‘Oppenheimer’ Is the Existential Wake-Up Call We All Needed

How do people rationalize the evils they deem necessary? It’s a question that lingers in the background in the films of Cristopher Nolan, and now comes to us fully formed in the shape of Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the famed physicist and military hero who became a Red Scare pariah. Oppenheimer (2023) is a dense and wordy biopic on the man who headed the Manhattan project and who Time would later christen the father of the atomic bomb. To say that he was conflicted about his creation is as easy as writing E=MC², but deciphering the logic is more difficult. Yet no other Nolan film has ever been so openly sceptical of the justification of state violence.

For all the talk of ‘Barbenheimer’ – a portmanteau inspired by the simultaneous release of Barbie (2023) and Oppenheimer, which spawned a marketing behemoth – both films have shown a certain uneasiness about revealing their true colours. Just as Mattel undersold the philosophical edge of Greta Gerwig’s live-action romp, Universal leaned hard into Oppenheimer’s explosiveness, fuelled by the promise of a sans-SFX recreation of the 1945 Trinity atomic weapons test. It’s delivered with dazzling grandeur, of course, but like Barbie, Nolan’s film is both a soul-searching summer blockbuster and a meditation on death, one which shows the director grappling with notions of power in a way that goes against the oppressive grain of much of his previous work.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus (2005) and stacked with a roll call of stars and oh it’s that guy character actors, Oppenheimer stretches out over three dialogue-drenched hours. The drama is split between multiple, nonlinear timelines: the physicist’s rise to notoriety in Göttingen and Berkeley; at the height of his powers in Los Alamos; and finally, tired and embittered, being interrogated for alleged connections to the Communist Party.

It's not difficult to imagine as cerebral a filmmaker as Paul Schrader (who came out to bat for Oppenheimer last week) being tickled by the notion of something this vast focusing so closely on one man’s inner turmoil. Oppenheimer is shown reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and admiring a Picasso, as if to suggest that the mind that broke down quantum physics was just as much a modernist as those two objects of his interest. In the frenetic editing (Jennifer Lame) and sound design (Randy Torres), the film pulsates with the potential energy of that mind and its ideas, as Oppenheimer dreams of reality-eating black holes or a nuclear chain reaction that devours the planet. He convinces himself that the bomb will ‘end all wars’ but no sooner has he reached his moment of triumph than he is plagued by nightmares of the horrors he has wrought. ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn,’ Michael Caine’s Alfred explained to Batman in The Dark Knight (2008). Others feel conflicted, but if duty calls they might just do it all the same.

Going against type, Nolan also attempts to tackle Oppenheimer’s romantic life – his marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt) and doomed love affair with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), which builds into the director’s very first sex scene. On the promotional posters and red carpets, Pugh shares top billing with Murphy, Matt Damon (typically solid as Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves) and Robert Downey Jr. (taking a career turn as the antagonist Lewis Strauss), but make no mistake, this is a film about men in rooms arguing over isotopes and labour movements.

Blunt occasionally rises above the fray, delivering one particular riposte with the kind of gravitas that will ensure heavy rotation over the course of the awards season. But of course, this film was always going to live or die by the performance of Cillian Murphy. The Irish actor in many ways is this film, a $100 million USD IMAX production that spends swathes of its lengthy runtime examining the deep-set eyes and gaunt angularity of Murphy’s face. Oppenheimer may be the most human character Nolan has ever put to film but it would be a far poorer one without the actor’s fascinating interiority.

That human touch is the most significant break from the Nolan norm. The monolithic quality of his films (Tenet, 2020), their quasi-philosophical tone and self-seriousness (Interstellar, 2014), their Pyrrhic heroes left to make awful choices (Dunkirk, 2017),  the promise to show you something you’ve never seen before (The Prestige, 2006), have garnered one of modern cinema’s most committed fandoms without ever really grappling with the lives of ordinary people. Released in the climate of the financial crash and Occupy Wall Street, the Blue Lives Matter bent of his Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012) suggested a certain sympathy for authoritarianism: that a great lie is acceptable if it keeps the peace; and that uprisings are there to be squashed, regardless of their popularity. Oppenheimer isn’t perfect, but it’s a frank admission of Nolan’s own political and moral uncertainties and it suggests a move toward a more inward-looking cinema, and perhaps a healthier one for it.  

_{Main image: Oppenheimer, 2023, promotional poster}