“Oppenheimer” Is Ultimately a History Channel Movie with Fancy Editing

Leaving the theatre after seeing “Oppenheimer,” I was tempted to call it a movie-length Wikipedia article. But, after a look online, I realized I was giving Wikipedia too little credit—or Christopher Nolan, the movie’s writer and director, too much. A simple fact-heavy article about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist whose leadership of the Manhattan Project, during the Second World War, produced the atom bomb, turns out to offer more complexity and more enticing detail than Nolan’s script does. And it has more to say about the movie’s essential themes—the ironies and perils that arise when science, ambition, and political power mix—than the movie itself does.

Nolan’s bio-pic, three hours long and based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning biography “American Prometheus,” charts the two main strands of Oppenheimer’s life: the scientific work that made his career and the leftist sympathies that, thanks to the country’s postwar anti-Communist crusade, were to prove his undoing. We meet Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) as a student making the grand tour of European science capitals, in the nineteen-twenties—Cambridge, Göttingen, Leiden—before returning to the United States and taking up joint appointments at Caltech and Berkeley. At Berkeley, he becomes a union organizer and donates to the anti-Fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War. (The money is conveyed via a Communist-affiliated group.) He hangs out with Communist Party members, including his brother Frank (Dylan Arnold), also a physicist, and Frank’s wife, Jackie (Emma Dumont). Although not himself a Party member, he is spied on by the F.B.I. He meets a Communist medical student named Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and they begin an ill-fated relationship.

In 1942, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), who is in charge of the Army’s effort to develop a nuclear bomb, taps Oppenheimer to oversee the program. Political suspicion clouds Oppenheimer’s name, but Groves vouches for him. Now Oppenheimer’s scientific life and his political one collide. He proves himself a master not only of the scientific aspects of his assignment but also of its administrative and political dimensions. But, once the Red Scare takes hold, his eminence, his proximity to known Communists, and his postwar efforts to prevent a nuclear-arms race make him an easy target. (He was stripped of his security clearance in 1954.)

The movie is structured as a sort of mosaic. Deftly edited by Jennifer Lame, it intercuts the various periods of Oppenheimer’s life—rise, struggle, fall, aftermath—continually connecting the early leftism and later pacifism with the tribulations during the McCarthy era. It’s natural to figure that such a fractured chronology would have a destabilizing effect—Nolan directed “Memento,” after all—but, in fact, the temporal scheme makes “Oppenheimer” less complex rather than more. The insistence on correlation means that events get reduced to their function within a larger morality tale. Nolan cuts his scenes to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and details that don’t fit—contradictions, subtleties, even little random peculiarities—get left out, and, with them, the feeling of experience, whether the protagonist’s or the viewer’s. What remains is a movie to be solved rather than lived.

The crux of “Oppenheimer” is, of course, the tension between the abstractions of physics and the brutal exigencies of war, between the freewheeling researcher and the project manager pursuing worldly goals, between the man of principle and the man whose work is directly responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. Oppenheimer, who is Jewish as well as a leftist, fervently devotes himself to the creation of an atomic bomb because he knows that Nazi Germany is far ahead in developing one and he assumes that Hitler won’t hesitate to use it. Once Germany surrenders—in May, 1945—he gets a shock: work on the bomb not only continues but accelerates. This mission drift poses a moral crisis for Oppenheimer that determines the course of the rest of the film, and of his life. It becomes clear that joining the Manhattan Project has left him tragically compromised, committed to creating a weapon of unparalleled destructiveness while having no say in how it will be used.

Then again, the film is so intent on making Oppenheimer an icon of conflicted conscience that it pays little attention to his character over all. He was a renowned aesthete with a bearing so charismatic that his students would try to emulate it, but we get little more than a couple of artsy name-drops to suggest that he has any cultural life at all. The “overweening ambition” that Groves saw in Oppenheimer is never in evidence, nor is there any mention of his chilling readiness to go along with a plan (one that was never put into action) to poison German food supplies with radioactive strontium. There’s no glimpse of the ailing Oppenheimer, who was suffering from tuberculosis and joint pain even while running Los Alamos. It doesn’t help that Murphy portrays Oppenheimer as wraithlike and haunted, a cipher, a black hole of experience who bears his burdens blankly as he’s buffeted by his circumstances but gives off no energy of his own. The performance, no less than the script, reduces the protagonist to an abstraction created to be analyzed. “Oppenheimer” reveals itself to be, in essence, a History Channel movie. Detached from the rich particulars of personality and thought, the moral dilemmas and historical stakes that Oppenheimer faces are reduced to an interconnected set of trolley problems—with the historical context flattened to green-screen backgrounds.

This moral reckoning is oddly underplayed in the dramatic action of the film, largely because of one specific aesthetic conceit of Nolan’s. After the bombing of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer is brought to speak to a raucously triumphal assembly of Los Alamos employees. His speech betrays no misgivings, but, while he’s at the podium, Nolan shows what Oppenheimer imagines: overwhelming flashes of destruction, conflagrations that burn his audience to cinders. Representing conscience in this way, wordlessly, enables Nolan to fill the screen with visual fizz, but it doesn’t convey the presence, the inner experience, of a true moral reckoning. That’s because images alone—at least, those which Nolan offers here—can’t suggest the interior debates that must be pulsing through such a conflicted mind at this ghastly moment. Perhaps, in a movie that told its story while ranging further into the realm of visual imagination, the decision would come off as an aesthetic commitment. But, given the plethora of dialogue in “Oppenheimer,” Nolan’s choice to convey Oppenheimer’s inner life solely in images comes off as merely a cinematic prejudice. In “Memento,” Nolan was sufficiently interested in his protagonist’s thoughts to let us hear them, as voice-over; all the more puzzling, then, that we are granted no such access to the inner monologue of someone as literate, reflective, and fascinating as Oppenheimer. Although the movie is unusually and even gratifyingly talky, moving most of its action ahead by way of dialogue, we almost never hear Oppenheimer speak about his guilt—not even in intimate discussions with his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt). The key moment in which he does verbalize misgivings is an encounter with Harry S. Truman, after the end of the war: Oppenheimer admits to feeling as if he has blood on his hands; Truman derisively offers him a handkerchief and then dismisses him as a “crybaby.” The scene is powerful, but its power is limited by Nolan’s failure to convey Oppenheimer’s opinion of the Commander-in-Chief who’d ordered the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The extended scenes of the closed-door security-committee hearing in which Oppenheimer’s political record and personal life are subjected to cruelly intrusive scrutiny come off as a scourging that he endures with a sense of self-punishment. Other scenes, of his persecutor Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), a Cabinet nominee, facing his own intrusive inquiries at a Senate committee hearing, evoke the Machiavellian realm of power into which Oppenheimer, naïvely confident in the wisdom of his mission, has ventured. Yet these notions, too, are unexplored from Oppenheimer’s own perspective. Rather than illuminating him or his times, the scenes seem pitched to spark post-screening debate, to seek an importance beyond the experiences and ideas of the characters.

A hallmark of Nolan’s method—as in such auteur-defining big-budget works as “Inception” and “Interstellar”—is to take the complexities of science, turn them into sensationalist science fiction, and then reinfuse the result with brow-furrowing seriousness. The last step is often achieved by means of chronological or visual intricacies that render objectivity as deep subjective strangeness; strip away such effects, however, and one sees characters conceived in simplistically sentimental terms that are pure melodrama. In “Oppenheimer,” sentimentality and melodrama are in plentiful supply, but visuals less so, with the exception of Oppenheimer’s visions of conflagration. Even these are strangely subdued, generic images of churning fire standing in for the destructive power of atomic weapons—and it is tempting to imagine that Nolan is, in spite of himself, admitting to the incommensurability of cinematic representation for the historic catastrophe of nuclear devastation. For long stretches of the film, Nolan’s direction is a merely literal depiction of actors dispensing dialogue with efficiency but without flair; if his name weren’t attached, the direction might well be ascribed to a serial-television journeyman.

What’s missing, above all, from Nolan’s connect-the-dots version of Oppenheimer’s life is the kind of utterly outlandish detail in which that life abounded. For instance, Nolan shows Oppenheimer, as a student at Cambridge, injecting potassium cyanide into an apple belonging to a professor who humiliates and punishes him for poor laboratory technique—apparently to no consequence. Later, Oppenheimer lets on, in a quick aside, that he was forced into psychoanalysis as a result. In fact, he was threatened with criminal charges and with expulsion, and only the pleas of his father, a prosperous businessman, spared him. In the movie, this reckless, potentially deadly whim comes out of nowhere, but there are plenty of other episodes in Oppenheimer’s life to suggest that a truly violent personality lurked within, as when he physically attacked a friend who announced plans to marry. Nolan shows Oppenheimer to be an eager class participant in his physics tour of Europe; in fact, he was an obnoxiously aggressive one, whose fellow-students signed a petition demanding that the professor silence him. Throughout his life, he was highly mercurial—expansive and sociable and whimsical when the occasion demanded it, as at Los Alamos, where he took a comic role in a play and was an enthusiastic party host.

It wouldn’t have taken a six-hour miniseries to show Oppenheimer from more angles and do justice to his range of character: the movie is as sluggish as if Nolan were underlining the script’s most salient passages onscreen, and, with a more vigorous pace, it could have amplified the script without adding a minute of screen time. As it is, the paucity of teeming, loose-ended details is rendered all the more dismaying by contrast with the movie’s finest touches—particularly one involving Oppenheimer’s brief meeting with the elderly Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). Oppenheimer has come to head up Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein has been seemingly put out to pasture, and the pair discuss guilt and fame, faded glory and the passing of time. In terms of the film’s plot, the scene is insignificant, but the lightning flash of worldly wisdom it offers is exactly what most of the movie fails to give us. Unfortunately, Nolan parsimoniously withholds it to the end—like a banknote that, thanks to the inflation of the rest of the movie, has lost most of its value by the time it’s used. “Oppenheimer” sacrifices much of its dramatic force to the importance of its subject, and to Nolan’s pride at having tackled it—which is to say, to his own self-importance. ♦