In the Flesh: Oppenheimer

“Don’t bring that crybaby in here again,” sneers president Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) as J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), father of the atomic bomb, leaves the oval office. To see the man who made oceans of fire of two cities in Japan sniping like a schoolyard bully at the man who made the bombs he used to do it over the latter’s pangs of conscience is so sickening it made me physically tremble. The dumbest, most hateful idiots in the world are in charge. They’ve always been in charge. Their unthinking bloodlust and petty cruelty may actually be a precondition for climbing high enough to exercise real political power. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer positions these small moments of personal and institutional stupidity on a continuum with the existential evil Oppenheimer himself gradually realizes he’s unleashed on the world, conflating mankind’s most horrific acts of instantaneous mass murder with its most unremarkable daily failings of character, to stomach-churning effect. The world is going to burn, not because of any Biblical prophecy or hidden conspiracy, but because its most brilliant inventors are monkeys yanking threads they don’t understand at random while its leaders are so paranoid and unimaginative they’re barely capable of relating to other human beings.

Throughout the film’s first act, Oppenheimer is haunted by visions of quantum physics in action. Cages of oscillating light. The churning hearts of atoms. Fire and dark and emptiness. Once the bomb is successfully tested, though, these visions cease. Nolan shoots and edits the buildup to the Trinity test like someone winding a stopwatch tighter and tighter, cutting rapidly between groups at different distances from the test site as they perform simple preparatory work. Laying out mattresses to absorb the shock wave. Handing out welders’ glasses. Watching a countdown in an insulated bunker. We skip from face to face too quickly to settle, growing more and more agitated until finally the unbearable tension releases in a ten-thousand-foot column of fire. Hell opens up, and Oppenheimer begins to realize what he’s been glimpsing for all these years through his obsession with quantum mechanics. Then, after the great man receives news of the bombing of Hiroshima, the visions return, not of physics visualized but of the consequences of this tremendous leap forward in arms technology.

At a sickening victory rally for the Los Alamos scientists and their families and staff members, Oppenheimer sees a woman in the crowd with her skin molting from her face and flapping in a savage wind. He sees the carbonized body of a dead person curled faceless and unknowable on the floor. The world around him literally vibrates with the scale of his realization as ethics slither into the place in his heart vacated by fixation on physics. “You don’t get to do the sin and then make us all feel sorry for you when you feel the consequences of it,” says his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) when Robert tearfully tells her of the suicide of his lover Jean (Florence Pugh) after he broke off contact with her. It’s an ethical tangle which echoes through his conflicted conduct in the aftermath of the bombings, and one nobody in power wants to deal with. Instead we watch as they rip Oppenheimer apart for making them think about it. Murphy gives the performance of a lifetime, his dialect impeccably Wellesian, his mannerisms arrogant and neurotic, his moral torment so convincingly a product of both narcissistic self-involvement and genuine insight. In spite of a few corny, overwritten moments, Oppenheimer is Nolan’s greatest film by a country mile.