LAST UPDATE | 19 Jul 2023
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN HAS brought many intriguing things to the screen: a brooding Batman; two duelling magicians; astronauts searching for a new home for mankind. But with his twelfth film, Oppenheimer, he’s tried something new – a biopic of one of America’s most controversial figures.
The story of J Robert Oppenheimer is a fascinating one. A theoretical physicist, he led the lab at the Manhattan Project (the USA’s attempt to create an atomic weapon) during WW2, and became known as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’. But less than a decade after this, he was a victim of his beloved country’s McCarthy witch hunts.
To depict him, Nolan made a clever decision: selecting his longtime collaborator, Cillian Murphy. They make an experienced pair, not just in terms of their own careers, but also in how long they’ve known each other: 20 years. That means an understanding about what it takes to make a film like this. A sense of simpatico.
Murphy bears a striking resemblance to Oppenheimer, and the camera loves to linger on his baby blues. The wiry physicist was said to exist solely on cigarettes and martinis, and a slimmed-down Murphy wears a slightly obnoxious hat and beautifully tailored suits for much of the film, bringing his character’s silhouette to life.
The film – with longtime Nolan collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema behind the lens – follows Oppenheimer from his early days as a student to his time in Los Alamos in New Mexico constructing the bomb. Murphy seamlessly depicts Oppenheimer across different ages, bringing us a man who is often deep in thought, sometimes charming, a womaniser and a deep thinker.
Here’s an anecdote that highlights just how much he was absorbed into the character. The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. Bird told the New York Times that when he met Murphy on set, the first thing he said to him was: “Dr Oppenheimer! I’ve been waiting decades to meet you!”
Oppenheimer was a paradoxical figure, who was responsible for leading a team that created a weapon capable of incomparable levels of damage and death. He wasn’t untroubled by this – he wasn’t untroubled by a lot of things. To give us a sense of the maelstrom inside him, Nolan doesn’t just rely on Murphy’s acting. He also visualises both Oppenheimer’s mental state and his thoughts about physics, studding the film with visceral moving lights and images, and enveloping them in a wall of noise.
The director is known for being furiously analogue. The movie is in IMAX 70mm format (and having seen it in both 70mm and 35mm, there is a distinct difference). To depict the Trinity atom bomb test in the New Mexico desert in 1945, he used miniatures and real explosions, and minimal CGI.
It’s not easy to explain how an atomic bomb is made, but Nolan does his best here, distilling it down to the most basic of facts while trusting his audience to get what’s going on, or at least to Google it afterwards.
Visually the film is gorgeous, with a muted midcentury palette, stunning New Mexico vistas and an almost documentary approach to depicting the Manhattan Project base (look up videos of it and you’ll see how close everything was to the real thing).
One of the big draws with Oppenheimer is its stellar supporting cast. Murphy is buoyed by stars at every turn – here’s Gary Oldman! Here’s Matthew Modine! – and Nolan generally keeps tight control on who’s who. He decided not to create any composite characters, hence the need for such a wide cast.
Robert Downey Jr is outstanding as the slippery Lewis Strauss, a businessman whose relationship with Oppenheimer has a deep effect on him. Meanwhile, Matt Damon brings a note of frustrated humour as General Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project and tried to keep everyone on track.
Emily Blunt is excellent as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, who the film indicates found motherhood and her husband’s career difficult, but whose steely side occasionally gets to be unleashed. When it does, she’s on fire.
The other notable female on screen is Florence Pugh, as Jean Tatlock, an ex-lover of Oppenheimer. She and Murphy feature in unusually explicit (for Nolan) love scenes. While Tatlock was a fascinating character, unfortunately Pugh is literally exposed here in a way that doesn’t seem necessary.
This isn’t a conventional blockbuster – it’s a biopic in the form of a blockbuster, and it’s only a blockbuster because Christopher Nolan can command such a huge budget ($180million) from Universal Pictures, a top-class cast and the time to create a film of such epic scale.
This is a character study that will be relished by those who trust Nolan to dig into the psyche of an intriguing, complicated figure. Since his very first film, Nolan has always leaned towards the cerebral, and he’s not a director who spoon-feeds his audience. There’s a curiosity to Nolan’s films, a sense that he’s trying to figure out something about his characters, even if he never gets close. With Oppenheimer, you can feel that he’s obsessed with what made Oppenheimer who he was, and what others thought of him.
The broad look at Oppenheimer’s life and career does result in some small moments of incoherence, when you might wish for subtitles to help you understand exactly what’s going on. That’s partly because Nolan crams a lot in here – he doesn’t give much breathing room. In the hands of a lesser director, this would have been messy.
Though it’s centred on one man’s story, Oppenheimer naturally lends itself to exploring themes that are pertinent today – the use of nuclear power, and its impact on war and on people. This means it feels both deeply rooted in the past, and yet also timeless. It’s a film made for discussions afterwards.
But mainly this is an epic about a battle of wills, and a battle of mind. The battle of wills is between Oppenheimer and the military and governmental figures who want him to do their bidding; the battle of mind is within Oppenheimer himself. It’s a film about the interior of a fallible, intelligent man, and Murphy does an incredible job of playing Oppenheimer as a withholding, deep-thinking and loyal-when-it-suits-him person. An Oscar nomination is guaranteed.
With Oppenheimer, Nolan shows that he hasn’t lost his ability to think like an independent filmmaker, but within a big studio framework. He makes the most of what his rarified position offers – scale, means – but isn’t willing to be lazy or one-note about his ideas. That can make his films complicated, at times hard to comprehend, and yet you can feel their creator has a very clear idea of what he’s doing. It’s never not exhilarating to go on a Nolan journey.
Oppenheimer is an intense film, dense with story and character; full of questions about human nature and what motivates people. At three hours long, it requires close attention. Could it have been shorter? Undoubtedly, but you know that wouldn’t be Nolan’s style. It takes until the second half of the film for things to really get going, as the explosion inches nearer. (The build-up to it is ingeniously tense.) But by the end you realise – the film isn’t really about the explosion of the atomic bomb at all.
Instead, you are left mulling over what it’s really saying: that humans can be terrible people, capable of creating much evil. Oppenheimer didn’t fully understand what he had done until it was done.
Oppenheimer is a film that lingers. Just like J Robert himself, it doesn’t give away its secrets easily, but at every turn it’s compelling.
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