Film Review by CARROLL McCUNE
The Red Scare of the McCarthy era in the 1950’s cost an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people their jobs, none more famous than J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.” Although dozens of articles, books, films, and documentaries have argued the justice or injustice of Oppenheimer’s shocking fall from grace, British producer-writer-director Christopher Nolan claimed that his purpose in making this historical drama about the controversial physicist was to illustrate Oppenheimer’s own point-of-view of his role in world history.
In a December 12, 2022, interview with “Total Film” magazine Nolan asserted: “We’re trying to tell the story of somebody’s life, and their journey through personal history and large-scale history…And so the subjectivity of the story is everything to me. We want to view these events through Oppenheimer’s eyes. And that was the challenge for Cillian [Murphy] that I set him, to take us on this journey, that was the challenge for Hoyte Van Hoytema, my designer, my whole team: how do we view this extraordinary story through the eyes of the person who was at the heart of it all? All our decisions on how to make this film were based on that real premise.”
Called the philosophical filmmaker, Nolan actually based “Oppenheimer,” his 13th film, on the Pulitzer Prize winning 2005 book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
Authors Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin compared the career of Oppenheimer to the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, a Titan who defied the Olympian gods by giving fire to mankind and was punished with eternal torment for advancing human technology.
Nolan builds on this Promethean analogy by opening with a scene in which Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) was being interrogated by the Atomic Energy Commission attorney Roger Robb (Jason Clarke), during a closed-door hearing in 1954.
Robb grilled him about his early association with Communist Party activists such as Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) and insinuated that while he was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, Oppenheimer collaborated with the spy Claus Fuchs (Christopher Denham). Fuchs, a former East German, had been a member of the team of physicists at Los Alamos and confessed to passing information about the design of the plutonium bomb to the Russian Soviets, our allies during the war.
Because of the anti-communist hysteria in the late 1940’s and 5o’s, Oppenheimer was subsequently declared a national security threat. He was forced to resign as chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. Stripped of his security clearance, his ability to influence national nuclear policy ceased. Press leaks of the private hearings destroyed his reputation as a hero of World War II.
Authors Bird and Sherwin summarized this part of Oppenheimer’s life that became the premise of Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film: “In the late 1940’s, as the U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated, Oppenheimer’s persistent desire to raise such tough questions about nuclear weapons greatly troubled Washington’s national security establishment. The return of the Republicans to the White House in 1953 elevated advocates of massive nuclear retaliation, such as Lewis Strauss, to positions of power in Washington. Strauss and his allies were determined to silence the one man who they feared could credibility challenge their policies.”
The political machinations that led up to the “trial” of Oppenheimer are interspersed throughout the story in multiple flashbacks and crosscuts to a parallel story about his antagonist Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) Although Nolan is considered a master of unconventional narrative structures, the Strauss sequences, filmed in black and white, result in a confusing jigsaw puzzle timeline.
The script suffers from too many new characters introduced in each scene, making it hard to sort out the plethora of Oppenheimer’s friends and foes. Also, the gratuitous nude sex scenes only distract from the film’s weighty underlying theme of the morality of nuclear weapons.
In the film, two women in Oppenheimer’s life, his lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and his wife Katherine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt), had been members of the Communist Party. The women were blamed for putting Oppenheimer under suspicion with the FBI in 1941. Both women are negatively portrayed; Tatlock as a turbulent seductress who committed suicide (or perhaps was murdered), and Kitty as a volatile nag who neglects her baby and belittles her husband for not standing up for himself. “Did you think that if you let them tar and feather you the world would forgive you?” Kitty scolds after the AEC security committee’s inquisition.
The first flashback was to Oppenheimer’s days as a maladjusted Jewish American student of experimental physics at Christ’s College, Cambridge, England, in 1926. In this scene, he vengefully injects potassium cyanide into an apple on the desk of his lab professor Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcy) after being punished for accidentally busting up his table-top experiment. When Oppenheimer’s hero, the visiting quantum theorist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), picked up the apple instead of Professor Blackett, Oppenheimer swatted it out of his hand where it hit the floor with a loud bang. Director Nolan cleverly staged this incident as if it were just a malicious prank by the young, temperamental genius that foreboded his destiny to become the mastermind of the greatest explosion the world had ever witnessed.
The facts of this bizarre incident, however, are debatable. According to Bird and Sherwin’s exhaustive biography, Professor Blackett detected the poison and reported the incident to authorities. Oppenheimer was almost expelled but was first ordered to receive psychiatric analysis and treatment. The psychiatrist concluded that Oppenheimer suffered from schizophrenia and pronounced him a hopeless case. The filmmakers had watered down the episode, turning it from an actual attempted murder into a schoolboy prank. They also overlooked Oppenheimer’s well-documented personality disorders and chronic depression.
While ignoring the man’s character failings, the film focuses on his patriotism, intellectual gigantism, leftist political leanings, and opposition to developing a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, which he thought could not be controlled.
Oppenheimer’s only regret about creating the atomic bomb was not that it was dropped on the already beaten Japanese, but that it had not been developed soon enough to use on the Germans, who surrendered on May 8, 1945. Being of German Jewish descent, his only wartime animus was towards the Nazis. Bird and Sherwin reported that in 1954, his neighbor Nancy Gibney wrote that Oppenheimer “transparently loved the bomb and his lordly role in its creation.”
After the war, Oppenheimer’s social conscience sharpened and he became a powerful spokesman for international control of nuclear weapons technology. In a Time magazine cover story in 1948, the writer said that Los Alamos and its aftermath left the world’s preeminent physicist with “a legacy of concern.” Oppenheimer told his fellow physicists that their weapon had “dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
At the end of the film, Oppenheimer fully realized the consequences of his actions and voices the guilt of his generation of nuclear scientists. In a conversation with his friend Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), who personified an Olympian god, he feared that he had given mankind the means to destroy modern civilization. “When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world.”
“What of it?” Einstein asked.
“I believe we did,” he opined.
Repeated flashbacks tell the story of an obscure professor at UC Berkeley and Cal Tech who was selected by Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), a US Army Corps of Engineers officer, to lead a team of thousands in a race against the Germans to build an atomic bomb. When Groves tapped Oppenheimer to be the director of the Manhattan Project, the young professor’s only ambition had been to make a name for himself as a theoretical physicist exploring the possibility of the death of stars in the new field of quantum theory—a theory Adolf Hitler called Jewish physics.
The parallel plot follows Oppenheimer’s arch nemesis Lewis Strauss, presidential adviser and behind-the-scenes instigator of the security committee’s decision to strip Oppenheimer of his top-secret security clearance. Oppenheimer had humiliated Strauss during his Senate hearing to become the Secretary of Commerce and Strauss plotted his revenge in a Machiavellian manor.
The middle part of the film dwells on the proceedings at Los Alamos where the top scientists chaff at their military overlords and argue acrimoniously over whether to pursue the uranium gun-type fission bomb or the plutonium-core implosion-type bomb.
Oppenheimer saw his role as director of the project mostly as keeping the contentious physicists focused on the practical engineering problems of building the test bomb called Trinity. The method of uranium fission had already been demonstrated by Jewish physicists in Berlin, giving the Nazis a head start in the race.
The ever-increasing volume of music by Ludwig Göransson and Randy Torres’ sound design created the suspense leading up to the test explosion on July 16, 1945. After the successful detonation of Trinity, the scientists celebrated in an orgy of self-congratulation. Life magazine boasted, “Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.”
Nolan interjects many depictions of Oppenheimer being haunted by hallucinations of a fiery atmosphere and the electrical sub-atomic world going haywire, hinting at the possibility that his breakthroughs in quantum theory came to him in visionary dreams. Cillian Murphy sometimes stares enigmatically straight into the camera suggesting the physicist’s psychiatric disturbances.
The pivotal scene towards the tragic climax of the film occurs when Oppenheimer meets with President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) and Secretary of State James Byrnes (Pat Skipper) in the Oval Office. Truman asks, “Jim tells me you’re concerned about an arms race with the Soviets. Do you know when the Soviets are going to have the bomb?”
When Oppenheimer just stammers, Truman asserts, “Never!”
Truman was turned-off by Oppenheimer’s simpering mea culpa, “I have blood on my hands,” and his blaming himself for the holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The president angrily responded that it was his decision to drop the bomb, not Oppenheimer’s, “Do you think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit about who built the bomb? They care about who dropped it. Me! It isn’t about you.”
As Oppenheimer dejectedly exists the Oval Office, Truman tells Byrnes, “Don’t let that crybaby back in here!” However, Bird and Sherwin reported that Truman actually said, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in my office ever again!” It was the beginning of the Titan’s great fall.
While Christopher Nolan’s film succeeds in telling the tragedy of Oppenheimer’s incredible life; that is, being railroaded by the conniving Lewis Strauss and wrongly scorned by the country he loved, it misses the great irony that while he spent the first half of his adult life acquiring the rarified knowledge that enabled him to weaponize nuclear fission, he spent the last half vainly trying to control that technology. He was not so much a Prometheus as he was Prometheus’ wife Pandora, who opened a box that released all the evils of humanity into the world. In a speech to fellow scientists, Oppenheimer predicted, “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenal of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time
will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos.”
Rated R, Oppenheimer is available for purchase on DVD/Blue-ray/4K UHD and
streaming on Peacock, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+. Click to view official Universal Pictures trailer.
PBS produced a documentary in 2009 called “The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” It includes recordings of Oppenheimer speaking, events at Los Alamos, and reenactments of the transcripts of the Atomic Energy Commission depositions. It takes the point-of-view that Oppenheimer was a scientist-hero who was martyred for urging a policy of government candor about nuclear weapons and advocating for international control of missile technology development..
“We do not operate well when they [important facts about the atomic arms race] are known, in secrecy and in fear, only to a few men…It is my opinion that we should all know…where we stand in these matters.”
The documentary is available from the archive of the American Experience series of programs.
