There is perhaps no other figure in the history of the twentieth century who better represents that unity of modernism, and that arc from modernist exhilaration to disillusionment, than Julius Robert Oppenheimer: poet, communist fellow traveler, and father of the atomic bomb. His attempts to transcend the paradox of modernity by pushing for the internationalization of peaceful development of nuclear energy and against the proliferation of nuclear weapons left him one of the most renowned victims of McCarthyism and all but professionally destroyed.
The film opens with Oppenheimer’s student days at Cambridge in the 1920s. In a brilliant montage, we see our protagonist in a museum staring at Picasso’s Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms, then listening to Igor Stravinsky and reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The young Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, finds himself “tormented by visions of a hidden universe” as a result of the profoundly destabilizing new science that upends the classical physics of Newton and Einstein (whose own relativity was already destabilizing enough) and leaves the very determinism of the universe unsettled.
Instead of a clunky exposition trying to explain the quantum realm to mass audiences, Nolan delivers some of his most visually experimental filmmaking yet — expressing Oppenheimer’s intellectual vertigo with raindrop ripples in puddles, vibrations of light, and exploding, dying stars. The rest of the first act then takes us through scenes exploring Oppenheimer’s early research; his efforts to unionize his colleagues; dinner parties and salons with liberals, socialists, Communists, and other “premature anti-fascists” devoted to fundraising to defend the beleaguered Spanish Republic; and the indifference of many of these progressives to the sexual mores of the time. Picasso, Eliot, Stravinsky, Bohr, Marx — or more accurately, art, literature, music, science, socialism — are all the same radical, revolutionary thing for this crowd.
“It’s kind of an amazing time,” Nolan says. “And then, of course, as you start to research and look at the drama of his story and where it then went, where this revolutionary fervor actually wound up — that’s when so many revolutions wound up in a pretty awful place.” |
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