In terms of its endlessly impressive artistry and technical achievements, Oppenheimer is a marvelous piece of work that often touches greatness and even, at times, reaches perfection. As a feature film experience in and of itself, however, its sky-high ambitions are often overwhelming and its intentions are sometimes unclear. Viewing the film is a frustratingly uneven experience, but one that cannot or should not be written off without any further thought or examination.
The film tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer’s (portrayed by Cillian Murphy) personal, moral, and political struggles with helping to invent the atomic bomb in the ‘40s and his persecution years later for a supposed affiliation with the Communist party. The audience is provided with glimpses of Oppenheimer as a college student, an eager beginning physicist, a young man torn between two different lovers (Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh), an obsessed director of The Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and a beaten down variation of himself who eventually faces extreme and painful scrutiny. Needless to say, the film tackles quite a bit thematically, narratively, and stylistically, often risking the exhaustion of its audience’s attention span.
Writer/director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception, Dunkirk) always swings for the fences with his work. Oppenheimer is not only no exception to this, it’s now the primary example of it in his filmography. Nolan so very obviously wants Oppenheimer, with its intense sense of drama and its wowing depiction of atomic detonation, to be a condensed and tightly wound theatrical feature film experience. The only problem with this is that he also wants to cover as many details of Oppenheimer’s life as humanly possible, and the film tries to fit in more information than any single feature can handle. Oppenheimer is bursting with detail, much of which is lost in its overcrowded and cluttered design. Despite its IMAX intentions, the film could have worked beautifully as a limited cable mini-series, a format that could have easily and clearly housed Oppenheimer’s hefty narrative goals.
The film’s unrelenting (and, for a three-hour movie, tiring) momentum sometimes prevents its events from being executed with the proper examination or timing. The grand story of Oppenheimer is told in a large series of rather quick snippets, not always allowing time for dramatic moments or pieces of information to settle and sink in before it moves on to its next area of focus. The film also unfolds with a fractured linearity that dances amongst different timelines throughout, making it even more of a challenging (sometimes to the point of being confusing) viewing experience.
Every single performance in Oppenheimer is flawless. Murphy portrays Oppenheimer with intelligence, naturalism, humanity, and humility. There is not a moment that he is onscreen that is not wholly believable. Blunt is sympathetic, tragically flawed, and painfully relatable as Oppenheimer’s long-suffering wife, Kitty. Pugh is wounded, vulnerable, and also tragically flawed as Oppenheimer’s young love interest/mistress, Jean Tatlock. Matt Damon effortlessly excels as army officer/Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves, providing the film and his straight-laced character with some much-needed comic relief. Robert Downey Jr. steps outside of his comfort zone as Lewis Strauss, a character that makes the excessively gifted actor drop his usual charisma and movie star charm in favor of something more grounded, subtle, and reality-driven.
On first viewing (which, as of this writing, is all I have experienced), Oppenheimer is just too much movie to handle. Like most other films by Christopher Nolan, I can only guess that it will improve and be clearer with repeat viewings. Though it is almost endlessly astonishing in terms of its artistry, its uneven narrative is sometimes so overstuffed that it becomes difficult to follow and stay focused upon. It’s interesting how a film that depicts an obsessively over-ambitious protagonist falls victim to its own subject matter. Oppenheimer doesn’t always reach its grand aspirations, but it never ceases to be fascinating while watching it try.
GRADE: B+
