Review: OPPENHEIMER

I was dreading this one. I've not been a big fan of Christopher Nolan since he began making important movies. Memento? Sure. Prestige? Right on. But the Batman movies, Interstellar and Inception all left me feeling like I'd spent an afternoon having something very plain made very convoluted. I did like how he used different timescales for Dunkirk but in the end it felt clever rather than profound. So, when I knew that he was making a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer, I was first in line. 

See, while I know most of his blockbusters are really just big popcorn movies with a few decent brushstrokes, I still think he does have an unlimited number of potential masterpieces in him, now and to come. This historical figure comes with ready made complexity so the struggle there is only to choose what to leave out. That his efforts gave rise to the nuclear age which made the Cold War terrifying right up to Glasnost in the 1980s makes him ripe for storytelling. So, how'd Nolan do?

Ok, first: assume premium grade film making on visual and audio lines. He shot in IMAX (which I chose against for convenience), chose a strong score composer and great sound engineering team. This means that Oppenheimer simultaneously feels like a contemporary film but looks like the best of the '70s, all grain, depth and colour you can eat. Even when I don't care about the movie I know it will look and sound superior to anything on the same block.

So, how's the story? It's three hours long, does it need to be? Not by a country mile. The first hour is all setup, Oppy did this, met this guy, said that and got to the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. As I watched this I kept thinking that it felt like a compressed few episodes of a streaming series, it's all dialogue from an old desk calendar and getting pointers to significant characters, and details that you should collect like game tokens so you can play later. It's a previously on Oppenheimer but it goes for an hour. 

Then, as the person Oppenheimer gets tangled in ethics, messy affairs, politics as well as history, the performances start getting enjoyable and the cinema separates itself from the streamer model and gets into gear. The best of these scenes - the blending of memory with testimony when Oppenheimer is talking about his mistress, a particular moment of bad news, and the crescending tension leading to the first detonation at Los Alamos, and the rally like congratulation scene which is interrupted by a stylised  imagining of the Hiroshima blast - are great film making, pure and simple.

But biographies of any kind must seek to teach, to provide a life lesson or at least talking points toward one. Most of these in Oppenheimer are centred on a few moments that play like leitmotifs and come to fruit in the final act when the character's historical downfall is examined. This will feel overlong and anticlimactic to many as it effectively bars the excitement of the Trinity test sequence (which is what many will expect to be the film's climax) to concentrate on the political fallout (see what I did there) and figures involved. My advice is to just keep watching as the conclusion is both sobering and satisfying. The pieces of the debate about potential arms races, the power of deterrence and the question of a permanent standoff (later MAD or mutually assured destruction) feels like a standpoint appropriately fragmented and only beginning to form.

Nolan has, for most of his career, been able to marshal impressive forces for his productions, not least of all are his casts. Well, look, everyone's good in this but I'll just concentrate on two. Cillian Murphy is Oppeheimer. When you see stills, especially those social media mugshots of him against a similar photo of the real thing there's a kind of uncanny valley effect where you end up rejecting Murphy as a lookalike. Murphy's big eyed boyishness has persisted well into his career and it is hard to imagine the face on the left at the centre of history. On screen, in motion, he establishes a swing between action and stillness that erases the photographic difference and allows us to concentrate on his character's presence and predicaments. His voice work is particularly impressive as he keeps his accent Yankee patrician but timbre about half an octave lower than normal without a moment's strain. This is dedicated character acting. 

On par is Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer who uses every second of her screen time to variously suffer in period correct silence or blister with rage or numbly wade through alcohol. Her appearance in a late scene when she turns to us and her husband takes us (and Murphy) aback with the violence of the ravages she has borne (her advanced rosacea looks like burns). In another, when she responds to an offered handshake with the contempt she feels, we know she is restraining all action and channelling her hatred through her eyes alone. It's magnetic.

So, then, how'd ol' Chris do? Is it worth your time staring at a screen for a bum numbing three hours? Well, it didn't feel like that long. the opening great moments in history pageant moves at a clip and when it gears down the stakes are raised to compulsion. If you can, after it has delivered its quota of multiplex thrills, keep with the length and detail of the epilogue you will feel rewarded. This is one of the good ones.