Do you recall this line in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005)?: “Theatricality and deception are powerful agents.” There are any number of film directors who could whitewash a man who ought to have been tried for war crimes into a misunderstood genius. It takes someone like Nolan to completely convince you that you’d absolve such a man of your own volition. So superb is Oppenheimer’s cinematography. So subtle yet surgically precise is its sense of theatre. And so seamlessly does Cillian Murphy transform into the titular character – Robert J Oppenheimer, ‘the Father of the Atomic Bomb’ – as he came to be known.
In Nolan’s preferred style of non-linear storytelling, Oppenheimer shifts back and forth between key events in the 1940s during and after World War 2. We see what led to the making of the two atomic bombs that slaughtered at least 140,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The estimate is from the time, but the actual number of deaths that occurred in the years that followed are believed to be much higher. We see how the Arms Race between the US and its one-time ally, the then Soviet Union, would come to unfold. We also see the famous trial of Oppenheimer–not for the death and destruction rained down on Japan, but over the revoking of his security clearance.
Yet in the same breath, Nolan offers critique of US policies about the stockpiling of weapons. There is even a critique of the McCarthy-era Red Scare–a time of intense state persecution of America’s Left. What throws you off about Oppenheimer’s politics is that, despite every flaw, it is plainly Nolan’s anti-war movie. It feels like a sincere enough warning in the wake of how the Russia-Ukraine war has played out so far.
There is a dreadful terror Nolan evokes that shifts beyond the cinematic to a prophetic revelation of a world-ending future. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is both an Oracle and conflicted enabler of mass murder. As the movie itself acknowledges, by the time preparations were in full swing for the Manhattan Project, as the building of the atom bomb was named, Hitler was already dead. Japan’s armies were decimated and on the verge of losing. Yet, not one, but two atom bombs were dropped on the basis of the argument that it would quicken the end of the war. The film ensures to stir your suspicion of this spurious claim which is still taught in our history books. That he accomplished this with a heavy reliance on practical effects and very limited CGI is a testament to Nolan’s filmmaking skills.
Despite all this, if you pick apart the film’s ideas a little more, something far less impressive is fuelling the story. This is Nolan’s second take on WW2 after Dunkirk (2017): another film with breathtaking cinematography, intelligent storytelling and acting. But also a film so feverishly nationalistic, that it drew the endorsement of far-right politician and former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage.
Oppenheimer’s politics is more complex than that of Dunkirk’s, though there are two striking similarities. One is the idea of a plucky little group beating the odds at a time when half the world was at war. In Dunkirk this idea was presented through Britain's imagination of itself regardless of its global imperialism. In Oppenheimer it is the team of scientists sequestered away at the secret military base in New Mexico’s Los Alamos. The success of the Trinity Test in the Los Alamos canyons is shown as a moment of scientific triumph and joy; a bloodless precursor to the slaughter awaiting Japan.
The second similarity in that regard to Dunkirk, is historical erasure. In Dunkirk, it was the absence of Black and Brown soldiers forcibly enlisted from Britain’s colonies in South Asia and Africa. The Trinity Test was not, as Oppenheimer will have you believe, bloodless. Underestimation of the test bomb’s nuclear fallout radius, failure to evacuate people nor even adequetly inform them of danger, led to a generation of people who came to be called the Tularosa Basin Downwinders. As the anti-nuclear weapon organisation ICAN points out, the people who lived downwind – Americans – from the test site faced multiple health conditions. ICAN also says that the nuclear fallout led to infant mortality rates in New Mexico reaching 56%.
Then there is the character of Robert J Oppeheimer himself. Cilian Murphy fits the Hollywood-type of high cheekbones and sharp jawlines; white male actors playing misunderstood, lonely geniuses. Similar to Benedict Cumberbatch or Eddie Redmayne. It is a complex role, but still an existing trope – that of excusing abrasive behaviour as eccentric brilliance. Yet, Murphy is an actor meant for complexity of character. The success of the gangster period drama Peaky Blinders, for example, is in no small part due to Murphy’s performance. But the real-life Oppenheimer, record shows, was not as remorseful as Murphy and Nolan tell you he was. This is the complexity entirely missing from Nolan’s version that regardless of everything, gives you a hero.
On that note, where Nolan really could have simplified matters is in the confounding aspect ratio and the requirement of special screens. Unless one is seated in the ideal rows Nolan recommends at a 70mm IMAX screen (that India doesn’t have), the IMAX experience, at least for Indian viewers, is going to be underwhelming. Off-centre seats, especially in a smaller-sized IMAX theatre, gives you a bizarrely narrowed down view almost throughout the film. At the premium prices that tickets and theatre food are selling, it would be advisable to wait until you can get the right seats.
Go watch Oppenheimer for the stars of the show. Pitted against Murphy is a Robert Downey Jr utterly unrecognisable from his ten-year run as Marvel’s Tony Stark. Career-defining roles can often weigh down how an actor is seen for the rest of their lives. While it is a credit to their performance in that role it could also prove to be a detriment. Downey startles you, not only because of the ageing-process Nolan has used, but also by the slow unravelling of his character of Lewis Strauss, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Matt Damon as Lieutenant General Leslie Groves is a solid, grounded counter to Oppenheimer’s more erratic personality.
It is Downey and Murphy, however, who bring to screen a far better envisioned chemistry than what Murphy has with either of his female co-stars Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh. Does Nolan really understand how to write women characters is a question his films keep demanding you ask. Pugh as Jean Tatlock, a strident Communist and love-interest to Oppenheimer, is a tormented, unpredictable soul. Why she is so remains a baffling mystery. Blunt as the wife, Kitty Oppenheimer, appears no less tormented with only marginally more clarity on why that is either.
Oppenheimer also boasts a parade of lead actors, guest appearances and extended cameos that leaves you wondering who is not in the movie. Still, it’s a fun experience to spot favourite stars beneath the surprising make-overs Nolan has given them.
The story’s frenetic shifts between different events preceding the creation of the atom bomb and after can be dizzying without some fundamental knowledge of that period’s history. And even with an understanding, the movie can be misleading.
Oppenheimer is a film for the conscience of white liberal America. At the surface there are several commendable stances the film takes. It rightly denounces war, anti-Semitism and weapons stockpiling – the obviously ugly things a nation can produce. Go deeper, and you realise that the systems of abuse and historic erasure that the US is built on, acknowledgement of which is a far more uncomfortable political process, is blissfully missing. The film is a symptom of American exceptionalism that continues to inform the country’s popular culture.