BLERD AT THE MOVIES
You're better off reading Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's biographical tome, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," instead.
Cillian Murphy dons the signature cigarette and rumpled hat to transform himself into J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, for writer-director Christopher Nolan's latest epic, Oppenheimer. (Universal Pictures/Syncopy | 2023)
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The following review was written during the simultaneous Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) strikes of 2023. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently striking, the media I cover here wouldn't exist. I fully support both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA in their fight for fair financial compensation, better working conditions, and a sustainable, safeguarded future as laborers working in a system that continually denies them such.
Although a consumer boycott has not yet been called for (in fact, striking union members have advised against such actions), this blog will begin to cease coverage of new films and TV shows released from the studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) out of respect for the striking writers, actors, and artists. Under the current guidelines from SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, influencers and content creators have been advised to not promote struck content unless it is out of contractual obligation, but independent reviews and media analysis/criticism are not considered promotion under said guidelines. As such, any praise given to the work I cover here should be purely seen as praise for the artists responsible for creating it. Said praise serves as a reminder that the artists who created said work deserve to be compensated and treated fairly because they are who make these works possible, not the CEOs and executives who continue to belittle and demean their demands as "unrealistic" and exploit their work without consequence. If you are able to, please consider donating to the Entertainment Community Fund; it supports the people making the film and TV shows that you love and can help actors apply for grants to help keep their bills paid.
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer. (Universal Pictures/Syncopy | 2023)
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few months, you're probably familiar with the other highly-anticipated summer blockbuster of the year.
Following a publicized falling out with Warner Bros.-Discovery over the same-day theatrical and streaming release of his 2020 film Tenet at the hight of the COVID-19 pandemic, writer-director Christopher Nolan parted ways with the studio after 20 years of collaboration, taking with him plans to write and direct and ambitious film about American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, a.k.a. "The Father of the Atomic Bomb." Universal Pictures capitalized on Nolan's availability and partnered with the director to release Oppenheimer, his three-hour biographical epic starring the criminally under-appreciated Cillian Murphy as the enigmatic physicist and director of the Manhattan Project. By setting Oppenheimer for a July 21st theatrical release, Universal not only set the stage for an unexpected rivalry with Nolan's former employer, who gave their buzzed-about, hot pink spectacle Barbie the same release date, but also the totally unexpected viral sensation "Barbenheimer." The hard-to-escape phenomenon, created by chronically online cinephiles and casual moviegoers, resulted in numerous memes, fan art, same-day screenings, and a now viral interview where Murphy said he was "100%" going to see Barbie. As a broke, post-grad zillennial blogger working minimum wage and trying to get their student loan debt forgiven, I could not afford the luxury of pleasantly (or, in some cases, nightmarishly) watching Barbie and Oppenheimer on July 21st -- not that I wanted to, really. (To be honest, I still don't understand why everyone became so transfixed on watching a bubblegum pink fantasy-comedy about dolls dancing to Dua Lipa disco tracks and a nightmarish biographical drama about WWII-era nuclear warfare in a single day, but, we're all built different... I guess?) So, I had to space out both movies and give myself enough time to think about them before writing a review for either of them -- shameless plug: if you haven't read my review for Barbie yet, you can read it here -- lest I wanted my already-fragile psyche to further splinter and crack before inevitably shattering into millions of pieces. Truth be told, I'll never understand why "Barbenheimer" became the phenomenon it did, mainly because neither film is that good. Whereas Greta Gerwig used a two-hour Mattel commercial as a Trojan horse for choice feminist rhetoric that, unsurprisingly, went over well with mainstream feminist (read: white) audiences, Nolan's twelfth feature film is a flat biopic hiding behind markers of "prestige cinema," such as a star-studded cast and incredible cinematography. Given the inherent limitations of a biopic, Nolan's choice to write the screenplay in first person feels fitting. Biopics tell a story from the eyes of its main subject, so viewers will only be told a portion of a larger tale -- and said portion is often told with creative liberties being taken, especially when it comes to factual accuracy. If you're looking for a review that cuts through all the noise and assess the fact versus fiction of Oppenheimer (the movie), I'm not your gal. I know very little about Oppenheimer (the scientist) and the fact I didn't know that much was one of the reasons why I went to go see this movie to begin with. I'm a history geek at heart, so I'll never say no to a good historical flick. The fact that Oppenheimer flounders on that front makes the whole experience doubly disappointing. If anything, it made me want to pick up a copy of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that inspired Nolan's film. So, for your reading pleasure (and my peace of mind), much of this review is going to be devoted to evaluating and critiquing the film and its writer-director on the basis of artistic merit. The historical aspect will be discussed much later.
Visuals & Aesthetics
Writer-director Christopher Nolan directing Cillian Murphy in a scene from Oppenheimer. (Universal Pictures/Syncopy | 2023)
On a technical level, Oppenheimer is probably the crown jewel in Christopher Nolan's filmography.
At a time where mainstream studio features have devolved into CG-heavy, colorless, and uninspired sludge, watching a film where the color palette, visual design, practical effects, and cinematography feel meticulously designed and deliberately constructed to capture the audience's imagination is always a welcome surprise. If there is one thing Nolan will always do, it's direct the hell out of a movie, and he adopts an interesting approach with Oppenheimer. In true Nolan fashion, Oppenheimer shifts back and forth between two basic storylines. "Fission," which is shot in color, follows Oppenheimer's beginnings from his early years as a grad student and, eventually, a college professor to the triumph (and horror) of creating then detonating the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Fusion," shot in IMAX black-and-white analog photography, follows Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr., Downey's Dream Cars), the former chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, through his 1959 Senate confirmation hearing. Accompanied by a fresh-faced but unnamed Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich, Brave New World), who also serves as the audience's proxy in this storyline, Strauss undergoes the grueling process of a Senate confirmation hearing, fielding questions about his relationship with Oppenheimer, who has become persona non grata in the U.S. government due to suspected Communist Party affiliations. (Fun fact: J. Robert Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearances in 1954 by the government, which angered many in the physics community. In December 2022, sixty-eight years later, Oppenheimer's name was finally cleared... just in time for the first trailer for Nolan's film.) Honestly, the "Fission" storyline is the film's least fascinating. Despite boasting what might be modern cinema's most stunning visual sequence -- the Trinity Test -- to date, it's typical biopic stuff. Nolan quickly moves through Oppenheimer's troubled young adulthood, his eventual tenure as a professor at UC Berkeley, and his two most significant romantic relationships -- his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt, Jungle Cruise) and his lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, Don't Worry Darling). We're also treated to glimpses of what makes Oppenheimer a "unique" genius in the physics field, thanks to some stunning visual effects meant to convey the scientist's 'hallucinations' and nightmares of nuclear chaos. (We'll talk about how tired the "tortured male genius" trope is in a moment.) At worst, it's a distraction, especially since the marketing spent so much time focusing on the drama surrounding the birth of the atomic bomb. As I was watching, I couldn't help but feel exploring the early parts of Oppenheimer's life seemed boring to Nolan, too, especially since he approaches it with such a clinical distance that will make you wonder if coming to terms with the complexities of J. Robert Oppenheimer was just too much of a chore for the versatile filmmaker. (Oh, and we'll talk about this soon, too.) It's no surprise that Oppenheimer finally comes alive when the film shifts to the black-and-white realm of the "Fusion" storyline, taking full advantage of its large-format IMAX camera. When chatting with Indiewire, Oppenheimer cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema described Nolan's film as a "three-hour-long movie about faces." For van Hoytema,the challenge of shooting the movie was "[getting] closer with the camera" to make the actors' faces the "landscape" and "to make those faces interesting enough for the audience to become captivated by them." This probably goes without saying, but van Hoytema more than accomplishes the task at hand. I've never seen a film, mainstream blockbuster or small-time indie, pay such close attention to the faces of its actors so it can capture even the most minute of facial expressions. van Hoytema's skilled close ups astonishingly zero in details that are almost always fleeting in a film, from the gears turning in each character's head to moments where slight contempt give way to simmering resentment. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Oppenheimer and Strauss sit across from each other at a table where politicians, military officials, and Manhattan Project represenatives flank them at all sides to notify them of recent developments in both creating the atomic bomb. Not only can viewers feel the tension steadily rise with each exchange of words between all parties in attendance, but they also might be able to visually pinpoint the moment when a normal dinner table in a large ballroom suddenly turns into a war room's lone strategy table long before Strauss presents evidence of the Soviet Union's efforts with building their atomic bomb. Coupled with the stark color palette evoking obvious tensions, both subtle and overt, "Fusion" stands as Oppenheimer's most compelling storyline. Unfortunately, you're going to have to sit through the largely inert "Fission" story before you can be rewarded with an arc that could have totally been its own movie. This isn't to say that "Fission" is a complete bust. Because Nolan always strives for authenticity with every film he makes, production designer Ruth De Jong delivers a meticulous and stunning recreation of Los Alamos circa 1942, turning the epic vistas and beautiful plateaus of Ghost Ranch (located in Northern New Mexico) into the manufactured cul-de-sac of the Manhattan Project's base in Los Alamos. Despite the looming threat of war and nuclear violence, Los Alamos looks like it exists in a world of its own, a pseudo-suburbia ripped from a classic 1940s or 50s TV commercial that encouraged housewives to become domestic goddesses and buy all the soup cans, ketchup bottles, vacuum cleaners, and kitchen appliances needed to transform their average house into the epicenter of the nuclear family (no pun intended). In a way, Nolan's interpretation of the town Oppenheimer and the military built out of nothing is the visual representation of the things American propaganda advertisements convinced people to protect from Nazi Germany. I don't know if that is intentional on part of De Jong and Nolan, but it's difficult to separate the Manhattan Project's constructed cul-de-sac from the social and cultural shifts and happenings of the 1940s. Lastly, I'd be remiss if I did not discuss the visual effects on display in this movie. Instead of relying on flimsy dream/nightmare sequences or imagined confrontations between Oppenheimer and his own mind, Nolan's VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson turned to practical effects to depict the intense visions of destruction, danger, and dread that accompany images of atoms colliding, waves of energy spiking, and, eventually, the bright white light of a bomb going off in Robert's mind following of the atomic bomb's. While, yes, this is emblematic of the aforementioned "tortured male genius" trope that Nolan loves far too much, I want to give Jackson and his team credit for making Robert's mind as much of a character as the man himself. The meticulous effects properly convey just how often the physicist is at war with his own mind -- namely, the growing feeling that he is about to blow the hinges off a door that can never (and will never) be closed again. As the protagonist's moral and ethical concerns begin to bleed into his real world, Oppenheimer's visual and digital effects artists produce grim, stomach-churning illusions of nuclear destruction that effectively isolate Robert, transforming him into both the sole survivor and the main perpetrator. Nolan has said that Oppenheimer can be read as a horror movie, and, the VFX team should be credited with pulling off unsettling imagery and sequences that leave the viewer as shocked and saddened as the protagonist is. If there's one aspect of Nolan's filmography that is consistently worth praising it's the filmmaker's keen eye for smart, and mind-melting visuals and aesthetics that not only ground viewers into the world he's crafted on screen, but also firmly plants them into the sprawling minds of his cast of characters. Modern blockbuster filmmakers today don't do this, so the ones who collaborate with their teams to create a fully immersive, filmgoing experience for their audience deserve credit for effectively doing so. [AUTHOR'S NOTE: Speaking of credit, it has been reported that only 26 visual effects artists were named in the film's credits despite Universal Pictures and Syncopy hiring around 125 digital and visual effects artists. Yes, Oppenheimer does not have computer generated imagery (CGI) in the final cut, but a majority of the British-based visual design comapny DNEG -- including the film's overall VFX supervisor, Jackson -- are omitted from the credits. Meanwhile, the artists who worked on the compositing process are credited. At a time where artists and technicians in the visual effects industry are finally moving to unionize and working with IATSE to make their union dream a reality, every person who worked to make the visual and digital effects on this movie -- and any movie, for that matter -- possible deserve to be credited and fairly compensated for their work. At a time where two major unions have spearheaded the first simultaneous work stoppage against Hollywood studios in sixty-three years, movie studios need to start getting it together and doing better by their artists, especially their visual and digital effects artists.]
Cillian Murphy Deserves Better Than This
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer. (Universal Pictures/Syncopy | 2023)
There's no doubt in my mind that next year we'll all be gushing about how Cillian Murphy more than earned his Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Oppenheimer. (Or, should there be a twist of fate, we'll be outraged by how Murphy was snubbed in favor of another actor whose wild-card win will be a bone of contention on Film Social Media.)
I'll probably be happy for Murphy, an actor who gets overlooked too much but gives his all to every role that comes his way, but I'll find myself wishing that he got the Oscar nod/statue for a different film entirely. Oppenheimer will pave the way for future lead roles for Murphy on the big screen, whether it be in another Nolan picture or in another filmmaker's, because he proves he's more than capable of commanding viewers' attention. Unfortunately, the actor is left with a unwieldy, thudding screenplay that perpetuates the popular --and dangerous -- image of Oppenheimer that Bird and Sherwin worked tirelessly to avoid with American Prometheus. Whether it be Jonathan Crane, also played by Murphy, in Batman Begins or Hugh Jackman's Robert Angier in The Prestige, Nolan has a soft spot for troubled male geniuses in his movies as well as an interest in how scientific milestones are manipulated by people with selfish and dangerous intentions. Oppenheimer is no different: viewers are following a troubled, scientific mind who transforms himself into one of the most significant figures in both American scientific and wartime history, but comes to regret the scientific achievement that gives him such a status. And that's the problem. While there's nothing inherently wrong with Nolan exploring science and destruction -- in fact, this has been a significant aspect of his films since Batman Begins --, Oppenheimer's foray into the subject feels redundant. As Bird noted in an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, the real arc of Robert's story "is the tragedy," but Nolan only concerns with this when the film lurches into its third act. Until then, Murphy portrays Robert as an immensely talented intellectual -- who, in real life, struggled with what we can now determine as anxiety and suicidal ideation in his young adult years -- haunted by visions of a nuclear hellscape that (maybe?) he believes he can prevent... I guess? It's unclear what Nolan is trying to go for with his interpretation of Oppenheimer's scientific achievement, but it seems to run up against Murphy's rueful and perturbed depiction of the physicist. What is clear is that Oppenheimer is yet another entry into the annoying genre of quixotic, tortured male geniuses who behave erratically in the name of passion, art, and success. Biopics are no stranger to this; just look at Steve Jobs, Amadeus, and even Bohemian Rhapsody. Culturally, we should be tired of this but, unfortunately, we're accustomed to it. Think about how many stories are out there where a marginally talented man acts like a massive dick to someone or a group of people but it gets excused because it's all about "art" and "brilliance." (Better yet: think about the stories that are out there where marginally talented men do a tepid mea culpa for their past assholetry and are instantly forgiven by their stans because it's all about "art" and "brilliance.") Naturally, there's enough movies reflecting this cultural norm because we either don't want to question why this is a norm or because we are comfortable with letting men believe that success and skill is good reason enough to act like an asshole, especially towards women. (More on this in a moment.) While the real-life Oppenheimer is not immune to any sort of criticism, no matter how hard the Nolan simps want to suddenly vouch for both the scientist and their fave filmmaker, reducing the man to a socially awkward, cold, and emotionally distant who can't look at the world without seeing unbreathable mushroom clouds is tired. Not only is the audience deprived of seeing how various, disparate aspects of Oppenheimer's life and personality, from his secular Jewish heritage to his love of Elizabethan poetry, come together to forge and re-shape his identity, we are also once again treated to a piece of media that dangerously asserts that enduring mental turmoil is part of a successful person's "gift." Oppenheimer sidesteps its subject's struggles with ill mental health, but the underlying idea that madness gives the physicist the opportunity to explore planes of reality that hadn't been considered before is present throughout the film. Nolan has nothing new to say about Oppenheimer, the mythic status the scientist has taken on in America's historical project long after his passing, or how scientific achievements and selfish, powerful people don't mix. Cillian Murphy may be blessed with a haunting thousand-yard stare, but this movie needed more than just his unsettling fixed gaze. Not that that's going to stop various film critic circles and awards bodies from showering Oppenheimer and its leading man with heaps of praise and metal statues, of course. After all, despite the conversations generated by the #MeToo and Time's Up movement about gender, culture, and media, our culture has repeatedly proven itself incapable of pivoting away from limited, damaging models of masculinity. Our media continuing to reflect this is no surprise.
Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh Deserve Better Than This
Emily Blunt as Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer. (Universal Pictures/Syncopy | 2023)
It's no secret that Christopher Nolan is not good at writing women.
Throughout his filmography, Nolan has his female characters function as either plot devices or one-dimensional love interests (dead and alive); sometimes, they function as both. Inception features a wife pushed to the brink of madness, which makes her vulnerable to her husband emotionally and psychologically manipulating her; The Dark Knight killed the woman both Batman and Harvey Dent loved solely because it needed to drive Dent to madness so he could finally become Two-Face; and Tenet subjects reduces its central female character to relentless physical and emotional abuse, giving the film's nameless Protagonist all the incentive he needs to protect her despite having no romantic interest in her. Despite casting two talented actresses to play two women with a rich and complex real-world history, Oppenheimer shows that Nolan just isn't capable of writing a female character without relying on tired tropes that squander said character's potential. Given the stacked supporting cast of the film, not every character was going to be depicted with the nuance reserved for Oppenheimer and Strauss. Moreover, a majority of the film's supporting characters are often filtered through either Oppenheimer or Strauss's subjective gaze, resulting in characters painted with broad strokes meant to help the audience categorize them accordingly. Sadly, Kitty and Jean are not exempt from this. Compared to her previous work, Blunt's performance in Oppenheimer is decent but she can only do so much with a weak script. The real-life Kitty Oppenheimer's history extends past her husband, from her Communist Party membership to her brief work as a Los Alamos lab technician, but Nolan isn't interested in giving Kitty a story that's independent from her husband. While it is true that highly educated women like Kitty were not given many opportunities outside domestic work during the 1940s, it's still unfortunate that Nolan reduces Kitty to an unhappy housewife and mother who flits rapidly between alcoholism and talking sense into her husband. Kitty's place in the world at this time is rarely explored in media: a woman who became a biologist through drive and intellect but had to sacrifice her career aspirations time and again because of cultural expectations and limited job opportunities. Kitty is stifled by married life and motherhood as well as stressed by her husband's determination to build the bomb, but the movie never explores how much of a toll that takes on her. A brief scene where a drunken Kitty lashes out when she hears her infant child is crying in the next room should have been a powerful beat that clues viewers into her anguish over being able to find her footing as a mother. Instead, all it accomplishes is depicting Kitty as a heartless and hysterical woman who cannot handle the demands of motherhood. Kitty sits stoically on the sidelines for a bulk of the runtime until Nolan remembers he's working with a great actor and gives her purposeful lines and scenes that show Kitty as more than a disgruntled wife. Blunt and Murphy have strong chemistry together, with the former proving she can hold her own in a scene with a fellow powerhouse actor. As satisfying as it is to watch Kitty order Robert to get his shit together and stop being complacent, Nolan is still reducing a complex, imperfect woman to a soundboard for her husband. Kitty has to repeatedly shake her husband out of complacency because Nolan cannot be bothered to give her anything more significant to do other than being cold, histronic, and drunk. Although Kitty's lingering desires, tangible misery, and visible frustrations counter the stereotypical box Blunt is forced to work within, audiences only get snippets of Kitty's fiery, intelligent, and calculating personality, especially when she goes head to head with the government officials who want to revoke her husband's security clearance. The way Blunt holds her own in that scene is magnificent, and I wish that Nolan gave her scenes and dialogue with that level of intensity and sharpness. Alas, Oppenheimer is a waste of a talented actress who not only has immense compassion for the real-life woman she's been tasked with portraying but also worked hard to ensure her character had just as many multitudes as her male co-lead.
Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer. (Universal Pictures/Syncopy | 2023)
In contrast to Blunt, Pugh fares far worse with Nolan's script.
Like Kitty, the real-life Jean Tatlock was a remarkable woman: a reporter and writer who studied to be a professional psychiatrist and became an active member of the American Communist Party all while she lived with what modern mental health experts would classify as acute depression. Moreover, historians suggest that Tatlock was queer, which likely caused her greater emotional distress since 2SLGBTQIA+ people were ruthlessly vilified and subjected to legalized punishment during the 1940s and 1950s. Although Kitty's crackling personality and layered private life is shown in fragments, Jean resides in the shadows despite some historical accounts considering her the love of Robert's life. Considering the nature of their relationship, I can understand why Nolan would opt for a mystifying presentation of Jean. Not only did she and Robert have so much in common, but Jean also sparked Robert's interest in communist politics, something that likely motivated him to stay in the public eye following the atomic bomb's creation. Moreover, Jean expanded Robert's mind; she encouraged him to become more empathetic and politically active. Long after her passing, Jean remained a looming figure in Robert's life and her death devastated him, a fact that is wrenchingly depicted in the movie in an emotional exchange between Robert and Kitty. At 29 years old, Jean took her own life and we'll never know what path she would have taken in terms of her career and personal life. Unfortunately, dead wives/ex-girlfriends are a common trope in Nolan films, and that's all viewers get out of Jean in Oppenheimer. With films like Midsommar and Lady Macbeth, Pugh is no stranger to playing complicated, nuanced women with complex emotions and an insatiable desire for something more out of life, but Oppenheimer deprives the actress of another opportunity to convey all of this through Jean, who, like Kitty, wanted so much more out of life but was deprived due to social and sexual expectations for women of her time period. In Nolan's hands, Jean is nothing more than a mysterious, unconventional politically incendiary temptress, who seemingly offers Robert the things Kitty cannot. Oppenheimer's screenplay implies Kitty is constricted by the demands of motherhood and severe alcohol dependency, Jean is a free thinker and a sexually liberated woman who entices Robert to meet her in the bedroom-- where the audience is then subjected to uncomfortable, out-of-place sex scenes that filter a nude Pugh through the male gaze. (It must be noted that Pugh had nothing but high praise for her on-set experience, and that perspective -- as well as her choice to appear nude in this film -- must be respected.) In that regard, Kitty and Jean fit neatly into the respective "madonna" and "mistress" boxes. All that matters to Nolan -- and, by extension, Robert -- is the sexual capability, desirability, and bodies of the two most important women in Robert's life, robbing each of them of the agency, complexity, and humanity from their real lives along the way. Whether or not he intended to characterize Kitty and Jean this way, Oppenheimer continues to insist that Nolan does not care about writing fully-formed women who contain the same amount of complexity as his male characters. For the people screaming at me "The movie is about OPPENHEIMER not his WIFE or GIRLFRIEND!," please lower your voice. I know who the movie is about. Thanks to the available historical records about both of these women, however, I also know that further developing Kitty and Jean's characters and interior lives would have also given us greater insight into Oppenheimer's scientific, political, and personal developments. Nolan's choice to disregard both women and subject them to misogynistic and arbitrary roles in service of Robert's own emotional needs and desires further underscores his continued failure to write women characters with agency and depth. Kitty drinks her days away, resents having to take care of two kids, and screams at Robert to get over his martyr complex. Jean is so infatuated with Robert that she seemingly threatens to end her life because he must end their relationship. If this is the best a woman can get in a Nolan film, I hate to see the worst.
The Huge Supporting Cast Deserves Much Better Than This
Robert Downey, Jr. as Admiral Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer. (Universal Studios/Syncopy | 2023)
As the hype began to build for Oppenheimer, I noticed a lot of memes about the film's stacked cast, much of which centered around how white -- sans Rami Malek, an Egyptian-American actor -- the cast was. For example, writer Yolanda Machado memorably tweeted that "you can play where's Waldo trying to find any POC" in the cast. Alongside those memes were memes about how this cast was either too good to be true or how badass it was shaping up to be because of the level of prestige attached to a number of the names cast in Oppenheimer.
To some extent, the huge supporting cast is indeed too good to be true. Nolan manages to cast a number of talented faces, including Benny Safdie, Jack Quaid, David Krumholtz, and Sir Kenneth Branagh, but does absolutely nothing with them. Essentially, the presence of many of these actors are meant to show off just how "prestige" of a filmmaker Nolan is and how his name can immediately attract an actor to his work like a fly to honey. There's no need for this movie to have as many actors as it does, especially since many of them are given only two to three speaking lines and pop up every now and again to remind you they were cast too. (I had that moment each time Krumholtz appeared on screen; despite portraying Oppenheimer's closest friend and confidant, Isidor Rabi, Nolan appears to only bring Krumholtz back when he's exhausted another character.) With the staggering number of supporting players that eventually go to waste, it seems that all that Nolan wanted to do with them is show off, brag about how he's "got it like that" to get Freddie Mercury and Ensign Boimler to play glorified bit players in a larger story that eventually sweeps them off to the side. With that being said, it is genuinely surprising that a few of the supporting actors manage to stand out from the pack. As General Leslie Groves, Matt Damon gives a blunt and brazen performance as a man who has no time to speak in philosophical quandaries and poetic pontifications about physics. Groves doesn't care if he wounds someone's ego or hurts some feelings; he even manages to knock Oppenheimer down a peg, though he tries to disguise it as keeping it real. There's a bizarre, darkly humorous element Damon incorporates into his performance, which helps balance out the bravado and resoluteness Nolan imbedded into the man on the page. Yet, Groves stands as a subtle embodiment of the dangers of nationalism that Oppenheimer touches on, his presence calling to mind President Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex, especially the increased push for more military weapons at the expense of the American people. More so than Downey's Strauss, Damon's Groves is the most effective political statement Nolan makes in the film. Speaking of Strauss, Downey, like many of the film's most noteworthy performers, is sadly crammed into the "mustache-twirling villain" archetype once he appears on screen. Like Oppenheimer, there are complexities that Nolan misses with his character design of Strauss, who may not have been the most personable and upstanding politician in real life but that doesn't mean he lacked depth. Instead, all that Nolan can imagine is a petty, privileged politician who will seek power by any means necessary, and it's a characterization that not only fails to do justice for the real-life Strauss (in spite of his various flaws and moral blindspots) but also fails to do justice by Downey, who sheds the Tony Stark skin and adopts a more restrained approach. As Strauss, Downey manages to convey the man's deep insecurities, moral responsibility to the American people, and political ambitions in almost every scene -- a worthwhile and sometimes successful attempt to breathe some complexity into a man who has been flattened into a conservative politician who doesn't like a moderate scientist. Over the past few years, thanks to the creative output of Marvel Studios and various other non-Iron Man roles (i.e. Sherlock Holmes), Downey has enjoyed a career renaissance that has allowed him to build up a very likable public persona; he's the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with and hear him regale you with stories about what's going on in his life. Here, Oppenheimer allows Downey to play against that type and step into the shoes of an unlikable man who pins his moral and political shortcomings on a physicist who didn't worship the ground he walked on. In a telling but brief scene, Strauss growls that he made Oppenheimer "the father of the atomic bomb," but the physicist seemed to turn him against the science community for reasons he cannot fathom. (I'd wager it would have something to do with revoking Oppenheimer's security clearance, but that's just my theory.) It's a shame that Nolan didn't give Downey a better script to work with because this is indeed the actor's best work in many years. Of the supporting actors who surprised me the most, I didn't expect Alden Ehrenreich to emerge as a scene-stealer. Not only is the actor saddled with playing an audience proxy character, but he's also simply following Strauss around and listening to the guy grumble and groan about his Senate hearing and his grand rivalry with Oppenheimer. Ehrenreich's unnamed Senate aide is just going through the motions for a bulk of the film, only to slowly realize that the story being fed to him isn't adding up. Oddly enough, watching his character go through that journey and attempt to give Strauss the reality check he desperately needs was one of the more compelling aspects of the film. Yes, this character is a stand-in for Nolan, who is able to look at Oppenheimer's story with 2023 eyes and chide the U.S. government for their treatment of Oppenheimer, but Ehrenreich is able to hold his own in his scenes with Downey, confidently elevating a glorified bit part into a surprisingly weighty performance. This Senate aide could have just been another face in the crowd, but the fact that this character gets an opportunity to call out Strauss on his bullshit all while developing a moral compass free from the politician's influence is unexpectedly effective. Once again, Ehrenreich reminds audiences that, despite being the only actor to headline the only live-action Star Wars movie that didn't turn a profit, he was not the problem with Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Considering Oppenheimer Within Our Current Historical Moment (or, In Conclusion)
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer. (Universal Studios/Syncopy | 2023)
One of the earliest reactions to Oppenheimer that I saw on social media came from author and ordained minister Dante Stewart, who took to Instagram to share the following thought he had after seeing the film:
"Christopher Nolan did his thing. He's an absolute genius. He tried to tell the story of a complicated man but the facts are this: J. Robert Oppenheimer was a product of white American male arrogance and power. [...] If you're going to tell it, tell the truth. I can only speak for myself when I say that the fervor over Oppenheimer (a.k.a. "Oppenheimer Madness," because a term like "Barbenheimer" only further obscures Oppenheimer (the scientist)'s moral failings and Oppenheimer (the movie)'s omissions) caused me to take stock of what is currently happening with history and American culture. As I write this, the literature-centric nonprofit organization PEN America continues to update its data on regarding banned books in U.S. schools, specifically books written by Black, Latine, Indigenous, Asian, queer, and trans authors and/or books centered around the subject of race, history, sexuality, and gender identity. PEN America notes that, during the first half of the 2022-2023 school year, their Index of School Book Bans list over 1,000 instances of individual books banned with 874 unique titles being greatly affected. In July, Florida once again made headlines -- this time, it was over its new African American history standards, which apparently wants to emphasized that enslaved Africans "developed skills" that could be applied for their "personal benefit." Despite backlash from the Florida Education Association, the NAACP, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the state's governor defended the choice and chose to flip the backlash back on Democrats for pushing for subjects and topics that would "indoctrinate" children... or something. (I watched a clip of his attempt at defending the choice during an NBC News interview; it's just word salad with a side of bigot dressing.) Unfortunately, Florida's massive overhaul of its educational curriculum is part of a larger trend to whitewash history, something that writer Julia Carrie Wong took notice of in a world news piece for The Guardian back in 2021. As the United States underwent a so-called "racial reckoning" in the wake of George Floyd's brutal murder at the hands of police, Wong wrote that a reactionary counter-movement began to emerge, one that was "bent on reasserting a whitewashed American myth." In its attempts to ban critical race theory -- a college-level theoretical framework typically taught in law school or in university classes focused on the court system -- from elementary schools or the New York Times' 1619 Project, which was spearheaded by Pulitzer-winning writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, this counter-movement remains devoted to trying to keep students of all ages from having honest classroom conversations about the complexities of American history and the racism at the heart of the nation's founding. As Wong notes, this is "characterized by a childish insistence that children should be taught a false version of the founding of the United States that better resembles a mythic virgin birth than the bloody, painful reality. It would shred the constitution’s first amendment in order to defend the honor of those who drafted its three-fifths clause." By decrying CRT, which has since become a mythic, catch-all boogeyman for conservatives who hate honest conversations about racism, the 1619 Project, and even Ibram X. Kendi's book How to Be an Antiracist (which was recently included in a racist tirade by a Republican presidential hopeful who likened both Kendi and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley as "modern grand wizards of the modern KKK" on the campaign trail.), it's becoming terrifyingly easier to treat racism as a "divisive" concept that (white) children need to be shielded from because they need to either maintain their innocence or maintain their sense of patriotism. Meanwhile, Black kids continue to get shot and killed by either complete strangers of the police, and the pictures the media uses when talking about them are ones purposely picked to make them look older and threatening. Black women -- especially Black trans women -- continue to navigate the unsafe factors of the real and the digital worlds, from the online transphobia that minimally famous cis women continue to spew to the very real misogyny that continues to endanger Black women on a daily basis. Racism is only "divisive" when certain folks don't want to talk about it, because coming to terms with the racism that's embedded into every facet of American society means reckoning with how they themselves benefit from and possibly exhibit that racism in their day-to-day lives. If you're going to tell it, tell the truth. Before Oppenheimer was released, I saw a number of people online raising understandable questions: Why should anyone have to sit through a long-ass film about a white guy who never apologized for building a weapon that killed over 200,000 Japanese people? Why does Hollywood insist on putting out films where Americans retroactively feel bad about harming people of color both globally and domestically? Why should we continue to care about a dead white scientist with enough documentaries to his name when there are Black, Latine, Asian, Indigenous, and queer people who have made scientific/historic contributions that continue to get buried or overlooked? When are we gonna leave these white savior films in the garbage where they belong? When are we gonna start questioning how deep in cahoots the American film industry is with the military-industrial complex? Despite the very loud and (unsurprisingly) very bigoted objections from both the Nolan simps and the bigots they have chosen to align themselves with so they can fight for their movie's credibility against "the woke left" (read: anyone who may have found this movie boring and/or might possibly not even be a liberal; I've read a few reviews from conservative folks online who found the movie to be long, boring, and (unsurprisingly), too political) or whatever, the questions, concerns, and outrage surrounding this film is understandable to me. It's not a shock that Oppenheimer humanizes J. Robert Oppenheimer at the expense of the nameless, faceless Japanese people who were killed by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor is it a shock that the 32 Latine-American families who were forced off their land in New Mexico so that the lab used to create the atomic bombs were erased entirely from the narrative. As cynical as this sounds, I do not expect the American film industry to create films that actually acknowledge the nation's poisonous shortcomings -- namely the white male arrogance, power, and savior complex that all congealed to make J. Robert Oppenheimer (and dozens of noteworthy historical white men before and after him) "the destroyer of worlds." All that America can and will continue to do with films like this is what Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle once quipped: "Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people … they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad." If you're going to tell it, tell the truth. Like most things, Oppenheimer does not exist in a vacuum. Despite Nolan's intentions, his film is now part of a few larger cultural conversations, from the moral and ethical blindspots that surround the myth-making project we call American history to the (white) anxiety and anger-fueled backlash to inclusive filmmaking and cinematic storytelling. To some degree, I hate that we have to put so much stock into such a flat, boring biopic that is so unabashedly captivated with itself it hopes you will be infatuated with it -- as long as you pay zero attention to the trope-y writing, sexist cliches, and self-indulgent creative liberties that threaten to sink the whole thing. I'm probably going to get jumped for stating the obvious but Oppenheimer fails to qualify for all the genre markers it sets up for itself, much less fails to qualify as a good "prestige" blockbuster; if this was any other filmmaker, we'd chat about this for a week or so and then let it fade into obscurity until the Golden Globes or the Oscars bizarrely nominate it the way they nominated Andrea Riseborough last year. But this is Christopher Nolan. We are expected to pay attention for some reason. Film critics and awards bodies will fuss around Oppenheimer when awards seasons hits, showering it with unnecessary awards and accolades that awards season analysts will watch like a hawk to determine its Oscar chances because they probably want to win that Oscar prediction pool they got going on at the office. And, because it's Christopher Nolan, so many cinephiles and chronically online film snobs will go ham about it-- and fight anyone online who disagrees with them about Oppenheimer winning a certain award, much less an Oscar. Me on the other hand, I'm bowing out of the Oppenheimer discourse now. I did my due diligence as a film fan, saw the other unnecessarily over-hyped movie of the summer, and regretted of the whole endeavor--excluding the Trinity test sequence, of course. As "prestige" of a filmmaker Nolan has since been classified as, no one can convince me that Oppenheimer is anything but a dull, trope-y, white anxiety/savior biopic that insists I buy into its delusion of self-importance. In the annals of film, J. Robert Oppenheimer is yet another white man who is granted a three-hour biopic to mope, stare blankly into the distance, and wrestle with his choice to make an atomic bomb that killed thousands of people, eventually emerging as a "complex anti-hero" of some sort who committed a grave act of necessary evil to help cement America's status as a global superpower after years of traumatic warfare. If you're going to tell it, tell the truth... but that's too much like right.
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