Recently, it’s felt like Christopher Nolan is at odds with his viewer. There’s a strange antagonism to his storytelling in his past couple of films, less of an invitation into a world than the posing of a challenge — dukes up, narratively.
In 2020’s “Tenet,” and now in “Oppenheimer,” his obfuscation of story can be trying to watch, as we trot behind the auteur, hoping that the complex cinematic bombast will pay off, that it’s not just obfuscation for obfuscation’s sake. Unmoored in time, space, and subjectivity, these films can be a struggle. Take heed the advice of the scientist played by Clémence Poésy in “Tenet” and, “don't try to understand it,” as she tells John David Washington’s Protagonist, “feel it.” The only choice Nolan allows is total submission to his dominance; to stop fighting and allow yourself to be sucked under the visual and sonic riptide that is “Oppenheimer.”
Whether or not that results in an enjoyable viewing experience will depend on the individual audience member. Nolan brings a jagged, dissonant sensibility to his adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s “American Prometheus,” the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played here by Cillian Murphy), the physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb.”
The film opens with a quote about Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, and for this was chained to a rock and tortured for the rest of his existence. Nolan imagines Oppenheimer’s torture as a parade of endless bureaucracy: government surveillance, closed door tribunals, Senate hearings, and of course, award ceremonies and medals for what he has done.
This is not a movie about a bomb, but rather a movie about the U.S. government’s relationship to what it did in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, subsuming the moral stance under piles of paperwork. The film is largely concerned with Adm. Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who both worked and clashed with Oppenheimer after the war. The first and third hours of the three-hour “Oppenheimer” are dedicated almost solely to the machinations of Strauss’ Senate confirmation hearing in 1959, and the 1954 security hearing he convened to subject Oppenheimer to tortuous questioning about his private life and Communist leanings. These two events, five years apart (though not indicated as such), are conflated in the film.
Nolan discards the dates and details of traditional biopic storytelling, which is a frustrating if evocative choice. He thrusts us headlong and simultaneously into the advent and fallout of the nuclear arms race with the same nagging insistence that Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) adopts to recruit Oppenheimer to the Manhattan Project.
The film also switches frequently between black and white and color, and Nolan has said in interviews that the choice reflects a difference between the objective (black and white) and subjective (color) point of view, but a viewer without knowledge of this could not discern that from the internal logic of the film itself. The color swaps sometimes happen mid-scene.
These choices all seem like a strategy to keep us adrift in a shower of science and politics, and therefore, “Oppenheimer” is less about facts and more about feeling. All we have as an anchor are Murphy’s piercing blue eyes, and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema gets his camera up close to capture his nuclear-sized guilt. Oppenheimer is haunted, from the beginning — when he attempts to poison his bully of a physics tutor with a cyanide-laced apple — to the end.
In both the edit, by Jennifer Lame, and the score, by Ludwig Göransson, there is a relentless, agitated pace, skillfully achieved. The edit is especially complex, slamming from scene to scene with little context. The score roars and riles and cajoles; it instructs you to look, pay attention, now. We think we are racing toward the bomb, but the bomb comes and goes. Oppenheimer’s torment is forever.
There’s a dissonance between the rapid-fire dense dialogue and the cinematic effect, which jostles and hurries us along. The only moments when the film is fully present, the form and content aligned, are when Oppenheimer finds himself in a dissociative panic attack, whether eyeing the poisoned apple or lurching through a rah-rah rallying speech post-Hiroshima.
The sound drops out, the camera finds his mottled blue eyes, the roar of feet on wooden bleachers explodes back in with a boom. The edges of the image wobble precariously. When the smoke clears it’s just Oppenheimer and his haunted blue eyes and the sound of a bomb. If one can keep afloat in Nolan’s swiftly running cinematic current, these moments are worth it.
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‘OPPENHEIMER’
2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for some sexuality, nudity and language)
Running time: 3:00
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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