I have never been a great fan of Nolan in the same way I am of Coppola, Scorsese, Malick, Stone, Fincher, or Tarantino. I am not mentioning the masters of the US that came before. Memento grabbed my attention as a new approach to narrative. Then nothing else. The first one that truly excited me was Dunkirk. All the rest were big-budget fantasy in the garb of timeless existentialism.
Watching Oppenheimer was such a huge impact that I decided to drop to my knees and write this. Yes, it is one of the greatest semi-biopics ever made. A cinema that actually captures the turning point of human history and its complex moral questions now that the bomb has a place almost in all nations, big or insignificant.
Nolan’s almost factual semi-biopic on J. Robert Oppenheimer is not about the bomb, per se, neither about its test in New Mexico, nor about the catastrophic disaster at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s about the complex minds of many who took the decision of changing the course of this universe. Here, Lewis Strauss, senior member of the Atomic Energy Commission (the most complex performance by Robert Downey Jr), is as important as the military handler at Los Alamos, General Leslie Groves (a delicious Matt Damon). It makes Edward Teller the hydrogen bomb maker, a fellow scientist at the Manhattan Project (a brilliant Benny Safdie) as decisive as the leader of the disaster Oppenheimer himself (a harrowingly titanic performance by Cillian Murphy).
Thus, Oppenheimer is actually a disaster film of many minds and their deviously desperate attempt to end the Second World War which was already on its knees. Nolan’s structure is similar to that of Oliver Stone’s JFK. It’s about many people and issues. It’s about communism being different to the communist party. It’s about the conflicts between scientific and personal minds. It’s about the right of the individual to take history into his or her hands. It’s about the two-faced democracy of the US.
Finally, it’s not just about the destruction of Hiroshima but the destruction of Oppenheimer himself. The irony is that Nolan’s film is edited in such a way that it recreates the basic theory of splitting the atom which results in a domino effect that causes a chain reaction beyond control. Nolan’s depiction of Oppenheimer is the chain reaction caused by Oppenheimer himself, that destroys him.
My best film on war to date is Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Nolan takes it to another level of complex guilt that doesn’t care about a lavish extravaganza. It concentrates on the human faces. Close-ups. Dialogue. Chamber tension.
The beginning of Oppenheimer was during his homesick period in the UK where he met with Niels Bohr whom he saved (fictionalised). His tedious rise in the University of California, Berkley, and his communist connections. The building up of the Manhattan Project in New Mexico under Sergeant Groves and his team of world-famous scientists leading to the testing of the bomb at Los Alamos. His falling out with Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission and Strauss’s absolutely logical yet ethically wrong decision at the trial. Oppenheimer’s security clearance trail which destroyed him.
All these five parts are constantly intercut with his private and sexual encounters with his communist lover, Left-minded but non-communist party member wife, and his communist brother. All these are further interjected with sounds of bomb effects and a brilliant background score by Ludwig Göransson interspersed from the very beginning. It creates a collage that is so riveting that I was left with no choice but to accept and understand the mind of the genius I hated since my youth, J Robert Oppenheimer.
Everything is said blatantly in the film. You don’t have to be very clever to understand it. Unfortunately, I saw it at a multiplex where I was constantly disturbed by the young audience who were busy taking their selfies in the theatre and not watching the film. I was angry at them. After the screening, I felt so numb that I realised many young folks are actually not aware of what a nuclear weapon means. To them it's like it happened somewhere else and does not affect them. They came out gleefully having another Nolan in their pocket.
I was reminded of the scene where President Truman (a super Gary Oldman) in the movie who called Oppenheimer a “crybaby” when he expressed his concern about the weapon. “I dropped the bomb. Not you. It’s me. You are no one,” said the president. Perhaps the most significant moment in the movie. Cillian Murphy walks out of Truman’s office devastated.
To me, the movie brings back memories of masterpieces, primarily, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. I would like to mention some movies that, in my mind, led to this masterpiece. Paul Schrader has called Oppenheimer the “most important film of the century”. His screenplay of Taxi Driver, the cult film by Martin Scorsese, depicts a modern hero who saves lives but perhaps is a messiah of violence. Inspired by Scorsese, Todd Phillips's Joker goes one step ahead to show you that the villain has his right to destruction.
Now here is history that proves we are not talking about cartoons. Nolan is actually showing you the making of a “Joker” whom you have forgotten but is still so bloody relevant to the fate of our world. We all have been fated by a historic act and there is no coming back whether it's a cold or hot war in the Ukraine. We may choose to be blind but our fate has been sealed.
The paradox of science or knowledge is that you are defying nature and the unknown. Discovery is like a bomb in the head, be it penicillin or quantum theory. It has to be physically tested to be of any use or misuse. Therefore knowledge once discovered is public and one actually cannot control it from people. I have a faint inkling that Nolan is making a comment on AI, which is today’s bomb. We use or misuse it... will seal our fate. The film comes at a time when writers go on strike joined by all in Hollywood and one of its agenda is the misuse of Artificial Intelligence.
Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange comes to my mind. So does Hannibal Lecter of The Silence Of The Lambs. I have to admit that Cillian Murphy manages to go beyond Hopkins’s Hannibal with his haunting eyes and a certain vulnerability which Hopkins did not indulge in for obvious reasons. Any genius, science or art, is devious in terms of what is “normal”. Their very nature challenges the “ordinary”.
Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss to me is the American Jewish version of Salieri in Amadeus. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is the German Jewish version of Mozart. Therefore Nolan’s film is about a “genius” who deals in science and knowledge. You stop scientific discovery, you don’t get your mobile phones. You live in a prehistoric society. You allow it, and you get AI which can rob numerous writers of their jobs all over the globe. More than 70,000 died at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Finally ‘the all for nothing” where the “political and social leads to the pathetic personal” parallel are inevitably Citizen Kane. The close-ups of Murphy’s harrowing gaze, into the lens frequently, is too haunting an image that sums up the crazy mind of a genius whose “rosebud” was “atom”.
Christopher Nolan has finally managed to use all his so-called “domino effect” extravaganzas into a three-hour, serious chamber disaster historical in his lowest budget (barring Memento) which is truly the best film experience of this century, to date.
This doesn't mean I won't revisit Amores Perros, City Of God, Tropical Malady, Across The Universe, Bader Meinhof Complex, and even Notting Hill or Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi.
