Justice for the Women of ‘Oppenheimer’

Let me begin by saying that I worship at the altar of Christopher Nolan. From The Prestige to The Dark Knight, Inception to Dunkirk, I can never resist his particular brand of steely, high-concept blockbusters—their knotty plots, epic cinematography, thundering scores, sleek interiors, and mysterious and tortured protagonists. However, these thrills are almost always accompanied by what I consider to be the auteur’s Achilles heel: namely, a penchant for populating his films with severely under-developed female characters.

There are arguably a couple of exceptions—perhaps Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain’s NASA scientists in Interstellar, though they, too, are largely defined by their relationships with the men in the film. Beyond that, however, it’s a veritable wasteland of dead wives who serve to motivate the male leads (Jorja Fox in Memento, Piper Perabo and Rebecca Hall in The Prestige, Marion Cotillard in Inception, Matthew McConaughey’s character’s wife in Interstellar); dead love interests (Lucy Russell in Following, Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight); murdered teenage girls (Crystal Lowe in Insomnia); women desperately in need of rescuing (Katie Holmes in Batman Begins, Elizabeth Debicki in Tenet); dead villains (Marion Cotillard in The Dark Knight Rises, Dimple Kapadia in Tenet); and peppy sidekicks (Hilary Swank in Insomnia, Scarlett Johansson in The Prestige, Elliot Page in Inception, Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises). And then there’s Dunkirk which, of course, has no named female characters at all.

So, when the news came that Nolan’s next eye-popping extravaganza, Oppenheimer, a barnstorming biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb, would feature two prominent and meaty parts for women—his wife, the biologist and botanist Kitty, as played by Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh as his former lover, the psychiatrist Jean Tatlock—it was certainly heartening. The spotlight would, naturally, remain on the titular theoretical physicist (the formidable Cillian Murphy) as he grappled with the legacy of his era-defining creation, alongside a bevy of scientists, generals and political operatives embodied by the likes of Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, and Gary Oldman. But my hope was that these two revered British stalwarts, new to the Nolan universe, would get a chance to make their mark on it, too.

Sadly, they’re not given quite enough room to do this—relegated to the peripheries in every sense. Firstly, there’s Blunt’s Kitty, who, when she’s seen on screen for the first time, is literally nothing more than an impeccably dressed, red-lipsticked blur that lurks in the corner over the shoulder of Murphy’s Oppenheimer as he’s grilled during his 1954 security hearing. Even though she was, by all accounts, a highly intelligent and fascinating woman, we’re then introduced to her in a flashback as a drunken, somewhat ditzy flirt who’s viewed in relation to two men—Oppenheimer, to whom she’s obviously attracted, and her husband at the time. When she later delivers a monologue to him that condenses her biography to date, its focus is on her three previous marriages, including that with Joseph Dallet, through whom she became affiliated with the Communist Party—an association which later negatively impacts Oppenheimer.