Oppenheimer film review — Christopher Nolan delivers the bomb but can’t crack the man

Receive free Film updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Film news every morning.

No action figures are yet being sold of J Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb. He is the stuff of a lavish summer blockbuster all the same: Oppenheimer, a $100mn, Imax-ready portrait from writer-director Christopher Nolan. It makes an unlikely Hollywood prospect. The film doesn’t just forego superheroes, it is steeped in the very definition of the all-too-human. Feel the tortured ambivalence; witness the dark shadow of doubt. A popcorn trail that leads to Hiroshima: a high-risk strategy.

The star is Cillian Murphy, whose weight loss for the part leaves it looking like the bomb was created by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne in the era of concert movie Stop Making Sense. Supporting him, a giant cast includes Emily Blunt as wife Kitty Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr playing Washington insider Lewis Strauss; among the throng are Kenneth Branagh, Florence Pugh and Tom Conti, as an avuncular Einstein. 

The film runs three hours precisely. This is also the typical length of an exam in many British university finals, a rhyme with early scenes of the fragile young Oppenheimer at Cambridge. And with the film as a whole, in truth, which can feel like an undergraduate essay, packing in factoids to mop up marks. It also has a touch of psychoanalysis: Nolan sure that if he aims the camera at Murphy just-so, his character will crack right open.

Put like that, it sounds hubristic. The film still has much to recommend it. Nolan taps the full sensory potential of moviemaking, pushing picture and sound to meet the scale of the story: clever lines dot the script; the whole project is admirably willing to wrestle with matters of great weight through cinema. But the source is a book: a credit given to Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin for their 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer. 

All to the good. A gifted choreographer, Nolan has also long struggled with rendering characters in three dimensions. Bird and Sherwin have done the legwork for him: the principals come with rich biographies and ready-to-go dialogue. The book also provides the story’s basic shape: a Greek tragedy, structured around the trial-by-any-other-name Oppenheimer faced during the postwar inquisitions of Joseph McCarthy.

Physicist, womaniser, linguist, leftist, enigma, coward, genius. The film must find room for many Oppenheimers. It duly shows how illusory the divides between them were, one Oppenheimer habitually setting off chain reactions that imperil another. 

And yet here, not all are created equal. Blue eyes gleaming, Murphy’s sheer charisma is often the glue that holds the film together. But the through-line from one part of his character to another can be hard to track. We see cocksure intellect, for instance, but have to take on trust that the same man could also be a shrewd handler of personnel, taking charge of the rogue elements building a nuclear weapon in desert Los Alamos, New Mexico.

That period claims much of Nolan’s focus. Of course. This is the crux; the crossroads. But you sense a second reason for Nolan glomming hard on to the moment. As a creative hub thrown up out of plywood, Los Alamos resembles a movie set as the second Oppenheimer becomes director of his band of mercurial talents, facing down bad weather while a producer hovers in the form of US Army Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon). At one point, the script calls its subject the most important man in history. Oh, you think: and yet here we are watching another film about filmmaking.

Still, to quote Robert Shaw in Jaws, Nolan delivers the bomb. He can be an astonishing image-maker. The test in the New Mexico desert is all that and more, the mushroom cloud a strange white apparition, dread and wonder on the watching sun-goggled faces. (“It hardens the heart,” Oppenheimer says, hauntingly.) For all Nolan’s unease with inner lives, Oppenheimer is at its most effective shrunk down to faces and human drama: Los Alamos lost in queasy jubilation after Hiroshima, the scientist’s later hounding driven by one small man’s grudge. What an indictment. The species still so petty, even now. 

The film also overplays that hand. The decision to treat the background to the trial like a gaudy whodunnit is misjudged. The storytelling is fumbled too, key scenes saddled with flashbacks and distracting flips between black-and-white and colour. When Oppenheimer needs a spotlight, Nolan puts on a firework display. And the detail comes to feel scattershot; unthinking. (We still never see the moment in Bird and Sherwin’s book where, sharing a lift with McCarthy himself, Oppenheimer gave the senator a wink.)

For all the hint of Hollywood in Los Alamos, Christopher Nolan isn’t Robert Oppenheimer. Nor is he Stanley Kubrick, who gave us that deathless nuclear comedy, Dr Strangelove. Kubrick was brilliant; Nolan is proficient. You may still find that his new film stays with you for days, turning itself over in your mind. And if that owes as much to Oppenheimer as Oppenheimer, the pair do have much in common: each as bold as they are flawed, two contradictory equations.

★★★★☆

In cinemas from July 21