Oppenheimer (Atlas Entertainment, Syncopy, Gadget Films, Universal,, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night (Wednesday, January 10) my husband Charles and I watched Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer, based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman. I hadn’t planned to watch this at first – I’d planned to keep watching MS-NBC with their account of the most recent Republican Presidential debate in Iowa with just two participants, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, and the Donald Trump counter-programming event, a so-called “town-hall” on Fox News – but Charles almost immediately bolted the room when it started and at 7:30, with our dinner ready, I switched to the Jeopardy! rerun and called him back. I hadn’t wanted to do two major events on the same day, but shortly after 8 p.m., with three hours empty in our schedules and a still-sealed copy of the 4K HD Blu-Ray of Oppenheimer, I decided to run it. As I’ve said before in these pages, Christopher Nolan is the filmmaking equivalent of the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead: when he is good, he is very, very good, and when he is bad he is horrid. I’d had high hopes for Oppenheimer because when he’s dealing with a true story he’s usually very good. I gave the best review I’ve ever given a Nolan film to Dunkirk (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/02/dunkirk-warner-brothers-syncopy-dombey.html), his true-life account of the fabled British retreat from Dunkirk, France in 1940, and I was expecting that another World War II story dealing with the Manhattan Project and the race between the U.S. and Nazi Germany to build the world’s first atomic weapon would equally bring out the best in him. Right and wrong; the first hour or so of Oppenheimer is burdened by all too many of the fabled visual effects that drag down a lot of Nolan’s films (including the tendrils across the sky and the stars – apparently representing Oppenheimer’s dreams – that are supposed to give a visual representation to the theory of quantum mechanics) – and also a non-linear time sense.

Nolan, who wrote as well as directed the film, decided to “spine” it around the infamous 1954 hearing by which Oppenheimer was stripped of his U.S. security clearance by a cabal within the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) led by Lewis Strauss (pronounced “Stross,” by the way). I’d just read American Prometheus and it told Oppenheimer’s story in straight chronological order, which frankly would have been better for the film as well. Once Nolan gets Oppenheimer to the desert laboratory at Alamogordo, New Mexico where the Manhattan Project developed, built and tested the first atomic weapons, the film becomes effective drama even though that part of the story has been told quite often (in books like Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in movies like the 1989 Roland Joffé film Fat Man and Little Boy, and even an opera, John Adams’ Doctor Atomic) and Charles made the comment after the film that Peter Sellars’ libretto for Doctor Atomic had given Oppenheimer a sense of humor, which Nolan’s script hadn’t. The film is well cast start to finish; Oppenheimer is played by Cillian Murphy (who pronounces his first name with a hard “C,” like “Killian,” by the way), whom I first saw in Neil Jordan’s 2005 film Breakfast on Pluto (Jordan’s second film about a Trans character, after The Crying Game), and he brings a quite effective and workable combination of intellectual airiness and authority to the role. General Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer’s commander at the Manhattan Project – who was played by Paul Newman in Fat Man and Little Boy – here is Matt Damon, who’s also quite effective in the role. The women in Oppenheimer’s life include Emily Blunt as his wife Kitty and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, the woman he’d been dating when he met Kitty (who was already married to someone else; one thing that comes through in the movie and even more so in the Bird/Sherman book is Oppenheimer’s airy disregard for conventional social expectations of monogamy; this is definitely a story that contradicts the reputation scientists have of being almost asexual because they’re so consumed with their work!). During his work on the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer spent an unauthorized absence for a weekend to be with Jean and have sex with her before Jean, apparently still feeling depressed by her abandonment by Oppenheimer, committed suicide.

But what ultimately did him in politically was his Left-wing political past; in 2023 Cold War historian Barton J. Bernstein concluded that Oppenheimer had secretly been a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Apparently he based that conclusion on evidence that hadn’t been available to Bird and Sherman when they wrote American Prometheus in 2005, but even if Oppenheimer himself hadn’t been a Communist, plenty of his family members and friends had been. Among them were Kitty Oppenheimer (who said she’d been a Communist until she left the Party in 1936), his brother Frank Oppenheimer (Dylan Arnold) and Frank’s wife Jackie (Emma Dumont), as well as friends like physicist Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall). Oppenheimer seems to have been a victim of a classic change in the political “line” the U.S. was as vulnerable to as the Soviet Union; elements in his past that were considered tolerable by the American government when the big enemy was German and Italian fascism and Japanese imperialism were suddenly beyond the pale when the U.S.-Soviet alliance broke down and the Soviet Union emerged as America’s big enemy after World War II. Oppenheimer was attacked, and his loyalty questioned, when he opposed the development of physicist Edward Teller’s (Benny Safdie) dream project of a hydrogen bomb, the so-called “Super.” His stated reason was that there was no conceivable purpose for a hydrogen bomb other than to obliterate entire cities and their civilian populations, but in the McCarthyite political climate of the early 1950’s Oppenheimer could be (and was) accused of deliberately delaying or blocking production of the “Super” to give the Soviets an edge in the arms race. At the same time, the relative positions of Oppenheimer and Teller didn’t always align the way modern readers would think they would; in the days before “Trinity” (the New Mexico test of the first atomic weapon in July 1945) Teller had opposed the use of the bomb on a Japanese city – while Oppenheimer was for it because he hoped that obliterating a city, including its civilian population, would demonstrate that the A-bomb was such a terrible weapon humanity would draw back from ever using it again. (So far, at least, he’s been right.) Teller had also warned of the possibility that an atomic explosion would literally detonate the atmosphere and lead to the immediate end of all life on earth, and he even prepared a set of equations allegedly demonstrating this – while Oppenheimer thought that was B.S. and showed Teller’s equations to Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), who agreed with Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer’s public role between the end of World War II and the denial of his security clearance in 1954 (which basically put an end to his public role as a spokesperson on atomic energy, though he lived for 13 more years as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where, ironically enough, Lewis Strauss was his boss) was basically to argue for the U.S. to share its nuclear secrets with the world. He correctly predicted that the Soviet Union would have its own nuclear weapon in three to four years (the Soviets fired their first A-bomb in 1949 and, ironically, the physicist in charge of their nuclear program, Andrei Sakharov, ran afoul of his country’s political police, too) and thought the idea that one or more spies at Los Alamos had stolen the secret of the bomb and given it to the Soviets was ridiculous. At the same time there’d been at least one genuine Russian spy at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham), who unlike most of the alleged “atom spies” was a physicist with direct knowledge of key A-bomb data and enough understanding of it to communicate both the information and its importance to the Soviets. (Because Fuchs had naturalized as a British citizen before the war, when he was caught and charged with espionage he was tried in Britain under British law, and therefore escaped the death sentences imposed on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were tried and convicted for being part of Fuchs’s plot. Instead he was sentenced to 10 years at Wormwood Scrubs Prison and, when he was released, he was relocated to East Germany, where he returned to nuclear physics and spent the rest of his career there.)

Overall, Oppenheimer is a film that does justice to its story and its subject matter, though some of Christopher Nolan’s affectations as a director do get in the way. There’s a shot of Oppenheimer envisioning the deaths of children from the atomic attack on Hiroshima, and the first time we saw a girl’s face literally melt from her body it’s shocking and makes the point Nolan intended. But he can’t stop there; he has to repeat the shot several times, and each time it loses a bit of its dramatic effect and point. Ultimately, we think, “Chris, knock it off, already!” One of the best aspects of Oppenheimer is its skill at depicting the relationship between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss – played by Robert Downey, Jr., who won a Golden Globe for the role. Strauss actually comes off as a more sympathetic and multidimensional character in the movie than he did in the Bird/Sherman book; the biographers made him a pretty one-dimensional villain but Nolan makes him something more than that. Lewis Strauss did some good things in his life, like lobby (unsuccessfully, alas) for a bill in the late 1930’s that would have admitted more Jewish refugees from Nazism to the U.S. At the same time he had such a reputation for ideological rigidity that one of his colleagues at the Atomic Energy Commission said, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you're just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.”

The consensus seems to be that Oppenheimer had ridiculed Strauss during a public hearing on whether the U.S. should supply radioactive isotopes to Norway for medical use. Oppenheimer favored it; Strauss opposed it on security grounds, and in a public hearing (effectively dramatized in the film – in fact, with Nolan’s Cuisinart editing style, we see it several times) ridiculed the idea that you could make an A-bomb with those isotopes by saying you could make one out of sandwiches or beer. Supposedly Strauss never forgave Oppenheimer for the public ridicule and ultimately set out to destroy Oppenheimer’s public reputation. He achieved it, but at the cost of his own as well; in 1958, when President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Strauss as Secretary of Commerce (oddly, the film tells us he was in line for a Cabinet appointment but doesn’t specify which one), U.S. Senator Clinton Anderson (D-New Mexico) led the fight against his confirmation and he was ultimately rejected, 49 to 46. One of the deciding votes against him was cast by Senator John F. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), who during his short-lived Presidency actually invited Oppenheimer to the White House in 1962 – though it wasn’t until December 16, 2022, 68 years after Oppenheimer’s security clearance was taken away and 55 years after his death in 1967 (from lung cancer quite probably brought on by Oppenheimer’s consistent tobacco use), that U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm formally rescinded the withdrawal of his clearance. It’s an indication of how “live” the issues raised by Oppenheimer are today that Donald Trump (who has at least one degree-of-separation political connection to Joe McCarthy: his former attorney, the late Roy Cohn, who was the Rosenbergs’ prosecutor and McCarthy’s chief of staff and later masterminded Trump’s rise from minor real-estate developer in the outer boroughs of New York City to crack the sacred precincts of Manhattan) has pledged to use McCarthy-style tactics to rout his political “enemies.” In a speech in New Hampshire on Veterans’ Day 2023, Trump said that if he’s returned to the Presidency in this year’s election he’ll attack “the radical Left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He declared, “[T]he real threat is not from the radical Right, the real threat is from the radical Left,” openly promising that we’ll be in for a new McCarthy era if Trump is re-elected President.