Stern Reality
Say what you will about the movies of Christopher Nolan (I thought “Tenet” was a disaster), they have a way of getting into your head and sticking around.
I saw “Oppenheimer” a couple of weeks ago. I remain fascinated by movie and the man. It’s a uniquely powerful movie about a deeply conflicted man.
I saw the IMAX version, always a good idea with Nolan’s movies (“Dunkirk” especially). I sat toward the front of the theater, the better to be overwhelmed by the visuals. Alas, the AMC theater had the sound turned up so loud that even whispered dialogue came off as a shout. Nolan always cranks up the sound. No need to boost it any higher.
Maybe I could have understood more of the dialogue if I’d sat further back. Only two or three of us were in Row E, five rows back from where the floor starts to rise.
As usual, Nolan’s narrative jumps back and forth in time. It also moves between color sequences when Oppenheimer is the focus and black-and-white sequences when others carry the action. Despite its complexity, this technique is mostly seamless and more intuitive than confusing.
The acting is similarly flawless. Amazingly, the movie makes Emily Blunt appear almost dowdy most of the time. The last shot of her is devastating in showing the toll events have taken on her character.
As Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy’s gaunt face and frame, and his hauntingly deep blue eyes, stay in memory a long time. His signature hat will probably start a minor fashion revolution the way Indiana Jones’s fedora did ages ago. It’s apparently a cross between a fedora and a porkpie. Whatever it is, it’s brilliant. With his crisp white shirts and perfectly matched suit and tie, plus the ever-present cigarette, the hat shouts his steeliness of purpose to a world that never marches to the same drummer.
You can interpret the ending as cryptic, or tragic, or both. “The man who invented the atomic bomb” thinks he has doomed humankind. Perhaps he has. You wish Vlad the Impaler and that pudgy goon in North Korea had even a smidgen as much conscience.
Some pundits have found a historical error in the film. It seems that in one scene you can briefly glimpse an American flag with 50 stars rather than the 48 appropriate to the time. Really? Who looks for such things? And how much of the bigger picture do you miss while focusing on such minutiae?
A personal reference: When I started as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I was an English major. One of my creative writing professors was Nuel Pharr Davis. He was a National Book Award finalist for his book Lawrence and Oppenheimer. In the movie, Oppenheimer is the theorist and Ernest Lawrence is the practical thinker in rimless glasses whom he’s often arguing with. Friends and colleagues for a time, they were divided by the bomb they both helped create.
