and that we only remember one of them historically says a lot.

In the second thread, we see J. Robert Oppenheimer rising through the academic ranks in the world of physics before ending up at Berkley. There, he forms a friendship and partnership with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), the man who would take Oppenheimer's theory and turn it into a reality. Both men are brilliant and one doesn't succeed without the other, even as Oppenheimer is the one who goes on to infamy as the man who founded Los Alamos and led the charge to create the bomb. Nevertheless, without Lawrence, Oppenheimer may not have been sought to lead Los Alamos, it was Lawrence who joined The Manhattan Project first.

The third thread finds Oppenheimer, known by colleagues as Oppy, though that always feels far to whimsical for a man this serious, takes charge of Los Alamos, essentially a town founded with the specific goal of uniting America's best scientists in one place in order to build the bomb. Here, Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) work as leaders and adversaries in the 2 billion dollar effort to beat the Nazis and then the Russians to the development of a weapon of mass destruction. The point of the Manhattan Project was beating the Nazis but the war in Europe is won before the bomb is built.

This leads to a number of ethical debates about whether the the bomb still needs to be built. Oppenheimer here is shown as ineffectual in trying to make the case against developing the bomb. At a certain point, he just wanted to know if it could be done and this ambition allowed him to passively be convinced that dropping the bomb in Japan was a necessary evil intended to end the war in the Pacific and show Russia the full force of the American military. Oppenheimer was of two minds, understanding the bomb as a deterrent to future wars while also worrying that developing the bomb would cause a dangerous and divisive arms race.

Simmering in the background is Oppenheimer's personal life which is divided between two women, among several he may have carried on relationships with. Oppenheimer's first love was communist author and psychiatrist, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). She tries to recruit Oppenheimer to communism but finding him noncommittal to the cause, she settles for a tumultuous affair with Oppenheimer that unfortunately collides with Oppenheimer's relationship with the woman who would become his wife and mother of his children, Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt).

These two women reveal different aspects of Oppenheimer, aspects that cut to the core of the human being behind the pragmatic scientist turned unlikely patriot. From Jean Tatlock we learn about Oppenheimer's approach to politics but also to passion and how emotion can collide with his dedication to reason and education. Through Kitty we see the conflicted Oppenheimer, the vulnerable, awkward, self-effacing man behind the confident veneer of a world famous scientist. In the performances of these three actors we see this incredibly tense and passionate attempt to get Oppenheimer to open up and confront himself and his creation and we watch Murphy do everything he can to maintain composure in the face of world altering history on a very human scale.

When the mask of composure slips the insight we get comes almost entirely from Murphy's face, the sense of the totality of what is happening all behind the eyes of the man at the center of this moment. The awesome conflicting desires between doing something that has never been done and the conflict over whether it should be done at all. The contradictions ripping at the soul of Oppenheimer as both a bold, pioneering scientist and patriot, and the man who feels every inch of the regret that comes with knowing you created something that could legitimately destroy humanity and will kill more than 200,000 people in Japan.

Murphy's performance is staggering, it's a remarkable effort. It's truly the best performance by any actor thus far in 2023. He is at the heart of an epic tale and though he has plenty of support, we will get to that, Murphy is the aching, bleeding, battered, soul of the movie. He effortlessly holds the center of the film embodying all of the conflicting moral quandaries, intellectual experiments, and the passions that come with such intense emotions. That he's not ripping the scenery to shreds with big speeches or actorly flourishes only underlines his brilliance, he doesn't do the most acting, he is doing the best acting.

The other towering performance in Oppenheimer comes from Robert Downey Jr. In some ways, Downey's Strauss is the Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart. He's a man who longs for greatness, who longs to be known and respected but is overshadowed by a man he both respects and despises. He admires Oppenheimer's mind and looks to harness it for the betterment of his own career but when the two come into seemingly minor conflict, Strauss's ego steps ahead of his judgment. Downey Jr poignantly captures a man both too arrogant to see his own flaws and a deeply insecure man desperate to prove his greatness to a mostly indifferent world, and those to whom he seeks to be a peer.

Strauss fumes throughout about how Oppenheimer poisoned the scientific world against him. This is underlined by a moment in which Strauss is blown off by none other than Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) following a brief conversation that Oppenheimer had with Einstein. In his egotism, Strauss believes Oppenheimer said something about him and this plus a pair of other slights, one very public, one entirely offhand, hit right at the heart of Strauss' inferiority complex. That's the underpinning of much of the story of Oppenheimer, two men who can see the world for what it is but cannot see much beyond themselves when it comes to their immediate presence.

That's a rather brilliant metaphor for the age of the atomic bomb and The Cold War, insecure men eager to out muscle each other in terms of world power only to blind themselves from what really matters, protecting the people they have been chosen to lead. They can see the vastness of world political power brokering but not the immediate cost of the decisions they are making and how those decisions echo through history, hidden by the shadow of that sword that still hangs over all of our heads. In trying to make the world a safer place, they made it a more skittish, insecure, and ultimately ugly and suspicious place.

Oppenheimer encompasses the whole of 20th century history without seeming to try. It lays the foundation of every major political and worldwide conflict for years to come. This moment in world history is perhaps THE Rosetta Stone that unlocks the past 70 to 100 years of world history. That Nolan seems to know this lingers in the background of what is also an ingenious movie of incredible pacing and artistry. It's a film that seamlessly shifts through history, black and white and color, periods of time, effortlessly, almost flawlessly laying out its cards and inviting you to consider how you feel about what you are seeing and what it all means.

Oppenheimer is an incredible film. It's deeply engaging, enthralling in its drama, and compelling in its wide range of meaning. It's a film about legacy that is building a legacy of its own as, arguably, the definitive examination of how the wielding of great power comes not only with great responsibility, but also greater consequences. Men in smoky rooms deciding the future of the world based on a half heard debate and a gut instinct. The ignoring of experts in favor of embracing decisiveness. These are the legacies of 20th century politics that Oppenheimer lays bare and asks you to consider as you look toward your own future and how you would like to see that future unfold.

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