Oppenheimer (2023)

The film alternates between two frame stories which both involve hearings.  One is to renew J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance and one to confirm Lewis Strauss (pronounced “Strawss,” he insists) as Secretary of Commerce.  Near the start of Strauss’s hearing, a senator makes a reference to “the Oppenheimer affair.” 

It’s clear that the hearing about Oppenheimer’s security clearance is a McCarthyist kangaroo court.  But their only question which fazes Oppenheimer is their most genuine: why did Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, turn around and become an opponent of hydrogen bombs?

The film opens with intellectual montage.  This is always thuddingly obvious, but that's not a problem when it's as effective as it is here.  In this movie, the montage is motivated largely by Oppenheimer's subjective experience.  Oppenheimer imagines the mysterious reality behind the world we perceive; Oppenheimer visits a museum and examines Picassos.  His interest in science is an aesthetic appreciation.  He’s almost childlike when the idea of a gravitationally collapsed object starts to form in his mind.  (There’s an anachronism in this movie where they say Oppenheimer wrote a paper on “black holes,” a term not used until the 1960s.)

The obviousness of what the montage means in the early parts of the film is important, because it sets the stage for the montage in later parts of the film.  Like Nolan's other films, Oppenheimer places asynchronous events and images in sequence.  The film is divided into scenes in Oppenheimer's perspective and scenes in Lewis Strauss's perspective.  Strauss's scenes are in black-and-white, and only the scenes within Oppenheimer's perspective have asynchronous editing.  

We understand it as flashes of Oppenheimer's memory or imagination.  Sometimes there are also shots of things in Oppenheimer's present that resemble things from his past.  Oppenheimer's powerful intellect motivates these elements, but past the opening scenes the film does not show him using it very much.  Rather, it highlights his spinelessness, takes away his plausible deniability whenever he says something to justify his support of building the bomb or refusal of responsibility for what it will do.

And because the story is told out of order, we have no context for some of the sounds and images that haunt Oppenheimer.  We see what his mind does but are still at some distance from exactly what he's thinking.  It gets to a point where the people railroading Oppenheimer are certainly antagonists, but Oppenheimer doesn't seem like a victim.  He's only vulnerable to them because of his own spinelessness.

When other scientists approach Oppenheimer and ask him to join them in discouraging the use of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer does one of two things.  He might weakly say that his job as a scientist is just to discover and build, and that what is done with what he builds is not his decision.  Otherwise, he makes the rather absurd claim that once the world sees the terror of a nuclear weapon in use, all nations will come together in the cause of peace.  

After Hiroshima, Oppenheimer is brought to speak before the staff of the Manhattan Project.  They greet him with uproarious applause.  The bloodthirsty elation of his audience disturbs him, but even then, he's too weak to do anything but smile and give them the victory speech he senses they want.  

But one of the film's weaknesses the lack of any perspective other than Oppenheimer's.  Lewis Strauss doesn't count.  He exists in this film only to provide contrast that highlights the details it wants us to notice about Oppenheimer.  The only characters with views really different from Oppenheimer's are the people he meets early on from the Communist party at Berkeley.  The inquisitors repeatedly remind us that he associated with socialists, and we see many such meetings.  But there is no discussion of what any of those people actually believe, nor do any of them speak for themselves in the film, except for Jean Tatlock speaking of her personal relationship with Oppenheimer.  Not letting these characters speak keeps the film from seriously dealing with the questions it tries to raise.  It doesn't help that they include the film's only women characters, who the film ends up treating only as accessories to Oppenheimer.  

The greatest weakness, though, is the way it approaches the Trinity test.  The nuclear explosion is portrayed with the same overawed fascination Interstellar gave to black holes.  Later on, the film accuses Oppenheimer of trying to make the world remember him for Trinity and not Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But the film itself commits similar whitewashing by failing to show how Trinity was also horrific.  This film's Bill-Nye-esque adoration of science is cute near the beginning when Oppenheimer hops between lectures by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg talking about how Einstein opened the door to the quantum world.  Maybe part of the point is that Oppenheimer felt that way about the bomb.  But to persist with that way all the way through Trinity just buries the point.