Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a staggering reckoning with history

A little after halfway through Oppenheimer, fresh off the success of the Trinity atomic bomb testing near his beloved Los Alamos in the US state of New Mexico, the film’s titular protagonist learns that Little Boy, the atomic bomb he helped develop, has been dropped on Hiroshima. J Robert Oppenheimer’s invention is a raging success, as the then-US president Harry S Truman informs him. But the former cannot be persuaded. The shock of his promethean act takes away the light in his eyes, and when it comes back, it betrays the horror of a man who knows he might have just irreversibly destroyed the world. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not about you,” a surly Truman tells him before shutting the door on him.

Truly, they are not about Oppenheimer.

Early impressions and reviews on social media have complained that Nolan’s 12th is misinformed and a whitewashing of the life of a man held directly responsible for the most catastrophic act of war modern humanity has seen. But contrary to claims that it is an irresponsible romanticisation of a tormented white genius, Oppenheimer is actually a brave documentation of post-WWII tensions and the West’s obsession with left-wing politics, both of which hounded a man they would have held as the highest patriot had he not been, well, himself.

The biopic is a tough genre, prone to quickly becoming episodic and self-important, crawling with banal-seeming historical detail and other superficial (but indispensable) storytelling aids. Oppenheimer, a staggering saga of a chequered life, doesn’t quite set out intending to change that either. In the first half, the story partly laboriously and partly with flair (thanks to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and composer Ludwig Göransson) embarks upon building the titular protagonist’s world.

It is composed, as those more familiar with American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer might realise, of his upbringing in a well-to-do Jewish American family, his early scientific inclinations and later-day inescapable political affiliations through friends and acquaintances. Nolan in a recent interview refused to ever direct a TV show but one wonders if this world-building would flow and cause a more powerful catharsis, if Oppenheimer were to be made as a four- or six-part series. Anyway, within his chosen framework, he does manage to austerely cull episodes from his protagonist’s life that contribute to his tragic unmaking. His love affair with Jean Tatlock, psychiatrist and member of the Communist Party of the USA, his relationship with his brother and the latter’s friends and acquaintances, his marriage and appointment as the director of the Manhattan Project — are all crucial to the brave exposition this film is envisioned for.

What this film does aim to do is negotiate with the post-WWII world in the most poetic manner as regards the character of a man seen ostensibly as one of science’s worst fiends in the context of the violence his research precipitated. Who was he, after all, procurer of the fire that ended more than two lakh lives in a matter of a few weeks and unleashed terror of unprecedented scale upon the innocent citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? To see this film as causing erasure of the victims is to watch it a bit wrong. The trauma of the twin bombings exists and is continually acknowledged and will forever be — it is part of the chronology of world events that has formed the consciousness of the epoch directly following it.

That’s the unquestionable context and historical basis this film emerges from. Employing three timelines — the rise of Oppenheimer to the upper echelons of world scientists amid a tense WWII and anti-communist hysteria and his role as director of the Manhattan Project, his appointment to the Atomic Energy Center and finally a systematic smear campaign involving protracted surveillance, a bogus investigation and ultimate branding as a Soviet spy — this Nolan-style exposition of ’50s Americana is more about the demons that hound Oppenheimer both within and in the physical world that he inhabits.

Nolan regular Cilian Murphy, known to mainstream film lovers as crime boss Tommy Shelby (Peaky Blinders), endows it with just the sort of crazy duality and indecision that might go on to entrench him as Oppenheimer in public memory in just the way that Lawrence of Arabia (1962) did for Peter O’Toole. Murphy lets the porkpie hat- and cigar-loving physicist consume him, staring into the camera and away into the distance with his blue-eyed gaze. Robert Downey Jr proves a capable back-stabbing foil for Nolan’s tragic hero, and the likes of Rami Malek, Gary Oldman and Casey Affleck make memorable brief appearances. Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock could feel underwhelming in this film that so many other characters to accommodate and motivations to acknowledge, even as Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer shines, especially towards the conclusion of the film.

At three hours, Oppenheimer needs you to come having eaten well (rest assured you won’t nod off) but that’s not the grouse. Those used to crisper lengths may feel it is forced to rush through certain establishing episodes and junctures of the protagonist’s life, especially in the first half, and on screen they could feel extraneous if you’ve read the book. Nolan, however, isn’t one to tell a story in the most obvious way, so he closes in on the centre of his film from various positions, following the personally motivated surveillance and inquest of Oppenheimer’s post-atomic bomb life with intrigue. The reward is a quintessentially Nolan payoff. Throw the unsettling score in and you have a delicious quagmire to step into.