“Oppenheimer” is a magnificent film that paints J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atom bomb,” in a more sympathetic light than his detractors would like while nevertheless exploring the blindness behind his brilliance.
It’s not only superbly acted by a cast that is A-list down to the smallest role but wonderfully written and directed by Christopher Nolan and edited by Jennifer Lame so that while the story shifts back and forth in time and space, it nonetheless propels itself forward. When the big moment comes — the detonation of the test bomb at the Trinity site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945 — it comes with a furious sight, the fireball continuing to mushroom.
But then, just as you think you’ll be spared anything else, you remember that light travels faster than sound. When the crescendoing crash comes, you’re unprepared for it. It was, one of the many young people watching it in an IMAX theater said to his companions, more terrifying than a horror movie.
Still, the greatness of “Oppenheimer” is that it really isn’t the story of the making of the atomic bomb. (For that I recommend the 1989 telefilm “Day One,” with David Strathairn as Oppenheimer.) It’s more of a counterpoint between the 1954 hearings that would deny Oppenheimer (a mesmerizing Cillian Murphy), a suspected Communist and critic of the arms race, the renewal of his security clearance, which was manipulated by nemesis Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (Robert Downey Jr. in a performance of dazzling duplicity); and Strauss’ vain quest to become secretary of commerce, his karmic comeuppance, as it were, for what he did to Oppenheimer. (It’s a measure of just how pretentious Strauss is that he insists on his name being pronounced “Stross.” He’s the kind of guy, as an assistant who grows to loath him notes, who thinks everyone is always talking about him.)
Strauss isStrossed himself by a U.S. Senate looking to advise and consent on his appointment as secretary of commerce. He would be denied by the Democrats and three abstentions, including one by a young Massachusetts senator striving to make a name for himself — John F. Kennedy. When he became president, he awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Medal. With his assassination, it fell to successor Lyndon B. Johnson to present it, although Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline, made sure to meet with Oppenheimer to let him know how much her husband wanted him to have it.
Oppenheimer and Strauss, then, are portrayed like evenly matched, complementary tennis players who keep trading points. Oppenheimer would be vindicated by the Biden Administration, which reinstated his security clearance in 2022, 55 years after his death.
There are those who see in Oppenheimer’s persecution in the age of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts, the MAGA hatred of the left today. But that is I think the wrong parallel.
Rather the story of Oppenheimer is proof that in a two-party system, power will seesaw. Our time is no more or less partisan, though that partisanship is magnified today by social media.
For all his versatility and gifts for organization, leadership and office politics, actual politics eluded Oppenheimer. His wife, Kitty (a marvelously tart Emily Blunt) — a frustrated, bitter botanist, wife and mother — may not have understood nuclear physics. But she could see what he could not: That the story of the atom bomb was less about fusion and fission and more about people coming together and breaking apart.