MOVIE REVIEW: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a roaring, terrifying, and carnal tale of the father of the atom bomb.
– his biography of the father of the atomic bomb – he does both simultaneously.
It's 1924, and a young J. Robert Oppenheimer quits Cambridge to study the new discipline of quantum physics in Germany: a decision that ultimately leads to him running the Manhattan Project, America's World War II rush to build a functioning atomic bomb. It's 1954, and Oppenheimer is in a small room in Washington, D.C., facing a kangaroo court predetermined to confirm suspicions that he was a Red.
What bonds them is Oppenheimer, scintillatingly and sympathetically portrayed by Murphy in a performance of breathtaking understatement and perspicacity. Without ever resorting to exposition or flagellant self-examination, he probes the complexities of a man who saw the workings of the cosmos on an almost instinctual level . Yet he's not a dry academic, or the cryptic tool of the military-industrial complex as which he has been caricatured.
Nolan's script truly centers on Oppenheimer's relationships. That includes his penchant for affairs, such as the catastrophic carnal connection with Jean Tatlock and the more scandalous one with Kitty Harrison . Swirling around them is a perfect ensemble cast of researchers, many of them icons of science: Branagh as Bohr, Conti heartbreaking as the aged Einstein, and a lugubrious performance by Benny Safdie as Edward Teller.
The people around Oppenheimer are his strength and his weakness, as Nolan's script subtly indicates how his pre-war political naivety and basic humanism were used against him by Hoover's commie-smashing FBI. Grand betrayal is an elemental component of the story, and this being Nolan, that cinema is indeed grand. Yes, the Trinity test sequence is a nail-biting feat of cinematic tension, but he deploys the same epic filmmaking to the smallest of moments.
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