I had long been looking forward to seeing Oppenheimer. I am fascinated by his life. And I am a HUGE fan of Cillian Murphy. I’ve had the privilege to see him on stage and I can confirm from that experience that, if anything, we don’t experience the full range of his considerable talents in his on-screen appearances. I have mixed experiences of Christopher Nolan’s movies but I can acknowledge his talent.
Before I go on to assess the movie, there are two things to correct. First of all, insofar as the movie implies to the contrary, Oppenheimer was not the “father” of the atomic bomb, not even in the sense that Edward Teller (of whom I do not have a high opinion), was the “father” of the hydrogen bomb (a title he tried to shake off in later live, in fairness). He was the supreme organiser but it was very much a team effort.
More importantly, some media coverage has been commenting on the assertion that this is the first biopic of Oppenheimer, and wondering why he was never the subject of a biopic before. Well, in fact,if you count a TV series as a biopic, there was one, a seven-part BBCTV series also entitled Oppenheimer, starring Sam Waterston, directed by Barry Davis and written by Peter Prince. Anyone not old enough to have watched The Killing Fields when it came out in 1984 probably won’t know who Sam Waterston is from Adam but in the 70s and early 80s he was regarded as a talented and quietly good-looking character actor. Ten years earlier he had second billing as Nick Carraway, the narrator in a much hyped but flawed adaptation of The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow (there has never been a satisfactory adaptation of that superb book).
Watching the BBC series live at the time I was mesmerized. To be honest, the style of the series was so American that I was surprised to find out that it was a BBC production. The cast were a mixture of American actors and British, the latter sometimes portraying Americans, sometimes the European scientists who worked on the project, notably David Suchet (who went on to portray Poirot successfully in a popular British series), as Edward Teller.For what it’s worth, the series gets very positive reviews on IMDb. It tells the story from the time Oppenheimer was teaching in Berkeley in the early 1930s until the aftermath of the withdrawal of his security clearance in 1954. Being seven hours long it can flesh out more of the scientific detail and some of the characters, including Jean Tatlock, Kitty Oppenheimer and Edward Teller are more rounded.
So the question for me is, how does Christopher Nolan’s movie compare with the 1980 series?
Well, of course, even though the BBC series clearly cost a lot (it doesn’t have any of the obvious clunky signs of budget restrictions; the Trinity test scene, although drawing on newsreel footage of subsequent explosions, is convincing), you can see the results of the much larger sum of money that was spent on Nolan’s movie, and I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense. It’s cinematographically gorgeous, and it has so many big ticket actors in walk-on roles. Regarding Cillian Murphy versus Sam Waterston, I’d say it’s about even. For the other actors, some of them are slightly better, some not as good, but that’s in a context where they are all competent at a minimum, and usually excellent. It’s only to be expected that actors like Robert Downey Jnr., Matt Damon, Jason Clarke, Emily Blunt and Rami Malek would hold their own against the lesser known actors of the series. The same can be said of the wonderful Florence Pugh (who is shamefully under-utilized).
No, my biggest problem is with Nolan’s script, which he wrote himself. I remember Gore Vidal, back in the 80s, rejoicing that the auteur phenomenon in cinema was on the way out. Unfortunately, he was wrong, and Christopher Nolan, despite his considerable talent, is a manifestation of it. There are so many occasions in the movie - not least in the final scene - where characters make portentous statements that reek of hindsight. Even in the lead-up to the Trinity test, characters, including Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, talk about the apocalyptic implications of the project, though the evidence suggests that, while there were deep concerns about using the bomb on Japanese civilians, a subsequent arms race with the Soviets was not on people’s minds at that point. Maybe some of these conversations are accurate, but I can’t help feeling that most of them aren’t. Even if some of them are, I would have chosen to leave them out, because they are unsubtle and take you out of the story.
The result is that Cillian Murphy is burdened with what I think are many clunky lines that implausibly foresee a future situation that they couldn’t have foreseen. Sam Waterston, on the other hand, has a much better script to work with.
The BBC series is available on YouTube, here. The image quality is poor in places, notably in the last episode, but I strongly recommend watching it. I won’t say don’t go to Nolan’s movie but watch the series first.
