The life of Robert J. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project and who, after the war, was accused of communist sympathies and associations. This is the story of how the bomb was created and of the commission that, years later, discredited him before America and the whole world.
Oppenheimer is a true colossal
Much more so than Christopher Nolan’s previous films, which small are not since a long time. It is more so than Inception, Interstellar and the Batman trilogy, works that somehow fit into the normality of Hollywood that has always needed products to feed its production bulimia. In many ways, Infernal machines are a kind of cinematic perversion to which Nolan at some point subjected himself, exploiting it in turn, using it as an excuse to build his fantastic worlds between dreams, comic books, and space-time travels.
Dunkirk, a triple feature, was closer to that war cinema of the 1960s and 1970s that patriotically celebrated the efforts and sacrifices of the Anglo-American alliance, from The Longest Day to A Bridge Too Far, to which it added a pacifist message and also a somewhat ambiguous post-Brexit nationalism.
Oppenheimer, on the other hand, is a classic colossal, in which one man’s life is intertwined with that of the entire world, filmed with many means, an exceptional cast and a development on different temporal planes, as Nolan so rightly likes, which recounts the before and aftermath of the advent of the bomb.
The British director also penned the screenplay, recounting the physicist’s life from his first scientific upsets to his pacifist conversion, analysing torments and ambitions, merits (few) and flaws (quite a few, but all very human). It does so thanks to a truly magnificent performance by an actor who has long deserved more consideration, Cillian Murphy, who, without the Peaky Blinders series, would not have had the popularity that one with his talent deserves.
Around him revolve like electrons around the atom’s nucleus, his women, his scientists and the men who made him famous and brought him to dust. Nolan goes for build-up, thanks to the exceptional cast, consisting of Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh (also a bit wasted), Matt Damon and Robert Downey, both outstanding.
And he also ends up exaggerating his now-repeated flaw by putting too many words into this story, especially in the final part, that is overly explained, too much music (Ludwig Göransson’s soundtrack is beautiful, but it is present for a good 90% of the 180′, decidedly exhausting), leaving out subplots that would have been interesting to explore, such as those of his closest collaborators in the project that would have helped to delineate better the chiaroscuro personality of this man who truly changed the history of mankind.
And precisely because these fairly obvious flaws fall by the wayside in the face of this vast story. Oppenheimer is genuinely a film from another era, and this is its most significant merit. It also helps to understand two fundamental elements of Nolan’s cinema, which are always present.
The obsession with perfection affected the detective Al Pacino in Insomnia, but also the illusionist in The Prestige (overall and conceptually his most accomplished film), the man of dreams in Inception and the astronaut in Interstellar.
All, in one way or another, are dominated by a larger and more powerful force: love. And as funny as it may sound, all the clever, even overly so, worlds created by Nolan only serve to amplify the power of this nuclear device of the soul.
Ultimately, the core of Nolan’s cinema is women.
The engine of each of his stories and whose protagonists are succubi because they are weak men looking for ever more complex and dangerous toys. Sooner or later, we will have to reflect on this aspect, but it is probably why the young man has always loved Batman, and his talented wife produces his films.