I was interested to go see Oppenheimer, but then reluctant to make it my first movie visit in maybe five years. Those full houses that put off my seeing it for a week; the new technology of being ticketed on-line which led to double booking for my seat J-19 and kept me expectantly waiting for the rightful owner of empty J-16, where I had perched, to appear and claim the seat. When we got to 2:30 I thought I was home free until I realized all the mindless previews only ended at 2:55, but I managed to stay where I was unimpeded. And then the new technology for paying for parking which involved loading an app and getting a movie employee to enable the scanning machine to get my voucher recognized. Good thing I had time, it was summer and so still light outside. Yet, I had to wonder yet again, is advancing technology worth it? How appropriate.
(Not to mention that in the course of a half-hour lead in and three-hour film, I got so uncomfortable that I had to leave momentarily to visit the bathroom, about when Kitty faces the inquisition committee that ultimately nixed renewing Oppie’s security clearance, so I won’t be commenting on that, except that “inquisition” is the right word in these very religious rites. We get so comfortable with streaming – bathroom and refrigerator nearby, pause button at the ready.)
But forget all that. Despite Nolan’s overuse of loud, insistent music that sometimes drowns out dialogue (as in Dunkirk), this is a brilliant movie. He’s making a familiar story into myth, in the best way possible, employing the movies’ technological advances over literature. Progress that once sparked protests from book-lovers, although now that books and movies comfortably co-exist, their bleats are muted.
It could only be told by interweaving the later time plot line tracing (1) the effort to renew Oppie’s clearance followed by Strauss’s failure to be confirmed by the Senate for a post in Eisenhower’s cabinet, then moving back and forth to (2) Oppie’s personal history and the Manhattan Project’s trajectory. A straight chronological timeline would have been deadly; the script is just ingenious at heading to two climaxes simultaneously. (And, after all, we’re dealing with physics here; with the imponderability of time running only one way and the undecipherability of quantum physics, so moving time around is altogether appropriate.) The use of black and white for the post-war plot line, and full color for the sunnier times of fighting fascists, is once again brilliant. The McCarthy era deserves nothing more than black and white — truth and myth over reality. Let’s not uplift emotions for those guys. One reviewer regretted that the full depth of Oppenheimer’s genius for languages and art went unplumbed, but to my mind, just alluding to it was startling and revealing, and the unstated depths hinted at the back story you can get if you read the books. The man was a genius, folks, and that’s what geniuses do. But it doesn’t mean they’re good at relationships or politics. (Let’s get that straight!) Here in the movie, the allusions were perfect, and that’s what is great about movies – the small bits of business, hardly even noticed, that you have to take real time to explicate in books.
And then the mixing of the personalities, the human stories, and the science. The picture of individuals with all their weaknesses and moral flaws – their humanness – unlocking the locked boxes of the gods, the knowledge, the Furies. That’s really what it is.
The scientists are, well, scientists. They are like the people who think that explaining the facts will make Red states get vaccinated. Oppie thinks recitations of facts are enough to protect himself and conquer his foes. No strategy but that, “if I only explain to them.” His wife says, fight! She smells out Strauss for the jackal he is, and what a performance by Robert Downey Jr.! It might be his best ever, and the turns are brilliantly written as the truth only gradually becomes apparent – it had me distrusting what I knew about Strauss in the moment as a young teenager, was I wrong? Downey plays it perfectly, Strauss’s petty perfidy and consummate skills as a bureaucratic infighter etched for all time, in black and white.
Nolan makes the whole story mythic, how the power was unleashed by people who all saw only slivers of the picture. Scientists as technicians who think they know more than that, political and military figures who know more than the scientists about the world as it is but have less vision of what is possible, perhaps, or perhaps more clarity about what is realistic in international relations. It could go this way –we could trust each other and find a common path to peace — says Oppie. I didn’t see it in the movie, maybe I missed it, but Einstein said to him, don’t you see, they need you, you don’t need them, walk away. But then, that’s Einstein, aware of his own weaknesses, of the reality of everyday life and love that we saw in that series where he can’t handle women. Einstein dives back into his private life — contemplating sitting on light beams (and feeding ducks) — but Oppie can’t do that. He’s in the game, which isn’t to say he knows how to play it. Einstein thinks he’s foolish for that; I think Oppie feels an admirable imperative to be more socially responsible than Einstein. But people are different.
And then there are the sex scenes – brief but enjoyable, female nudity presented without shame or desire. The burden that wife Kitty has to bear with this husband whose capacity for showing affection might be limited but whose libido is not, and she’s had her own troubles, of course. I think people tend to treat the sexual foibles of the scientists with less compassion than they should; here the sex is just backdrop to the main issue — the unlocking of the secrets of the gods by mortals, so compassion for foibles is in short supply. People just open the damn locked box because they are people.
The picture we get is of a scientific genius becoming an organizational genius who bumbles through his private life (although he’s shown as very brave politically in resisting social pressure to join the Party). We’re back in the era of smart scientists who think life could be organized scientifically as socialism because it’s only rational, of politicians who don’t realize that it’s not a new weapon but a new world – all this makes you think, how can Armageddon not happen, one way or the other? An unanswered question, likely for all time, until it’s decided unfavorably, and then we know. (See my review of Daniel Ellsberg’s final book: The Doomsday Machine – First of the Month.)
It’s not disrespectful to make these events into a story, into myth. The spectacular use of special effects — prospects of dead and disfigured people in blanched-out flashes as projections of Oppie’s guilty conscience (or a seer’s vision of reality as seen by gods) — isn’t overdone, as it could well have been. The quieting in the soundtrack of screaming crowds and explosions you half-expect to see, the counterpoint to the insistent music (that, saying it again, I didn’t like any better here than in Dunkirk), that’s fine, too. Not too flashy-for-flashy’s sake, more masterful, I’d say.
So, finally, a brilliant movie that I was set to dislike. Maybe one of the great ones. Just goes to show you – don’t predict, let them play the game.