Christopher Nolan (2023)

With a running time of exactly three hours, Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s longest film yet.  Except for his seventy-minute debut feature (Following (1998)), Nolan’s shortest is Dunkirk (2017), a trim 106 minutes.  In certain other respects, that film and Oppenheimer are significantly similar.  Nolan’s penchant for fancy time structures is strongly in evidence in both yet can’t dominate to the extent it does in Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014) or Tenet (2020):  because, unlike those science fiction heavyweights, they dramatise historical material of unarguable intrinsic interest, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer are relatively easy to sit through.  Even so, this new film is overlong and the narrative construction wilfully complicated – as if Nolan thought it wouldn’t be a proper work of auteurship otherwise.  I admit to being biased against his film-making but I honestly don’t think Oppenheimer is any great shakes for the most part.  It does, though, feature one outstanding sequence.

The story Nolan tells has four main strands, three of them more or less generic in screen biography.  First, there are the key stages in the progress of the protagonist’s chosen career and in their personal life.  Second, there’s build-up to the event, or network of events, for which they’re primarily remembered:  in the case of J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), that means his work during World War II as scientific director of the Manhattan Project, based at Los Alamos, New Mexico, which resulted in the development of the first nuclear weapons.  Third, there’s the fall-from-grace-or-is-it component:  a 1954 hearing, under the auspices of the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which reviewed and eventually suspended Oppenheimer’s security clearance and, in effect, ended his formal relationship with the American government.  AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) is a prime mover in instigating the hearing, which has a strong focus on Oppenheimer’s past involvement in left-wing political causes and connections with members of the US Communist Party.  The film’s fourth strand describes proceedings, five years later, of the US Senate confirmation committee that considered Dwight D Eisenhower’s nomination of Strauss as Secretary of Commerce.  Although the narrative progress within each is mostly linear, Nolan moves back and forth between these different strands throughout Oppenheimer.  Because he can:  the sequencing doesn’t yield much synergy between juxtaposed scenes.

Nolan’s screenplay, an adaptation of a 2005 biography (American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin), majors in imparting information.  It does so at the expense of dramatic energy:  few of what feel like the hundreds of sequences the film comprises last long enough to develop much life of their own.  As well as splintering the narrative, Oppenheimer alternates between colour and black-and-white – a distinction unrelated to when a sequence is happening in the overall timeframe.  Nolan has said the colour sections are ‘subjective’ and the black-and-white ‘objective’.  ‘Subjective’, according to what Nolan told Total Film, means reflecting Oppenheimer’s point of view and ‘objective’ someone else’s, chiefly Lewis Strauss’s.  This makes sense to the extent that the Senate confirmation committee scenes are monochrome and barely feature Oppenheimer.  But these are not the only scenes in monochrome – in some of which Oppenheimer is on the screen just as he is in colour sequences.

It was a relief to this viewer that the explosive flashes experienced by Oppenheimer inside his head (aka ‘occasional cutaways to evocative, surreal imagery that symbolically [express] his interior world’) were reasonably rationed.  Nolan’s use of Ludwig Göransson’s score is a different matter.  Although the music sometimes gets especially excited, it insists continuously that we’re watching something VERY IMPORTANT, which we don’t need telling.  Unless you manage to blank it out as persistent background noise, the music has the effect of blurring differences in the tone of scenes – as well as of making dialogue hard to make out.  (A complex sound design may also contribute to that.)  In the context of this particular life story, the score gives unfortunate new meaning to the word bombastic.  That said, Nolan does turn off Göransson in the climax and immediate aftermath to the film’s centrepiece and highlight – the ‘Trinity’ testing of the atomic bomb on the desert plains south of Los Alamos, in July 1945.

This extended sequence does more than showcase Nolan’s formidable logistical strengths.  It puts them at the service of a moment in history in order to convey its momentousness – and vividly illustrates how the moment was experienced by those actually present.  Trinity, as the testing of a plutonium implosion device, was the execution of a technical process yet its consequences were immense.  Nolan, his DP Hoyte van Hoytema and his editor Jennifer Lame deploy their technical skills to deliver a passage of cinema powerful enough to suggest what the event that they reconstruct came to mean.  But the film also chimes with reality more negatively.  The American nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place less than a month after the Los Alamos test, are widely seen as defining modern history in terms of before and after they happened.  Despite its spurious formal intricacy, the whole of Oppenheimer has been leading up to Trinity.  The episode’s brilliant execution seems to justify the film as a whole but it also sharpens your awareness of the defects of the before and after in Nolan’s narrative.

The description of Oppenheimer’s burgeoning scientific career – in Cambridge, continental Europe and California – is biopic boilerplate even with a few theatrical cameos on offer (like Kenneth Branagh’s impersonation of Niels Bohr).  In contrast, Oppenheimer’s affair with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) in the late 1930s and early 1940s is often bizarre.  Jean, a medical student and political activist, is introduced to Oppenheimer by his younger brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold), who, like her, is a card-carrying communist.  In her opening conversation with Robert, at a party, Florence Pugh’s Jean is sexually and intellectually fascinating:  you see why he finds her irresistible and, without further ado, they sleep together.  Afterwards, he lounges in bed while she turns to his bookshelves and takes down the Bhagavad Gita:  in other words, it’s time for ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds’.  Oppenheimer, aging and ill, quoted Krishna’s line on NBC television just a couple of years before his death in 1967, at the age of sixty-two (though he looks about ninety in the TV interview).  It’s understandable that Nolan fought shy of asking Cillian Murphy to try and inevitably fail to emulate the charge of the NBC footage but sticking the famous quote into this post-coital interlude feels tacky.  By the time of the 1954 AEC hearing, Jean Tatlock had (according to the official record, at least) committed suicide but her and Robert’s naked bodies interpose themselves on the hearing at one point:  I wasn’t clear who was imagining this although Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), seated in a corner of the room, observes her husband reproachfully.

Kitty Oppenheimer sits there for most of the hearing, which seems surprising, but at least eventually gets to make a decent contribution to proceedings:  under questioning herself, she fearlessly faces down the AEC’s special counsel, Roger Robb (Jason Clarke).  Although the couple’s domestic exchanges don’t amount to much, I liked the way that Emily Blunt seemed to fuse Kitty’s anger at her husband’s other (implied) extramarital affairs with contempt for his wilting under the political pressure he faced in response to his remorseful post-war pacifism, and which culminates in the AEC hearing.  Blunt thus brings the film a brief injection of emotional particularity usually missing from it.  Nolan has big ideas:  he wants to present Oppenheimer as a classic case of the hubristic, then tragically compromised, man of science; he means to situate the AEC review within the larger Red Scare zeitgeist.  He consistently fails, however, to spark a reaction between his abundant dialogue and the people speaking it, not least because they’re often just mouthpieces for the facts of the matter.

It’s not quite downhill all the way post-Trinity:  it’s effective, for example, that the bombing of Hiroshima isn’t another set piece but something Oppenheimer learns as news issuing from a crackly radio.  But the contest between Nolan’s largely mechanical human drama and his taste for pyrotechnics is no contest.  This is most clearly demonstrated when Oppenheimer speaks at a noisy, celebratory gathering of Los Alamos employees immediately after Hiroshima.  During his speech, a realisation of what he has brought about in Japan – a sudden realisation:  until it hits, Oppenheimer has been speaking at the podium without a hint of moral qualms – causes him to see his euphoric staff as incinerated victims of the nuclear attack.  Since we’ve no real sense of what Oppenheimer is feeling, what he imagines is no more than a visual flourish.

A scene early in the film shows Lewis Strauss welcoming Oppenheimer – this is shortly after the end of World War II and before Strauss considers him a foe – to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton.  Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) has been almost literally put out to grass there; he and Oppenheimer meet and talk on the Institute’s extensive lakeside lawns, observed, at a distance, by Strauss.  This is one black-and-white sequence that clearly is shown from the latter’s point of view:  Strauss and the viewer see the exchange end abruptly and Oppenheimer walk away from Einstein but can’t hear what has been said.  It’s obvious that Nolan will keep that up his sleeve until he’s good and ready.  Hours of screen time later, he reveals that Oppenheimer reminded Einstein of the fears they once shared that research and development at the Los Alamos laboratory might set in motion a chain of events that would destroy humanity.  When Einstein asks, ‘What of it?’, Oppenheimer replies – in the film’s closing line – ‘I believe we did’.  (Cue more pyrotechnics – of the world’s end.)  Oppenheimer’s meeting with Einstein is also supposedly important in the story because Strauss wrongly infers from it that Oppenheimer has badmouthed him to Einstein; it’s suggested that Strauss’s violent antipathy towards Oppenheimer develops from this point on.  As Strauss, Robert Downey Jr does fine work:  he’s measured but uses his charisma to make a grey, bespectacled figure magnetic.  Even so, Strauss’s 1959 confirmation hearing, given that it doesn’t directly concern Oppenheimer, occupies a disproportionate amount of screen time.  It’s a long-winded way of showing the villain of the piece get his comeuppance.

His aide (Alden Ehrenreich), reporting to Strauss on which committee members have opposed his nomination, mentions in particular a young Massachusetts senator ‘trying to make a name for himself’; the senator’s actual name – Kennedy – plonks into the conversation.  The line is stupidly inaccurate, besides:  by 1959, JFK was nearing the end of his second four-year term in the Senate; at the 1956 Democrat National Convention, he had given the nominating speech for Adlai Stevenson and finished second in the ballot for Stevenson’s Vice-Presidential running mate.  The ‘irony’ of the aide’s remark is just about as cheap as an aside put in the mouth of US Secretary of War Henry Stimson (James Remar) when he, Oppenheimer and others meet to decide on which city or cities in Japan the bomb should drop.  Stimson rules out Kyoto because of its cultural importance to the Japanese – and, he says, because he and his wife enjoyed their honeymoon there.  Oh, the selfishness of humankind!  (Never mind that Henry Stimson may not actually have honeymooned in Kyoto.)  Nolan has recently revealed that the line was improvised by the actor concerned, resulting in ‘a fantastically exciting moment where no one in the room knows how to react’.  That’s one way of looking at it.  Moments like these make you wonder if Nolan was doing the audience a favour after all in drowning out other bits of dialogue.

Cillian Murphy’s looks don’t closely resemble J Robert Oppenheimer’s though they do share prominent blue eyes.  Thanks chiefly to Peaky Blinders, Murphy is internationally well known and has appeared in several Nolan films before this one.  But not in the lead:  Oppenheimer is a big opportunity and responsibility for him – and the responsibility shows.  Murphy delivers nearly every line in an intense whisper but isn’t able – especially since Nolan portrays Oppenheimer more as an idea than an individual – to create much of a personality.  It’s helpful when Colonel Groves (Matt Damon), military director of the Manhattan Project, quotes psychological reports on Oppenheimer that describe him as ‘a dilettante … a womaniser, unstable, theatrical, neurotic’ because I hadn’t picked up those qualities from what Murphy or the film had shown (unless relationships with two women, one of them Kitty, counts as womanising).  Whenever a more interesting performance hove into view – Florence Pugh’s or Robert Downey Jr’s or, late on, Emily Blunt’s – I found myself wishing their character, rather than Murphy’s Oppenheimer, was the main character.

Nolan isn’t the best director to help an actor struggling with the weight of a major role.  He’s a film-maker, in the British tradition of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean, who meticulously preconceives his pictures in terms of how they will look, sound and be structured.  While there’s no reason to think he shares his famous predecessors’ impatience with actors, he perhaps does see them, as Hitchcock and Lean did, as pieces of an overall scheme.  Since Nolan became a big-name director, he has usually gathered casts to match:  you’re bound to wonder if this is at least partly because he thinks big-name actors can be expected to fend for themselves.  As well as the players already mentioned in this note, Oppenheimer’s cast includes no less than three of the last seven recipients of the Best Actor Oscar – Casey Affleck, Gary Oldman and Rami Malek.  Affleck, with only a few minutes on screen, is remarkably incisive as Boris Pash, a high-ranking US Army intelligence officer who interrogated Oppenheimer in the early 1940s about his alleged Communist Party connections and gives evidence to the 1954 security review hearing.  Just as well that Oldman’s appearance is also short – he overplays Harry S Truman.  Nolan’s use of Rami Malek is particularly instructive but also dramatically counterproductive.  Malek is David L Hill, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project; in the wartime scenes Hill is a figure in the background and with next to no lines – noticeable only because of the actor playing him.  By 1959, Hill was head of the Federation of American Scientists and it’s his testimony to the Senate committee that scuppers Lewis Strauss’s nomination as Secretary of Commerce.  This moment would have more impact with a less conspicuous face in the role of Hill:  as it is, you know there must be a better reason than you’ve so far seen for involving Rami Malek in Oppenheimer.  To be fair to Nolan, he also worked with Casey Affleck and Gary Oldman before they were Academy Award winners.  But his casting of them, and of Malek, in this film gives the impression that Nolan thinks any character who played an important part in important history has to be assigned to an important (in Oldman’s case, self-important) actor.

The BBC is doing more than its fair share to promote Oppenheimer:  an extended interview with Nolan by their media editor, Katie Razzall; the Corporation’s own 1980 drama series of the same name, with Sam Waterston in the title role, now available on iPlayer; Cillian Murphy on the cover of Radio Times; a repeat in the BBC4 Storyville slot of The Trials of J Robert Oppenheimer, first shown in 2009.  This last, a documentary originally made for American television, incorporates reconstructions of the 1954 security hearing along with talking heads, news film and voiceover narration (by Zoe Wanamaker).  Oppenheimer is played with eloquent restraint by David Strathairn.  Watching The Trials a few days after the new Oppenheimer was conclusive evidence for me that Nolan, despite his earnest intentions, was the wrong man for this job.  His prime interests in film-making lie in technological ingenuity and spectacle.  The Storyville documentary, little more than half as long as his movie, is twice as enlightening a character study.  Who knows, if J Robert Oppenheimer had been born a few decades later, he might have worked as a high-profile expert adviser on a Christopher Nolan sci-fi masterwork, as theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne did on Interstellar and Tenet.  As it is, Oppenheimer will now have to wait a few more years for a different director to do justice on the cinema screen to his complex, perennially unquiet personality and his daunting moral dilemmas.

27 July 2023