‘Oppenheimer’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Devastating, Explosive Magnum Opus
Christopher Nolan’s cinema is one of dualities: between knowledge and ignorance (Memento); seeing and sightlessness (Insomnia); good and evil (The Dark Knight); illusion and authenticity (The Prestige); dreaming and waking (Inception); courage and cowardice (Dunkirk); and the past and the present (Tenet). In that regard, Oppenheimer—a film of endless contrasts and contradictions—is the fullest expression of the writer/director’s artistry to date. Propelled by the inexorable march of progress and imagination and electrified by the terrible thrill of theories, dreams, and miracles realized in all their devastating glory, it’s a divided epic of awe and horror, fission and fusion. It’s simultaneously a unified portrait of a conflicted man and a singular achievement for Hollywood’s reigning blockbuster auteur.
Adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus, Oppenheimer (July 21, in theaters) begins with images of raindrops falling on a pond’s surface and fiery detonations in the void—the first of innumerable opposing visions that are in unlikely harmony, or at least uneasy coexistence, in Nolan’s masterpiece. An individual of myriad paradoxes, Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer is a scientist (and the father of theoretical physics in the United States) who adores art and culture; a towering intellectual who’s incompetent in the laboratory; an arrogant leader who’s unwilling to fight; a devoted lover and partner who’s habitually unfaithful; and the architect of modern annihilation who wants to foster global peace. When, early in his academic career, he’s drawn to quantum physics, because it suggests that the impossible—namely, that light is both a wave and a particle—is true, it’s a telling snapshot of his inherent attraction to the irreconcilable.
As with so much of Nolan’s prior work, Oppenheimer is chronologically fractured, recounting its tale from two perspectives: that of Oppenheimer, in color, and of Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), in black-and-white. In accordance with that structure, the film casts its dual strands as flashbacks told by these characters during, respectively, the secret, Red Scare-driven 1954 hearing that cost Oppenheimer his security clearance and the 1959 Senate hearing that denied Strauss the Secretary of Commerce position he coveted. Throughout, Nolan narratively and formally intertwines Oppenheimer and Strauss’ fates, juxtaposing them in order to highlight the story’s fundamental honesty and duplicity—what with its clandestine military operation in the Los Alamos desert, pervasive paranoia about Soviet spies stealing secrets from the Americans, and marital infidelities. Throughout, the film depicts Oppenheimer as a man partially unaware of himself; his wife Kitty, played by Emily Blunt, tellingly asks him, “Nobody knows what you believe! Do you?”