OPPENHEIMER: A Review

Oppenheimer: A‌ Landmark Picture

Oppenheimer is a landmark picture in​ many ways, not least because it’s a total throwback. We’re ‌talking about a self-conscious middlebrow ⁣epic about America, once a ⁣subgenre of its own and relatively common product for‌ studios‍ hungry for awards. These⁣ types of films fell radically out of fashion after the 1980s‌ and have barely been attempted since.

In fact, there was just such a movie in 1989⁣ that⁢ covered‌ much the same ground ‌as ⁢ Oppenheimer—a very prestigious historical drama starring Paul Newman⁤ called Fat Man and Little Boy ​ about the project ‌to build an atomic bomb during World War ⁤II. It was overwrought and clunky. But it got made because the people who made ‍it and the people who financed it thought it was the kind of⁤ thing that could win‍ them Oscars and make them a‌ lot of money. And its failure—along with other ​finger-wagging cinematic lectures made⁤ by very rich‍ people⁢ designed⁢ to expose the hoi polloi to the country’s shortcomings‍ and evils—helped bring ​the era‌ of this ‍pompous sub-genre to a close.

At the time, I found these didactic, middlebrow, mostly humorless movies annoying and self-congratulatory, and‌ celebrated their demise. But as the late Terry Teachout once said, there ⁢is a ​cost‌ to the disappearance of the middlebrow. One virtue of middlebrow fare⁤ is that it ​wants to be serious ‌rather than⁤ glib and shallow and to engage with the​ world as it is. When middlebrow movies of this kind—Gandhi, Cry Freedom, The Killing Fields,​ and many others—vanish from the scene, that doesn’t make new space for highbrow stuff, because high culture​ will‍ always be an elite minority taste. Instead,⁣ everything just goes lower.‌ And that’s⁤ exactly what happened with Hollywood. Over the past two decades, movies ‌that try to tell a real story about real people (and I don’t⁢ just mean actual real-life people like Oppenheimer, but ⁣just everyday folk) have gotten smaller ‍and more insignificant. They are ‌unambitious and⁤ unassuming.‍ When they work, they work because they are touching slices of ‍life and seek only to make us shed a tiny tear. ‍They’re not weighty. They’re gossamer.

A Weighty‌ and Magnificent Film

Oppenheimer is weighty, and it’s kind of⁢ magnificent. Writer-director ⁣Christopher Nolan ​has decided the story he is⁢ telling is the most⁣ important story in human history, and⁤ he wants to do it justice. This movie’s level of ambition is something I’m not sure we’ve seen in a major studio⁤ release in decades, ⁣and Nolan is so⁣ skilled a ⁤storyteller and so authoritative a director⁣ that his reach blessedly does ​not exceed his grasp. This‍ is not a subtle ‌movie, and⁤ there’s ‍barely a ‌joke or a laugh​ in it; as in all‌ his ⁤pictures, Nolan presents us with an⁣ earnest, formal,⁤ and heavy world. But⁣ what he doesn’t do is preach, ‌and that is what makes this ​movie such a triumph. Oppenheimer is⁢ a wildly ambiguous portrait of its titular⁢ subject, the work ⁤he did, ⁤the life he led, and even the humiliation​ to which he was subjected by political and⁤ ideological enemies. The⁤ titanic performance​ of ​Cillian Murphy, who does ⁢nothing to ingratiate himself with the audience, takes this‌ incredibly complex⁣ and deeply ⁤troubled man ‍and follows him through four decades of scientific growth, political activism, engineering achievement, and raw power politics.‍ And it does a ⁤beautiful job posing ⁤the key question of his life without answering it: In ‌doing something ‍transcendently great, ⁣did he do something evil?

The⁤ movie is far more ambiguous, in ⁤fact, ‍than its​ source material—the Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus. That book, coauthored by a longtime editor and columnist for the Communist-apologia rag called The‌ Nation, is ​an apologia for Oppenheimer,⁣ written as such to defend his noxious radical⁣ politics in the 1930s and to⁤ salute his visionary advocacy of ⁢a lunatic one-world-government approach ‍he advocated in⁤ the⁣ wake⁣ of the bomb he helped create. The book⁤ both soft-pedals⁤ and ‍excuses the very real evidence that Oppenheimer had been a secret member of the Communist Party in the 1930s.​ He⁢ was, the authors claim‌ hollowly, just a “social-justice” advocate rather than someone who believed the future was to be found in ⁢Stalin’s Soviet Union. The⁣ book ⁣also tries to justify the fact that he‍ had lied about his associations to the government—first, when seeking his security clearance in 1942 and then,​ 12 years later, when⁣ that security clearance was up for ​renewal—because ​he was a good friend and a good brother. While the movie follows the course charted by American Prometheus, ⁤it never really sides ‌with Oppenheimer, even as it does accept the‌ idea that the bureaucratic war we see waged on ⁢him in the movie’s final hour was a set-up ⁣job.

It’s ‌an immensely complicated ⁣life story and⁤ one of the best⁤ biopics ever made. There is much to argue over here, especially the movie’s depiction of Oppenheimer’s key ‍antagonist, Lewis Strauss (played​ dazzlingly by Robert Downey⁢ Jr.). Was the dispute between ⁤them really‍ a matter of wounded pride ⁢rather than a ‌deadly ​serious ideological and geopolitical‍ dispute over⁤ how​ best to manage the nuclear age with an extraordinarily dangerous Communist regime in Russia on the‍ other side of the equation?

The point is that American⁣ movies haven’t asked ⁢these questions for so long it’s revivifying to have them addressed at all. There won’t be a better film ⁣this year than Oppenheimer. There might ⁣not have been a better film in the past 10 years.