At a time in which the ambition of most American cinema can be measured in centimeters, it seems almost unfair to judge Oppenheimer by the distance between the movie it is and the movie it’s trying to be. Based on a much-celebrated book (2005’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin), and directed by Christopher Nolan, a director whose preoccupation with philosophical frameworks make him about as well-suited as anyone to adapt it for the screen, Oppenheimer is certainly a phenomenon, if a curious one. It’s made a shocking amount of money given its subject matter, and had the good fortune — or marketing genius — to be paired with Barbie, the other movie of the moment. It’s also got the kind of star-studded cast you don’t often see anymore, has a surprising amount of practical effects, and features the advantage of being neither fish nor fowl in terms of genre, slotting equally into biopic, war, historical fiction, and straight-up drama. Still, as the script repeatedly reminds us, theory will only take you so far. With all the ingredients, it certainly could be that rare thing, a blockbuster epic that’s also a genuinely great film. But is it any good?
Well, it’s certainly not bad. It would take a far more formidable director — say, a Zack Snyder, whose name was often paired with Nolan’s in the ridiculous ‘vulgar auteur’ conversations of a decade or so ago — to completely fuck up a movie at this scale. Oppenheimer looks impressive, its cast is competent, it tells its story effectively, and it rarely makes a misstep. It’s struck a chord with audiences and critics alike, and Nolan’s thematic preoccupations are present, if a bit muted compared to, say, Memento or Inception. Parts of it are spectacular: Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is as excellent as ever, Richard King’s sound editing is remarkable, and Nolan certainly pulls off a notoriously difficult task in the first two of the film’s three hours by wrenching a considerable amount of suspense out of a story of which everyone already knows the ending. It hangs together quite well, and tells its story fairly tightly given its sprawl; it never has that feeling that so many long movies of late do of just falling apart at a certain point. It is a good movie.
But it is not a great movie. It is, I think, not even a very good movie. And many of the reasons it is not a very good movie are extensions or mirror images of why it is a good movie. The cast is, as I say, uniformly decent, but there are few standouts in any role, including that of Dr. Oppenheimer himself: Cillian Murphy is never bad, but he plays the character so close to the vest that he seems enigmatic and largely passive until the final moment, too late to give us real insight into the man. If this is simply Nolan being true to life, for Oppenheimer was a very closed man, that somehow seems insufficient, for he is no Hamlet despite the attempt to make him one, and he is required to carry the entire film. Gary Oldman as Harry Truman is pure stunt casting, maybe part of the actor’s attempt to play every major political figure of the 20th century, and simply doesn’t work, while Robert Downey Jr. is perfectly fine as Lewis Strauss, but the role is underwritten and plodding. Matt Damon just does what Matt Damon does these days, and Alden Ehrenreich is wasted in a role that is not only unimpressive but unnecessary (he plays the movie’s only invented character, whose presence accomplishes nothing but to be a tedious moral counterpart to Strauss’ petty grudge-holding). The film’s subject matter makes it inevitable that a lot of fascinating historical figures would end up as minor figures on screen, but that still means a lot of great actors and performances (particularly Florence Pugh, James Urbaniak, Macon Blair, and Jefferson Hall) are essentially sidelined. This leaves only the ever-reliable David Krumholtz, as Isidor Isaac Rabi, to deliver an memorable performance outside the main character.
The storytelling, while solid and largely easy to follow despite Nolan’s insistence on sticking in his now-trademarked time jumps, falls victim to another of the director’s tics: It applies the editing and pace of an action movie, with the usual quick cuts, jumps, and effects scenes, with a movie in which, objectively, very little actually happens, and it left me with an odd sense of disassociation. I don’t think I was alone in this. It’s not that editor Jennifer Lame does a bad job; by all reports, she and Nolan worked together to make sure everyone got enough screen time and the story held together despite this approach. It’s just that they were working against one another. This story didn’t need that editing style, and trying to make them work together just showed how difficult putting this round peg into that square hole must have been. For all Oppenheimer tries to make the nuts and bolts of the Manhattan Project real to the viewer, its intellectual elements, from how the bomb was built to what Oppenheimer’s true moral beliefs might have been, seem strangely muted, and when they finally pay off towards the end, it’s too little too late. Its three-hour run time doesn’t seem padded or bloated, but it’s still three hours, and it doesn’t help the pacing at all that the final third shifts from a world-historical crisis to a relatively low-stakes affair about whether or not Strauss will become the Secretary of Commerce.
Oppenheimer is a true test of the old critic’s adage that you must discuss the film you saw, not the film you wanted to see. This applies, in particular, to the movie’s attempts at political positioning. It’s hard to blame Nolan for how politically flat a story so suffused with politics at every level turns out; Oppenheimer, of course, was a notoriously hard-to-read figure in terms of his loyalties and ideologies, and the book on which the film is based makes that one of its key pillars. But there are also moments when it seems like Oppenheimer, like its subject, is hedging its bets. For every moment it seems like the movie will be an indictment of the madness to which anti-communism led America, there is another where communism is presented as a negative quality that should be assumed by the audience. We are given to understand that it was foolishly naïve for the American government to assume the Soviets would never get nuclear weapons, but it is murky why so many people, including Oppenheimer himself, would want them to. The charge has often been made that the movie does not sufficiently deal with the horrific carnage the atomic bomb on Japan, but the main scene in which it is addressed (at his moment of greatest triumph, Oppenheimer is haunted by visions of terrified Japanese civilians) is so clunky and obvious it’s almost corny. It would likely have been impossible, given the time and place and manner in which it was made, to turn Oppenheimer into a movie that treated the political questions it raises seriously, but the end result is the same.
Maybe this is the way that we should think of Oppenheimer the man as well as Oppenheimer the film: as victims of their own ambitions. With feet in two worlds, divided loyalties, and attentions too split to deal with its locus in a whirlwind of history, it’s a film that largely accomplishes what it sets out to do, but leaves one wondering if what it set out to do was enough.