David Mikics
Tablet, July 25, 2023
“Oppenheimer was too mercurial to ever win the Nobel Prize.”
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” These dreadful words are by now familiar to many. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb, said he thought of this line from the Bhagavad Gita during Trinity, the first atomic test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945. Vishnu assumes his many-armed form to convince Prince Arjuna to enter battle, and the image of a thousand suns occurs as well, a spectacle to rival the atomic fireball.
Oppenheimer, the son of wealthy German Jews from the Upper West Side, went to Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture school as a boy, where he was taught to weigh each moral decision with grown-up sobriety. Much later, Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit in order to read the Hindu scriptures, drinking in their message about the fatedness of life. Arjuna must do his duty, terrible though it is. But the Gita also suggests that death is an illusion, given the reality of reincarnation. Oppenheimer enjoyed no such consolation.
Nolan’s Oppenheimer is nearly as captivating as the biography it is based on, American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Bird and Sherwin produced a page turner, and made Oppenheimer’s story thrilling in all its details. Nolan also captivates us, every step of the way. Oppenheimer is a relatively staid biopic, but it is masterfully arranged, and Nolan’s quiet approach pays off. The audience sticks with this thorny, fascinating man, aware that he altered the world forever.
This is an actor’s movie. Cillian Murphy is enthralling as Oppenheimer. He conveys Oppenheimer’s soft-spoken diffidence, his acerbic gestures, his passion and good humor. Every time Oppenheimer thinks something through, Murphy makes it exciting. Just as superb as Murphy is Robert Downey Jr., who gives the performance of his life as Lewis Strauss, who was both Oppenheimer’s patron and, eventually, his enemy. Downey’s Strauss is an ace politician, always genial and smoothly welcoming, with an appealing hesitance and, in the end, a pained weakness that turns vindictive.
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