Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023).
The critical debates surrounding Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s sprawling portrait of the “father of the atomic bomb,” offer a fascinating window into an industry reckoning with the fate of its most elusive creature: the summer blockbuster. Along with its better half in the joint entity now known as “Barbenheimer,” the film has been burdened with the responsibility of saving motion pictures from financial apocalypse and existential crises. Financially, its impact has been staggering: in July 2023 alone—the second-best month ever in the history of US box office returns, per Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro—“Barbenheimer” racked up a combined $547.8 million; Greta Gerwig’s Barbie netted the month’s highest gross of $366.4 million, and Nolan’s epic followed at $181.4 million. But the portmanteau has only blurred the crucial differences between the two, not to mention the many ways in which Nolan’s latest both indulges and subverts the vernaculars of big studio tentpoles. What’s most fascinating about Oppenheimer—and what makes it such a confounding and exhilarating watch—is that it is a movie-paradox.
Long before its release, Ann Hornaday notes at the Washington Post, the film had been anticipated with some skepticism among filmgoers who wondered “how Nolan’s penchant for Imax cameras and thundering sound designs would serve a story that, at its core, amounts to scenes of different groups of men arguing in different kinds of rooms.” Indeed, Oppenheimer rests on the tension between Nolan’s maximalist, shake-’em-by-the-lapels approach and a character study that’s almost Sorkinian in its emphasis on long and pugilistic conversations. It’s a friction that can make for a lopsided and ungainly experience, especially once the film passes the apocalyptic Trinity Test scene; after two hours of buildup, the film devotes its final hour to psychological fallout and claustrophobic legal proceedings. Once a hero, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) must confront, in a 1954 secret hearing, a kangaroo court hellbent on stripping his top-secret clearance after his resistance to the H-bomb program.
Oppenheimer hopscotches across the timeline throughout, but the chronology settles into two halves. The film’s first part, “Fission,” tails the scientist from his student years to his tenure as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project; the second, “Fusion,” shifts to chronicles Lewis Strauss’s (Robert Downey Jr.) 1958 confirmation hearing to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce—a bid that slowly reveals itself to be indissolubly tied to Oppenheimer’s own parable. Watching this unfold, David Fear suggests at Rolling Stone, “there’s a slight sensation of listening to wind blowing through torn sails.”
In attempting to get a 360-degree picture of his subject’s life and times on as big a scale as possible, it feels as if Nolan occasionally loses sight of the big picture as a whole. Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough.
For Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, nowhere does that “not enough” feeling seem more evident, and more frustrating, than in the Trinity Test scene itself. “Nolan shows it impressionistically—the sound cutting out, images of what look like radioactive hellfire,” yet “the terrifying awesomeness, the nightmare bigness of it all, does not come across.” Richard Lawson echoes this sentiment at Vanity Fair: “That enormous event does arrive, but perhaps not with the theater-rumbling blare that some might hope for in a summer tentpole movie from the high priest of commercial filmmaking.”
Legitimate or not, these remarks are thought-provoking; they chastise the film for not behaving like the big studio popcorn movie it’s been marketed as. Which begs the question: just what kind of blockbuster is Oppenheimer, exactly?
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023).
To be clear, there’s no denying the film’s big studio credentials, or Nolan’s commercial stature. Yet Oppenheimer seems engineered to question its own design. By leaving those Hollywood-friendly climatic explosions somewhere in the middle, and allowing its director to seesaw between grand-scale spectacle and smaller-scale flourishes, the film is rife with micro-macro contradictions. “Oppenheimer is a movie so sprawling it’s difficult to contend with,” Alison Willmore writes at Vulture:
It’s rich, uncompromising, and borderline unwieldy, but more than anything, it’s a tragedy of operatic grandeur despite so many of its scenes consisting of men talking in rooms—conference rooms, Senate chambers, university classrooms, and emptied-out restaurants, all the prosaic places where the fate of the earth gets hashed out. Its scope comes from Murphy’s haunted performance and the way the movie (with help from Ludwig Göransson’s panic attack of a score) submerges you in the mind-set of its protagonist as though it can create a psychic connection to the past.
Still, I’m not entirely convinced Oppenheimer achieves its majestic grandeur despite those frictions. “Nolan’s filmmaking,” Manohla Dargis notes at the New York Times, “is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.” The film’s virtuosity “is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement.” If anything, as Stephanie Zacharek astutely observes at TIME, Nolan blurs the distinction between grandeur and grandiosity, and his film works either despite or because of its awe-inspiring craft and all of these associated paradoxes:
There may be times in Oppenheimer when you look at the screen and think, Oh brother! as Nolan razzle-dazzles us with impressionistic inset shots of psychotically whirling stars and billowing plumes of what looks like molten lava, all while the lead character expounds in voiceover on the nature of matter, the universe, and other stuff. But either despite its intense craft or because of it, Oppenheimer works. In telling the story of genius theoretical physicist and atomic-bomb architect J. Robert Oppenheimer—played, with an almost otherworldly luminosity, by Cillian Murphy—Nolan blurs the distinction between grandeur and grandiosity. Both his subject and his lead actor can stand up to the outsize scale of his approach, so why shouldn’t he go for broke? So few filmmakers know how to make, or are able to make, pictures this big, about grown-up subjects. Nolan shapes Oppenheimer’s story into something like an epic poem, focusing not just on his most famous achievement, but on everything that happened to him afterward; Nolan is maybe even more interested in Oppenheimer as a complicated, questioning patriot.
Nolan’s emphasis on the darker, more sinister sides of his subject is not the only way in which Oppenheimer defies biopic conventions. Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the film doesn’t just stand as an anti-“great-man” biopic because the man at its center is hardly a hero, but because a faithful portrait of him is hardly schematic. Oppenheimer trades a straightforward, three-act trajectory for something much more elusive and sinuous, switching as it does between timelines, frames and perspectives, aspect ratios, and color and black-and-white. “Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do,” Matt Zoller Seitz suggests at RogerEbert.com, “and they also capture what it's like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling).” In that, Oppenheimer may well stand as a groundbreaking juncture in the director’s oeuvre:
Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated, but ultimately muddled and simplistic blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stories. But whether that characterization was ever entirely true (and I'm increasingly convinced that it never was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it's been applied to a biography of a real person. It seems possible that "Oppenheimer" could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director's filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he'd been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward, using them to explore the innermost recesses of the mind and heart, not just to move human pieces around on a series of interlinked, multi-dimensional storytelling boards.
Whether or not the film succeeds in dissecting its subject’s personality, however, is a different question. I wouldn’t go as far as to reduce Oppenheimer to a “movie-length Wikipedia article,” as Richard Brody does at the New Yorker, but there’s certainly room to question the film’s connect-the-dots logic, and the way Nolan sometimes seems to cut his scenes to fit like a jigsaw puzzle, so that “the details that don’t fit—contradictions, subtleties, even little random peculiarities—get left out, and, with them, the feeling of experience, whether the protagonist’s or the viewer’s.” In the end, “detached from the rich particulars of personality and thought, the moral dilemmas and historical stakes that Oppenheimer faces are reduced to an interconnected set of trolley problems—with the historical context flattened to green-screen backgrounds.” Following the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Murphy’s Oppenheimer addresses a triumphal assembly of Los Alamos employees, and while his speech betrays no regrets, Nolan shows what his subject imagines: apocalyptic hallucinations that turn his audience into ash. The choice can be read as further evidence of the director’s failure to articulate the man’s moral crisis:
Representing conscience in this way, wordlessly, enables Nolan to fill the screen with visual fizz, but it doesn’t convey the presence, the inner experience, of a true moral reckoning. That’s because images alone—at least, those which Nolan offers here—can’t suggest the interior debates that must be pulsing through such a conflicted mind at this ghastly moment. Perhaps, in a movie that told its story while ranging further into the realm of visual imagination, the decision would come off as an aesthetic commitment. But, given the plethora of dialogue in “Oppenheimer,” Nolan’s choice to convey Oppenheimer’s inner life solely in images comes off as merely a cinematic prejudice. In “Memento,” Nolan was sufficiently interested in his protagonist’s thoughts to let us hear them, as voice-over; all the more puzzling, then, that we are granted no such access to the inner monologue of someone as literate, reflective, and fascinating as Oppenheimer.
That failure may well derive, as David Ehrlich ponders at IndieWire, from a more systemic difficulty: “the film suffers from an irreconcilable disconnect between form and function because, without the benefit of dream limbos and astral libraries, Nolan doesn’t know how to dramatize what he doesn’t know.” The paradox that compelled the filmmaker to Oppenheimer, Ehrlich adds, “is the same force that keeps his films at a distance.”
Even so, the film’s inability to adequately represent all the horror that fuels it might be among its most intriguing aspects—and one of its greatest strengths. “If the extremely loud and refreshingly serious Oppenheimer is fascinating,” Michael Koresky observes in his illuminating review at Reverse Shot, “it’s maybe less as a Christopher Nolan auteur film than as a case study in how the studio filmmaking apparatus, even and especially when demonstrated as commandingly as it is here, continues to be imprecise and inefficient in representing the magnitude of evil, so wedded is it to specific aesthetic and narrative techniques that are deployed for maximum audience impact.” Like Koresky, watching Oppenheimer jolted me back to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, another film that sought to depict evil, in Koresky’s words, “as both spectacle and banality.” A chronicle of the Holocaust told entirely from the perspective of an Auschwitz commander and his family living a blissful life just next to the camp, that film only intimated the barbarities of the Shoah, without ever showing them.
While Glazer maintains an admirable, scrupulous rigor over this conceit, keeping the drama blandly domestic and sickeningly professional, there are formal flourishes that serve to puncture the film, whether long passages of black screens or intermittent use of a wailing score by Mica Levi—the editorializing of the unspeakable. In its own Hollywood fashion, Oppenheimer similarly demonstrates the irreconcilability of the unfathomable things that men do with the prosaic backroom conversations that make them possible. Its legible narrativization of history functions on one track (the story of a human whose scientific theories proved destructive to all other humans), while, on the other, its more terrifying speculations (the genie-out-of-the-bottle realization that we’ve hastened our own doom) are left to the realm of the invisible, summoned into being by Göransson’s pounding music, Jennifer Lame’s percussive editing, and the gradual hollowing-out of Murphy’s once implacable exterior. The ponderous Oppenheimer is one of the rare Hollywood films that feels fueled by remorse; it may not be the “wildest ride” that Nolan promises, but he finds a way to have his spectacle after all.
The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation.