![]() ![]() ![]() It is more of a fraught character piece than perhaps the advertising has suggested, as concerned with what happened to Oppenheimer after the war as it is with what he built during it. Oppenheimer is not a film that exists to demonstrate the might of the bomb. That enormous event does arrive, but perhaps not with the theater-rumbling blare that some might hope for in a summer tentpole movie from the high priest of commercial filmmaking. Oppenheimer is, of course, building and building toward the moment when Oppenheimer and his team-an ensemble played by a vast array of young to middle-aged actors particular standouts are Josh Hartnett, Matt Damon, and Benny Safdie-would test their terrible creation in the lunar deserts of New Mexico. Together, they help keep us aware of Oppenheimer the fallible, frustrating man-without them, the film might spin too far into cerebral abstraction. ![]() Interpersonal relationships involving women are not typically Nolan’s forte, but Pugh and Blunt give depth and dimension to characters that might otherwise be flat. Oppenheimer’s matters of the heart concern Jean Tatlock ( Florence Pugh), a Communist psychiatrist with whom Oppenheimer had a tortured love affair, and Oppenheimer’s eventual wife, Kitty ( Emily Blunt), a formidable intellect in her own right-lonely and sozzled but still fiercely invested in her husband’s developing legacy. His political conflicts-a dabbler in Communism and an avowed progressive, Oppenheimer was often regarded suspiciously by military and governmental brass-are nestled convincingly alongside his personal struggles. As played by Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer is a commanding, eerie figure-haughty and saturnine, haunted and consumed. At its best, Oppenheimer is a bracing wonder of heavy talk and ticking-clock suspense. We are disoriented, yes, but Oppenheimer demands that we trust in the grand mural so furiously painted in Nolan’s stern hues-that it will be understood in its whole once we have caught our breath and taken a step back to gaze upon its magnificence. Nolan aptly synthesizes the momentum of these men and their ideas, creating a heady sense of the world suddenly spinning at a precarious new tilt. That relentless pace is thrilling and tiring at once. There is some moral justification for the science, then, if not the implementation of its output. Of course, the circumstances of Oppenheimer’s day were dire: The Nazis were working on their own atomic project, and the Allied forces rightfully feared what Hitler and his gang might do with that power if they were to achieve it before the Americans. That is the sorry horror at the center of Oppenheimer’s story: that his particular genius, his avid and productive curiosity about the nature of life and its surroundings, could be fashioned into a weapon. Oppenheimer and his cohort cracked open human understanding of the universe, a big bang expansion of thought that was, inevitably, almost immediately harnessed for the purposes of destruction. He was a pioneer in the nascent field of quantum physics, which meant that, in essence, he really was envisioning another plane of existence: the molecular jumble that makes up all matter, governed by rules and properties we still don’t entirely understand. Oppenheimer, as described in the film (which Nolan adapted from the Pulitzer-winning biography American Prometheus), was plagued by visions of a world just beyond our own. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, a perfect subject for Nolan’s first venture into fact-based character drama. (He’s also made some Batman movies.) Which perhaps makes J. His 2017 war film, Dunkirk, dealt with real things, but Nolan’s work has largely been less about people than about the spectacle swirling around them, the awe and terror they experience as reality bends and new consciousness blooms. ![]() The director Christopher Nolan has never told a true story. ![]()
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