Deadly Toys and Tragic Lives-OPPENHEIMER
By Maribeth Thueson
How much do you know about Robert Oppenheimer? I suspect for most people the answer would be “not very much,” which is regrettable, considering that he is the man most responsible for ushering in the anxious nuclear age we are all living in. You could read the lauded biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin to find out more about him, or you can watch director/screenwriter Christopher Nolan’s expansive movie masterpiece Oppenheimer, which is based on the book. No movie can fully encompass a person’s life, especially not completely accurately, but this film goes a long way toward helping us understand Oppenheimer’s complex character.
Nolan employs his frequently-used technique of jumping back and forth in time, weaving together story arcs from different points in Oppenheimer’s life. Two of the stories are from Oppenheimer’s point of view and are in color: the period from the 1920s through the early 1950s, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearings that were held to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The third story is in black and white (the IMAX black and white film was invented specifically for this movie) and follows the 1959 Senate confirmation hearings for Lewis Strauss, who had been chair of the AEC and was Eisenhower’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce, and is told from his perspective.
The first story arc follows Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy, who looks amazingly like Oppenheimer) as a student in the 1920s, studying at European universities, soaking up the radical advances in art, psychiatry, and science of the period, and becoming acquainted with most of the important scientists in Europe. He returns to the U.S. in the 30s and teaches theoretical physics at Berkeley. Like most intellectuals of the time, he is attracted to leftist thought and causes, including communism. Although he apparently never joined the communist party himself, he donated money to leftist causes, and many of his students, friends, and loved ones, including his brother Frank, his lover Jean Tatlock, and his wife Kitty, were communist party members.
Oppenheimer discloses all this when he is being considered as the head scientist on the Manhattan Project, but Leslie Groves (played with bull-dog-like intensity by Matt Damon), the army officer in charge of the project, pushes Oppenheimer’s security clearance through anyway, convinced he not only has the intellect to solve the scientific and technical issues involved with developing the atomic bomb, but also understands how to set up a remote laboratory (Oppenheimer suggests the Los Alamos, New Mexico site) and has the ambition to see the project through. The Nazis are trying to develop a nuclear bomb, and those involved in the project are determined to make one first, no matter the cost.
Oppenheimer’s communist associations come back to haunt him in the second story arc, when he is accused of being a Soviet spy and the Atomic Energy Commission holds secret hearings in 1954 to revoke his security clearance. Oppenheimer cooperates in the hearings, but is curiously diffident, thinking that the facts of his accomplishments will save him. Kitty (Emily Blunt) keeps urging him to fight the charges, but he remains passive. She is the one who takes up his defense during her testimony, unleashing a stunning set-down to the committee’s attorney.
The third story arc follows Lewis Strauss through the Senate hearings for his nomination as Commerce Secretary. Strauss, played with verve by Robert Downey, Jr., is riddled with insecurities and vindictiveness, and his disagreements with Oppenheimer become central to the arguments against his confirmation.
The stories all pivot around the film’s climax, the Trinity test of the first nuclear bomb on July 16, 1945. Murphy plays Oppenheimer as a man whose quiet facade hides an intensity that lets him break through all obstacles, but right before the test he is twitchy and anxious, his eyes burning like ice in his skull-like face. He has pushed through the creation of this bomb, never really considering what the consequences might be. The scientists watch the detonation like it’s a July 4th fireworks display, and when the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are dropped, the people at Los Alamos celebrate like it’s New Year’s Eve.
And something in Oppenheimer changes. The devastation suffered by the populations of those cities is not shown, but is alluded to, and Oppenheimer opposes the development of a more powerful hydrogen bomb and also advocates for an international body to slow the proliferation of nuclear weapons, fearing an arms race with the Soviets. He goes so far as to tell President Harry Truman that he feels that he has blood on his hands. Truman’s response is to call him a cry-baby. Oppenheimer’s attitude, combined with paranoia about communism, combine to change him from a hero to a pariah.
While the film belongs to Murphy, Downey, and Damon, the cast is extremely strong with many small parts being played by major actors — Tony Goldwyn, James D’Arcy, Kenneth Branagh, Matthew Modine, Rami Malek, and Casey Affleck. Tom Conti plays Albert Einstein, and Gary Oldman plays Harry Truman. Of special note are Josh Hartnett, who plays Oppenheimer’s Berkeley colleague Ernest Lawrence, Alden Ehrenreich as a Senate aide, and Benny Safdie as Edward Teller.
There are only two major female roles in the movie, and both are ill served. Florence Pugh is criminally underused as the troubled psychiatrist Jean Tatlock. In her scenes, her disturbing energy leaps off the screen, and it’s easy to see why the more reserved Oppenheimer was so attracted to her that he continued to see her after he married Kitty, but we are left wanting to know more about her. Kitty, who was a botanist, is depicted as a bored housewife, holding either a screaming child or a martini glass. Drinking may be a logical reaction to being stranded in the desert without anything fulfilling to do, but Blunt gets only that moment in the AEC hearing to show what else Kitty was capable of.
The movie also falls short in not acknowledging the consequences of the open-air Trinity test. Radioactive ash fell on surrounding communities for days, and there has been a high incidence of cancer in the area ever since. The miners in the uranium mines were also exposed to radiation because they were not given adequate safety gear. Surely these effects should also have weighed on Oppenheimer’s conscience.
Despite these minor flaws, Nolan has managed to make an absorbing film without any action sequences or CGI special effects, and it’s not part of a franchise. Not only that, he makes the science interesting and easy to understand. Hollywood, take note: there is an audience for this type of film. There should be more of them.
Originally published at https://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on August 2, 2023.
