Film Review: Oppenheimer

Nerd smokes pipe, wins the war

I recently hosted a private screening for me and all my friends to watch Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on opening night. I strongly recommend doing this kind of thing: such was the mania and hype surrounding this event that an astonishing eight people flew to Ireland to watch it with us. Renting out a cinema is also a bargain; way cheaper than buying the tickets individually (I broke even on a ‘pay what you want’ basis). 

And the film was… good. As far as I’m aware, none of us left the cinema actively disliking it or thinking it was a waste of our time. But, as some of my friends pointed out, there are lots of complaints to be had about this film – and ways in which it falls short of greatness. Here are four brief thoughts:  

The film is really three films 

Oppenheimer is really three movies. The first one is about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s early life and womanising. The second is the story of the Manhattan Project: astonishing scientific collaboration resulting in morally ambiguous consequences, and a reckoning for the people involved. And the third film is about the McCarthyite revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance in the 1950s. I wouldn’t be the first to point out that this story may have worked better as an eight-hour Netflix series than a three-hour film.

I like long films, but only when the material demands it. The general lesson here is that the totality of someone’s life sounds like a more natural category for a film than it really is. It may well be that the best Oppenheimer biopic is a sleek 1hr40min courtroom drama only about his life after the bomb gets dropped. Or, a 2hr film about the Manhattan Project which has no pretence of being a biography – and in which Bethe, Teller, Ulam, von Neumann and Feynman are much more significant characters.  

When I watched the film again yesterday, I really felt the courtroom drama aspects dragging. It’s an odd comment to make, but I actually recommend watching this film a second time, and leaving the cinema two-thirds of the way through. After all, what is the value of an economics degree, if not to teach you to be comfortable abandoning things?

One of the most fun experiences I’ve had reading narrative non-fiction was David Edmond’s and John Eidinow’s book Wittgenstein’s Poker. That book is a ‘biography’ of an absurd and hilarious brief meeting between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1946 (the only time they ever met). By tracking and recounting all the different recollections of the people who were in the room at the time, the book is also a brilliant exploration of how memories are formed and how unreliable they are. In the time it would take me to read one serious and comprehensive tome about the life of Wittgenstein, I could read ten books like this – and I suspect it would be a lot more fun. Maybe I’m grasping at straws here. But the lesson I took was that the best biographical books and films often focus on intensely specific aspects of a person’s life. Biographical comprehensiveness often comes at the expense of thematic coherence. 

Uninformed audiences do not understand the emotional stakes of the security clearance

When I watched Oppenheimer with my father, he was confused about why Oppenheimer cared so much about no longer having a security clearance. He wasn’t working on the bomb anymore; why did he even need one? Three thoughts:

1. His not being seen fit to work on issues of national security was seen as synonymous with the destruction of his credibility as a moral and political voice on nuclear non-proliferation.

2. Whether or not Oppenheimer should have cared so much about the security clearance, he evidently did. Ego was certainly a part of it. Oppenheimer spent the final years of his life on the Caribbean island of St. John’s (which is not shown in the film, but maybe should have been). He had been publicly humiliated and had intense guilt about the bomb; is it that surprising that he wasted away the last years of his life drinking alone?

3. The quest to have Oppenheimer’s security clearance reinstated is still ongoing! It is currently being led by Oppenheimer’s grandson Charles and has some allies in Congress; I strongly recommend his appearance on the Titans of Nuclear podcast. Curiously, you can still have a security clearance when you’re dead – presumably for reading classified documents beyond the grave.

Oppenheimer’s story reminds me of Maciej Cegłowsk’s beautiful essay about the Wright Brothers. After inventing the aeroplane, Wilbur and Orville spent the rest of their careers defending their patent and attempting to sue their competitors out of existence. To bastardise Allen Ginsburg, I have seen the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by legal proceedings. 

In any case, my father is a smart former engineer. If the emotional stakes of the courtroom drama were not clear to him, then how could Oppenheimer succeed as a blockbuster with wide appeal?

There are too many famous people

There are too many famous people in this movie, and none of them can do convincing Central European accents. Matt Damon shows up, and only for a medium-sized role. He uses up a lot of the budget that the film has to include megastars without it becoming distracting. Why not cast a Dane as Bohr? Why is Josh from Drake & Josh the technician in charge of aborting the Trinity Test? (When the bomb goes off, he scowls… “Megan!”)

Americans are good at many things, but they are profoundly accent-deaf. 

There is too much music

Thankfully, Oppenheimer is not at Interstellar levels of inaudible dialogue. But there is almost no silence. Getting a cinema to play a specific film for you at a specific time is a non-trivial task, and about four minutes into our screening, I had a brief moment of panic about whether we were actually watching an extended preview of the film (given how reliant it was on music). 

In fairness, there are some masterful scenes. The Trinity Test was magnificent, as were some of the moments on either side. This is not unrelated to its featuring silence. I also had a disproportionate level of affection for how Feynman was featured with some subtlety. I never noticed him being referred to by name. The reference to him sitting in a car while watching the bomb go off was a nice touch (also, bongos). It would have been easy to overstate Feynman’s contributions in Oppenheimer – he is, I imagine, the most famous person to have worked on the Manhattan Project (until now). I did not envy the woman sitting next to me in the theatre, who I had met about an hour previously and to whom I was narrating these thoughts.

The excessive music was especially annoying in three scenes: when Oppenheimer is dropping off his son at his friends’ house, when he is horseriding with Kitty, and when he is speaking with Einstein for the first time. If Nolan had just let the characters speak in silence in those three scenes, that would have gone a lot of the way toward alleviating my annoyance.

Conclusion: Watching Oppenheimer is a better use of your time than what you would otherwise be doing

For me, the central mission of this film was to communicate that Oppenheimer was a complex guy. One must feel immense sympathy toward the Jewish émigrés who considered a Nazi bomb to be synonymous with the extinction of their people. It was hard to see a way around building atomic weapons. But in the details, the development of the bomb was seriously ethically questionable. It was used after Germany surrendered. The Americans were going to win the war anyway.  I agree with Matt Yglesias that, in the long arc of human history, the Manhattan Project was a failure.

As the inestimable Tom Lehrer put it: “The Lord is our shepherd, says the Psalm, but just in case… we better get a bomb.” 

Oppenheimer is a big part of this moral ambiguity. He convinced Teller to stay on the project to develop H-bombs, then later opposed them. Arguably, he did not leverage his position sufficiently well to ensure international regulation of atomic weapons (I don’t know if this is true; I’m just saying it’s incredibly complicated!). The Americans were unjustifiably convinced that they would be able to maintain a monopoly on nuclear “devices” – which proved an impossibility, given the realities of Soviet espionage.

And Oppenheimer successfully communicates this ambivalence! So I think the world is certainly better with this film in it, which is saying something. I find some films to be so ethically and historically confused that I wish they didn’t exist – The Social Network, or The Imitation Game, perhaps.¹

I’m glad there is now a culturally recognisable film about the Manhattan Project – one of the few academic topics that interested me even as a child. And I’m glad that it’s enjoyable to watch, with some of my favourite actors giving good performances. I’m happy that Cillian Murphy is playing his part in the growing Irish global media hegemony. But the film is too big, too star-studded, and too noisy to stay with me for life. Christopher Nolan has already made an unforgettable masterpiece that makes my hair stand on end – it’s called Dunkirk. It would be a rare director that could do that twice.

 

1. To be clear, The Social Network is immensely entertaining.