To look into Cillian Murphy’s eyes in Oppenheimer—in which he plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the American development of the atomic bomb during World War II—is to look into the eyes of a terrified god. And the small “g” is intentional. This is the story of a man whose near-omnipotent intellect allowed him to hand humanity near-divine power—and then realize too late that we’re not meant to hold it.
It’s no wonder then, that in this visually lush and dynamic picture—full of mesmerizing recreations of atomic reactions, courtesy of director Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema—one of the most arresting images is a close-up of a bright green apple resting on a desk. That apple, an allusion to the Garden of Eden, represents a moral dilemma (I won’t spoil exactly how) which stands in miniature for the massive moral question Oppenheimer considers: just because an atomic bomb can be developed, should it?
As a student, Oppenheimer’s eyes aren’t tormented, but hungry. He devours knowledge of any kind, rocketing through his early career with little time for anything but the next challenge in theoretical physics. (In an amusing moment with Florence Pugh, playing a psychiatrist and Oppenheimer’s occasional lover, we see that even sex isn’t as appealing unless learning is involved.)
Once Oppenheimer finds himself appointed to oversee the Manhattan Project by Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, sparking the proceedings with a nice bit of charisma), it takes longer than you would expect for worry to creep onto his visage. Oppenheimer throws himself into the scientific particulars, spurred by the knowledge that the Nazis are working to build their own bomb and waving away colleagues who begin to raise questions about the endgame of their efforts.
And then they conduct their first successful test. Nolan and van Hoytema stage this as the world-shaking moment it is—a distorted mirror of Terrence Malick’s creation montage in The Tree of Life, in that this sequence captures the emergence of a force of dis-creation and death. Wisely letting Ludwig Goransson’s sublime, momentous score fall to the wayside, leaving only silence and Oppenheimer’s sucking breaths, the sequence centers mostly on two things: the awesome, awful consuming fire (recreated without computer-generated imagery) and Murphy’s astonished eyes. After the test, the moral question at the heart of the film settles heavily on Oppenheimer’s face and never leaves.
If all of this sounds too straightforward for a Nolan picture—the puzzle maker who gave us Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Dunkirk, and other mind-benders—have no fear. Or, maybe you should. Nolan gives the movie a complicating framework: the Senate confirmation hearing of Oppenheimer rival Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who is being considered for the position of Secretary of Commerce in 1959. Part of Strauss’ own confirmation strategy involves revisiting his run-ins with Oppenheimer after World War II, which allows Nolan—who films these sections in black and white—to jump around in time, as well as employ a bit of sleight of hand with the hearing’s outcome (another gambit many of his films employ).
While these scenes are of interest and do thematically connect to the story proper in certain ways (contrasting the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake and the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of power), the Strauss sections can’t help but feel of significantly less import than those involving the Manhattan Project. I could never get invested in Strauss’ fate—or even how it affects Oppenheimer’s post-war reputation. And this is a problem when the Strauss sections take up a considerable portion of the film’s three-hour running time. (Perhaps some of these scenes could have been swapped out for more with Pugh or Emily Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s wife and is literally relegated to sitting in the corner of a room in a handful of scenes.)
By the time Oppenheimer ends, it becomes more about the interpersonal problems of two miniscule men—miniscule, at least, against the backdrop of the cataclysmic, world-destroying questions and implications it had been exploring. When Murphy’s shaken Oppenheimer looks into the screen, it’s not Strauss I see in his eyes, but our own existential fears. I wish more of the movie had taken place there.
(7/26/2023)
