Everything consequential in Oppenheimer happens at least twice: first as an event, then as an exhibit. A conversation in a Berkeley kitchen becomes a paragraph in a security file. A night in a San Francisco hotel becomes a question put by a lawyer holding a folder. A few minutes beside a pond in Princeton become a grievance that swallows a man’s career and, twelve years later, a Senate vote. The bomb goes off with roughly an hour of running time to spare. What detonates in the last third of Christopher Nolan’s film is paper.
That is the first thing to understand about a movie so routinely described as the story of the man who built the atomic bomb. It is that story, and it stages the bomb with every appetite for scale that Nolan has spent a career feeding. But its true subject is smaller and colder: how a first-rate mind allows itself to be borrowed by the state, discovers too late that the loan was a purchase, and then learns that the institutions which made it indispensable can arrange its humiliation with nothing more violent than a stenographer. Intelligence becomes implicated in power. Ambition puts on the uniform of duty and salutes. A man’s guilt, which is real, is confiscated and converted into political theater by people who have no interest in his guilt, only in his usefulness as a target. And the man himself, who has organized his entire personality around the prospect of being historically important, finds out that historical importance is not armor. It is a spotlight, and a spotlight is an excellent place to be shot.
The film knows this from its first images and never lets the audience forget it. Rain on a pond; a man’s face, all cheekbone and pupil, studying the circles; a title card about Prometheus that reads less like a promise of grandeur than like the summary page of a sentencing memo. Then two chapter headings, “Fission” and “Fusion,” that announce a structure before a line of dialogue has been spoken: one process that splits, one that joins, both of which release their energy by tearing at what had been stable. Nolan and his editor, Jennifer Lame, cut between a security hearing in a room barely larger than a walk-in closet and a Senate confirmation hearing that looks, beside it, like a cathedral, and the film has not yet reached Cambridge, or Los Alamos, or anything a trailer would call a plot. The atmosphere is already complete: acceleration, vanity, secrecy, a low erotic hum under the dialogue, and the particular dread of watching people fill out forms that will decide who gets to remain a person.
Nolan has made films about time before, compulsively, but this is the first in which time functions as an accusation. The nonlinear structure is not a puzzle box. It is a deposition. The past keeps arriving out of order because that is how the past arrives when someone else holds your file. Ludwig Göransson’s score, which sounds at first like a violin trying to outrun itself, turns out to be the sound of a man’s thinking pushed to a speed at which thought becomes a hazard to the thinker. Every sequence rushes toward a catastrophe, and the joke, if that is the word for it, is that the catastrophe has already occurred by the time most of the rushing is over. The audience is waiting for the bomb. The film is waiting for the noise.
At the Trinity test, which Nolan stages with a patience that shades into cruelty, the light arrives long before the sound. The scientists watch a second sun through welder’s glass and hear nothing. The desert stays silent for a span that feels indecent. Then the blast wave hits, everyone flinches, and the flinch is the whole movie in miniature. Oppenheimer sees what he has done in July of 1945. He hears it, in full, only in the spring of 1954, in a room without windows, when a lawyer named Roger Robb reads his own words back to him in a voice that has already decided what they mean. The organizing insight of a three-hour film is that consequence in human affairs behaves like sound in a desert. It is late. It is louder than anyone expected. And by the time it reaches you, there is nothing left to do with your body except flinch.
What He Could See and What He Wouldn’t
The film’s Oppenheimer can see atoms and cannot see faces. Nolan does not ask the audience to assemble this as a metaphor; he builds it into the visual grammar of the first Cambridge sequence, where a homesick, sleepless graduate student stares into a glass of water and sees vibrating strings, expanding rings of light, particles shivering against blackness. Hoyte van Hoytema photographs these visions as if they were the young man’s native country, more vivid than the laboratory where he is meant to be doing tedious experimental work under Patrick Blackett. The interior world is enormous and gorgeous. The exterior world is a man telling him to clean up his bench. It is not surprising that he injects the exterior world’s apple with cyanide.
That apple deserves more than the amused shrug it usually receives. Nolan places it in the film’s first quarter hour, before the physics has become glamorous, before anyone has offered Oppenheimer a mesa, ...
