Oppenheimer (2023): A Review

I saw Oppenheimer (2023) with my Bride and son at noon yesterday at a movie theater in Bloomington, Il.  Oppeheimer was on two screens and our showing was filled to capacity.  Cilian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey, Jr. as Admiral Lewis Strauss deserve Oscars for their performances.  Both men disappeared into their roles.  Matt Damon was very convincing as General Leslie Groves.  The film was unlike anything I have seen before, and it runs three hours which pass swiftly.  Spoilers to follow.

Going into the film I thought it had been overhyped.  I was wrong.  The film is divided into two parts, interspersed throughout the film.  A black and white section featuring Admiral Strauss, the bete noir of Oppenheimer in post war hearings that led to the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and colored sections centering on Oppenheimer, focusing on his work as Director of the Manhattan Project, his tempestuous private life and his security woes after the War.

The colored sections have the look and feel of an epic classic from the fifties, as if DeMille had been brought back from the grave to direct these portions.  There is a driving intensity to this portion of the film emphasized by the musical score as the US races Nazi Germany to the bomb.  (In fact the US was far ahead, thanks in no small part to Der Fuehrer kindly making sure to cause the best physicists on the Continent, many of who whom were Jewish, to flee the ever growing Third Reich, but we didn’t know we were far ahead until near the end of the war in Europe.)  The black and white portions are similar to security camera films,  and have an eerie disquieting feel to them, with many viewers I am sure puzzling initially their relationship to the rest of the movie.

The film is a series of vignettes, with the black and white portions interspersed with the colored portions.  Flashbacks are common.  I know  a great deal about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project;  those who do not might be confused by all this but I think the basic story comes through.

The film reminded me of a musical composition in structure, rather than that of the structure of a conventional film  Odd, but it works.

The film has a number of themes it returns to several times.  One of them is a glass sphere and a large wine glass.  They are set up by Oppenheimer in a lecture hall at Los Alamos with marbles placed in them, representing in the sphere the amount of uranium thus far produced for the eventual Little Boy, the bomb where the fission reaction was created by a gun firing a uranium projectile into an uranium target, which caused both the projectile and the target to go super critical causing the explosion, and in the wine glass the plutonium produced thus far for Fat Man, the bomb where an ingeniously constructed implosion would drive the plutonium core into a super critical state producing the explosion.  As the marbles slowly increase in the film, we feel the tension as we know the creation of the bombs is coming closer.

The film has two nude scenes I wish had been kept out.  Both involve Oppenheimer and his mistress who committed suicide in 1943.  Neither scene is played for erotic titillation but rather to show that in his private life Oppenheimer was confused and lost.  One of the scenes is played out when Oppenheimer is being grilled post war during the hearings that led to the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and the shame and rage that Oppenheimer’s wife, who is with him at the hearing, feels toward her husband as his adultery is made part of an official record is palpable.  His wife had an alcohol problem and at one point in the film Oppenheimer takes his infant son to a friend, whose left wing loyalties would later help lose Oppenheimer his security clearance, and asks him and his wife to take care of his son for a time, stating that he, Oppenheimer, and his wife are awful and selfish people, and that is a fair statement for much of Oppenheimer’s private life.

The film does an adequate job of showing the immense difficulties overcome in inventing and constructing the first atomic bombs and the successful partnership between Oppenheimer and Groves that was key to getting the job done.  I wish there had been more, but the director clearly did not wish the main purpose of the film to be a historical retelling.  The film instead is primarily a character study of Oppenheimer, warts and all.

The film is a wild roller coaster of a ride, which strongly impacts, eyes, ears and brain.  It is sui generis and I highly recommend it.  Be warned however.  Whatever you are expecting, I think this film will surprise you.