Oppenheimer (Film Review)
Jul. 24th, 2023 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakPersonal background: previous takes on Oppenheimer and/or the Manhattan Project I've watched or read: at school, In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer by Heiner Kipphardt (docudrama based on the transcripts of the hearings, part of the reading canon as an example of post war German drama), Fat Man and Little Boy (movie focused on Leslie Groves (Paul Newman) and Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz), a theatre play on the London stage called Oppenheimer but not really very good, so I don't remember whom it was by, and the tv series MANHATTAN which got cancelled after two seasons and mostly was smart and fascinating, full of complex (fictional) characters, though I had some serious nitpicks with the second half of the second season. (Manhattan had Oppenheimer and some of the other historical characters in cameos and brief supporting roles, but the main characters were all fictional scientists and their spouses whom the tv series made part of the project.) So yes, I'm interested, but not enough to have read actual biographies, only the occasional essay.
Oh, and on a related but not identical subject: I have seen, read and listened to Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen (about Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Bohr's wife Margarete) a lot.
As for Chistopher Nolan movies: my favourite remains The Prestige, I haven't watched some (to wit, Memento, Tenet, Interstellar, Dunkirk) and have varying degrees of admiration, interest or annoyance for those I did watch, to wit, his Batman trilogy and Inception.
With all this in mind, I knew I wanted to see Oppenheimer in the cinema and not at home a year later, which was definitely the right choice, because say what you want about Nolan, he does use that big screen to the max.
Overall, I found it compelling, absorbing, really well acted, and not letting itself off the hook with the various subjects it addressed. And with a hell of a final line/image/ending.
Of the Nolan trademarks which have a love or hate result on much of his audience, the different time lines intercutting and the sound design, the former really worked for me and the later not always. Personally, much as the music is well done, I'd have used less of it, and also good lord was everything loud, though at least in one case, this did make sense and worked as intended. (It's during one of the hearing scenes where Oppenheimer is questioned and his memory brings back all those noises and fragments of the past and there's additional soundtrack and it builds up to an assault of noise until he explodes with a statement and then suddenly there isn't even background music but blessed complete silence, and that's really efficient.)
By contrast, I had no problem following the three time lines (basically: Oppenheimer during his hearing in the early 1950s, Oppenheimer's memories as narrated by him during said hearing, and Lewis Strauss being questioned about Oppenheimer during his hearing in the later 1950s), and not just because Nolan filmed one (the one from Strauss' pov) of them in black and white, but then I have some advance knowledge. Would the film worked as well if Nolan had told it in a linear fashion? I don't think so, not least because the two hearings as narrative frameworks allows Nolan to pick and choose what interests him from Oppenheimer's life in a way a chronological storytelling covering as many years would not, and to have the two court room (well, except neither takes place in a court room) dramas to reflect on each other and built up to their respective climaxes simultanously.
This is one ambitious film in every sense, not least in the way it tries to visualize the thought process of its titular character in a way that works for a non-physicist audience, but also in the way it doesn't go for neat categories. For example, as a comparison: in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy, one of Groves' sidekicks when briefing him on Oppenheimer's mess of a private life tells him (and the audience) that Oppenheimer's wife Kitty symbolizes his ambition and his on/off long term mistress Jean Tatlock his idealism. Nolan's movie doesn't do that. (Instead, it has Oppenheimer tell his lawyer when the later is questioning whether Kitty should be at the hearing at one point "only toddlers and fools imagine they can truly understand someone else's relationship, and you're neither, so don't".) It lets the audience draw its own conclusions about either relationship. Well, what we see of them. Neither woman gets as much narrative space as the male supporting characters, which is not news in a Christopher Nolan movie. But one of the Jean and several of the Kitty scenes still remain with me days after thinking about this film. The Jean one is also something I don't think I've seen in another movie, especially not one produced in the US. It's the last meeting between her and Oppenheimer, it's after they had sex, and they're both completely naked - but not in bed, or next to each other, they don't touch at all in that scene, they're sitting opposite each other in chairs while talking. There's a stark, raw intimacy in this mutual nudity which isn't sexual while at the same time being very much the product of a long term couple who does know each other in the biblical sense as well as the metaphorical one.
(The Kitty scenes, by contrast, nearly all come from the last third of the film and involve her eviscarating people verbally or with a glance, which Emily Blunt is terrific at, but there's also her mixture of support and pulling away excuses in her conversation with Oppenheimer about his behavior during the hearings which is intimate and knowing each other on a whole other level.)
Apparantly Nolan has become the directer everyone wants to work with, no matter how brief the part, in the last fifteen years or so, because the number of cameos are truly staggering (for example, Rami Malek basically has just one scene as Hill, but what a scene; ditto for Gary Oldman as President Truman). Which is understandable if you look of how he casts them. There's a reason why a lot of reviews I've seen single out Robert Downey Junior as Lewis Strauss for praise. RDJ as Tony Stark was one of those career renewing, franchise founding and impossible to imagine anyone else in the role kind of parts, but it also meant a lot of what else he played in the two decades since Iron Man can be read as variations of that persona. Not so for Lewis Strauss, petty and wily bureaucrat with a grudge. The reviewer of my local paper was actually incensed Strauss - "a little man" - got so much screen time, when he thought the movie should have focused on Matt Damon's General Groves as the main supporting character instead. (To which I say, reviewer, they already made that movie, watch Paul Newman as Groves in Fat Man and Little Boy.) But leaving aside that Strauss' role in Oppenheimer's post war fate isn't something Nolan invented, it is important that he's not some kind of worthy opponent/ best enemy/magnificent bastard type of character, that he is a part of the machine and petty and basically Justin Hammer, not Tony Stark, if you need to make Iron Man comparisons, and this is exactly how RDJ plays him.
The movie's big set piece are of course the uninterrupted-by-any-other-timeline twenty minutes or so leading up to the Trinity Test, which are breathtakingly produced, but what's haunting about the film is the aftermath when Oppenheimer on the one hand has to make a triumphant speech to the team - this is what they worked for - but on the other starts to be aware of the full implication. Nolan does not try to show Hiroshima or Nagasak lateri; he has Oppenheimer begin to see faces of the joyful crowd dissolve into radiation burns during the "Go Us!" speech instead.
The questions of scientific invention, responsibility, the consequences of our actions, those are why people keep coming back to this story, and how the retellings address them always says something about the era they're created as well. Here's what this film doesn't do but what some of the other retellings did:
a) Ignore that the non-atomic bombings of cities. This was one of my pet peeves in Manhattan, much as I loved that show; the characters all talked as if, pre-Hiroshima, the Allies never ever had bombed a city full of civilians. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer brings up the Tokyo Firebombing in a conference scene early on.
b) Ignore the fact that by 1945, the German Atom Project wasn't a competition anymore. I know, it's more exciting if it continues to a race till the last moment, but lo and behold, Oppenheimer has Niels Bohr when he shows up (and in a nod to Copenhagen mentions Heisenberg's visit) say that Heisenberg talked about heavy water from which the Manhattan Project scientist realise the Germans have gone into another direction entirely (the wrong one, from the pov of wanting to produce a bomb) and thus there's no imminent danger of Hitler getting his hands on a nuke.
Now, Manhattan gave one of its main fictional characters, Charlie, the argument Oppenheimer gets to use in the discussion with fellow scientists about whether the "gadget" should be used on Japan at all, which isn't that it will end the war with less bloodshed than an invasion would (that argument comes up earlier as well, but it's not the one given main narrative attention), but that without the world seeing this weapon used for real once, people will not understand they must never use it again. Back when I watched the tv series, I thought that the horror if it is that it could be true, i.e. that the non-use of atomic weapons since 1945 depends on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, this new movie doesn't let this argument stand, and lets Oppenheimer himself come to a different conclusion as the film ends. It's also where Nolan's penchant for narration-within-narration and the Russian Doll approach, the puzzle of the past thing pays off, as early on, we see a meeting between Einstein and Oppenheimer from Strauss' pov, but don't hear it, as he's standing in a considerable distance. (He becomes convinced they were talking about him, and that Oppenheimer "poisoned" Einstein against him, because that's the kind of character he is.) As the movie closes, we return to this scene from Oppenheimer's pov and do hear what they talk about, and Oppenheimer's final line (and the final visualisation of his thoughts) is incredibly gut wrenching and so very much of 2023, where the world is on fire again in so many ways. It would not have been thinkable in, say, the 1990s.
Finally, Cillian Murphy: never since Peter Jackson filmed Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins did a movie showcase that many close-ups at soneone's haunted blue eyes. Seriously though, it's a great performance, and the script keeps avoiding the easy sympathy. (I mean, our first major Oppenheimer scene once the three timelines are established is him trying to poison his tutor at Cambridge. And one of the earlier mentioned memorable verbal eviscaration Kitty scenes is when after another ghastly hearing day she accuses him of playing the martyr so he'll be forgiven for the bomb.) Oppenheimer must be in 98% of the scenes, and you really need an actor able shoulder that while remaining magnetic (not likeable; magnetic), and he delivers.
Wait, one more trivia observation: Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr is only in two scenes, but immediately managed to make me wish he'd play Bohr in Copenhagen as well. He has that warmth (and the authority leading to the younger physcists nicknaming him the Pope), which is slightly surprising because Branagh, much as I like him as an actor, usually doesn't exude human warmth. (As for the home team, Matthias Schweighöfer has a 90 seconds cameo as young Heisenberg, shacking young Oppenheimer's hand when they're all at Göttingen together, which isn't enough to judge a performance.)
Oh, and on a related but not identical subject: I have seen, read and listened to Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen (about Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Bohr's wife Margarete) a lot.
As for Chistopher Nolan movies: my favourite remains The Prestige, I haven't watched some (to wit, Memento, Tenet, Interstellar, Dunkirk) and have varying degrees of admiration, interest or annoyance for those I did watch, to wit, his Batman trilogy and Inception.
With all this in mind, I knew I wanted to see Oppenheimer in the cinema and not at home a year later, which was definitely the right choice, because say what you want about Nolan, he does use that big screen to the max.
Overall, I found it compelling, absorbing, really well acted, and not letting itself off the hook with the various subjects it addressed. And with a hell of a final line/image/ending.
Of the Nolan trademarks which have a love or hate result on much of his audience, the different time lines intercutting and the sound design, the former really worked for me and the later not always. Personally, much as the music is well done, I'd have used less of it, and also good lord was everything loud, though at least in one case, this did make sense and worked as intended. (It's during one of the hearing scenes where Oppenheimer is questioned and his memory brings back all those noises and fragments of the past and there's additional soundtrack and it builds up to an assault of noise until he explodes with a statement and then suddenly there isn't even background music but blessed complete silence, and that's really efficient.)
By contrast, I had no problem following the three time lines (basically: Oppenheimer during his hearing in the early 1950s, Oppenheimer's memories as narrated by him during said hearing, and Lewis Strauss being questioned about Oppenheimer during his hearing in the later 1950s), and not just because Nolan filmed one (the one from Strauss' pov) of them in black and white, but then I have some advance knowledge. Would the film worked as well if Nolan had told it in a linear fashion? I don't think so, not least because the two hearings as narrative frameworks allows Nolan to pick and choose what interests him from Oppenheimer's life in a way a chronological storytelling covering as many years would not, and to have the two court room (well, except neither takes place in a court room) dramas to reflect on each other and built up to their respective climaxes simultanously.
This is one ambitious film in every sense, not least in the way it tries to visualize the thought process of its titular character in a way that works for a non-physicist audience, but also in the way it doesn't go for neat categories. For example, as a comparison: in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy, one of Groves' sidekicks when briefing him on Oppenheimer's mess of a private life tells him (and the audience) that Oppenheimer's wife Kitty symbolizes his ambition and his on/off long term mistress Jean Tatlock his idealism. Nolan's movie doesn't do that. (Instead, it has Oppenheimer tell his lawyer when the later is questioning whether Kitty should be at the hearing at one point "only toddlers and fools imagine they can truly understand someone else's relationship, and you're neither, so don't".) It lets the audience draw its own conclusions about either relationship. Well, what we see of them. Neither woman gets as much narrative space as the male supporting characters, which is not news in a Christopher Nolan movie. But one of the Jean and several of the Kitty scenes still remain with me days after thinking about this film. The Jean one is also something I don't think I've seen in another movie, especially not one produced in the US. It's the last meeting between her and Oppenheimer, it's after they had sex, and they're both completely naked - but not in bed, or next to each other, they don't touch at all in that scene, they're sitting opposite each other in chairs while talking. There's a stark, raw intimacy in this mutual nudity which isn't sexual while at the same time being very much the product of a long term couple who does know each other in the biblical sense as well as the metaphorical one.
(The Kitty scenes, by contrast, nearly all come from the last third of the film and involve her eviscarating people verbally or with a glance, which Emily Blunt is terrific at, but there's also her mixture of support and pulling away excuses in her conversation with Oppenheimer about his behavior during the hearings which is intimate and knowing each other on a whole other level.)
Apparantly Nolan has become the directer everyone wants to work with, no matter how brief the part, in the last fifteen years or so, because the number of cameos are truly staggering (for example, Rami Malek basically has just one scene as Hill, but what a scene; ditto for Gary Oldman as President Truman). Which is understandable if you look of how he casts them. There's a reason why a lot of reviews I've seen single out Robert Downey Junior as Lewis Strauss for praise. RDJ as Tony Stark was one of those career renewing, franchise founding and impossible to imagine anyone else in the role kind of parts, but it also meant a lot of what else he played in the two decades since Iron Man can be read as variations of that persona. Not so for Lewis Strauss, petty and wily bureaucrat with a grudge. The reviewer of my local paper was actually incensed Strauss - "a little man" - got so much screen time, when he thought the movie should have focused on Matt Damon's General Groves as the main supporting character instead. (To which I say, reviewer, they already made that movie, watch Paul Newman as Groves in Fat Man and Little Boy.) But leaving aside that Strauss' role in Oppenheimer's post war fate isn't something Nolan invented, it is important that he's not some kind of worthy opponent/ best enemy/magnificent bastard type of character, that he is a part of the machine and petty and basically Justin Hammer, not Tony Stark, if you need to make Iron Man comparisons, and this is exactly how RDJ plays him.
The movie's big set piece are of course the uninterrupted-by-any-other-timeline twenty minutes or so leading up to the Trinity Test, which are breathtakingly produced, but what's haunting about the film is the aftermath when Oppenheimer on the one hand has to make a triumphant speech to the team - this is what they worked for - but on the other starts to be aware of the full implication. Nolan does not try to show Hiroshima or Nagasak lateri; he has Oppenheimer begin to see faces of the joyful crowd dissolve into radiation burns during the "Go Us!" speech instead.
The questions of scientific invention, responsibility, the consequences of our actions, those are why people keep coming back to this story, and how the retellings address them always says something about the era they're created as well. Here's what this film doesn't do but what some of the other retellings did:
a) Ignore that the non-atomic bombings of cities. This was one of my pet peeves in Manhattan, much as I loved that show; the characters all talked as if, pre-Hiroshima, the Allies never ever had bombed a city full of civilians. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer brings up the Tokyo Firebombing in a conference scene early on.
b) Ignore the fact that by 1945, the German Atom Project wasn't a competition anymore. I know, it's more exciting if it continues to a race till the last moment, but lo and behold, Oppenheimer has Niels Bohr when he shows up (and in a nod to Copenhagen mentions Heisenberg's visit) say that Heisenberg talked about heavy water from which the Manhattan Project scientist realise the Germans have gone into another direction entirely (the wrong one, from the pov of wanting to produce a bomb) and thus there's no imminent danger of Hitler getting his hands on a nuke.
Now, Manhattan gave one of its main fictional characters, Charlie, the argument Oppenheimer gets to use in the discussion with fellow scientists about whether the "gadget" should be used on Japan at all, which isn't that it will end the war with less bloodshed than an invasion would (that argument comes up earlier as well, but it's not the one given main narrative attention), but that without the world seeing this weapon used for real once, people will not understand they must never use it again. Back when I watched the tv series, I thought that the horror if it is that it could be true, i.e. that the non-use of atomic weapons since 1945 depends on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, this new movie doesn't let this argument stand, and lets Oppenheimer himself come to a different conclusion as the film ends. It's also where Nolan's penchant for narration-within-narration and the Russian Doll approach, the puzzle of the past thing pays off, as early on, we see a meeting between Einstein and Oppenheimer from Strauss' pov, but don't hear it, as he's standing in a considerable distance. (He becomes convinced they were talking about him, and that Oppenheimer "poisoned" Einstein against him, because that's the kind of character he is.) As the movie closes, we return to this scene from Oppenheimer's pov and do hear what they talk about, and Oppenheimer's final line (and the final visualisation of his thoughts) is incredibly gut wrenching and so very much of 2023, where the world is on fire again in so many ways. It would not have been thinkable in, say, the 1990s.
Finally, Cillian Murphy: never since Peter Jackson filmed Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins did a movie showcase that many close-ups at soneone's haunted blue eyes. Seriously though, it's a great performance, and the script keeps avoiding the easy sympathy. (I mean, our first major Oppenheimer scene once the three timelines are established is him trying to poison his tutor at Cambridge. And one of the earlier mentioned memorable verbal eviscaration Kitty scenes is when after another ghastly hearing day she accuses him of playing the martyr so he'll be forgiven for the bomb.) Oppenheimer must be in 98% of the scenes, and you really need an actor able shoulder that while remaining magnetic (not likeable; magnetic), and he delivers.
Wait, one more trivia observation: Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr is only in two scenes, but immediately managed to make me wish he'd play Bohr in Copenhagen as well. He has that warmth (and the authority leading to the younger physcists nicknaming him the Pope), which is slightly surprising because Branagh, much as I like him as an actor, usually doesn't exude human warmth. (As for the home team, Matthias Schweighöfer has a 90 seconds cameo as young Heisenberg, shacking young Oppenheimer's hand when they're all at Göttingen together, which isn't enough to judge a performance.)
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