Oppenheimer, Dark Knight in Real Life.
(Lots of spoilers to follow, although most are in just about every review.)
During the filming of the original Batman, Michael Keaton asked co-star Jack Nicholson, the Joker, for advice on how to play the lead role. Nicholson replied, “Just let the costume do the acting, kid.” While Christopher Nolan did not direct that film, he seemed to have heeded the advice in his post-Dark Knight blockbuster, Oppenheimer.
He let the bomb do the acting.
As cinema, the almost two-hour lead up to the first test of a nuclear fission device, which those who built it called “the gadget,” is handled masterfully. Nolan generates growing suspense as the test comes nearer and nearer, even though the audience is fully aware that it will be successful. What the audience does not know, in this age of special effects, is how spectacular, how eye-popping and ear shattering, will be the result. Still, so…bombastic…are similar moments in contemporary cinema that, even in an IMAX theater, the Trinity test explosion was bound to be a tad anticlimactic, which, for all the pyrotechnics, it was.
That left an hour of screen time, and Nolan chose to pivot away from science and fill it instead with an earnest yet plodding McCarthy era tale of political persecution, featuring the sort of tortured hero and sneering villains that have become his specialty. Most of the action, if one could call it that, occurs in a private hearing, convened specifically to rob Oppenheimer of his security clearance. In many of these scenes, a stunningly passive Cillian Murphy, playing Oppenheimer, is tormented by evil prosecutor Jason Clarke, who played the head of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program in Zero Dark Thirty and seems even more sadistic here.
But the real villain is the man behind the scenes, the duplicitous, vindictive Lewis Strauss, played with malevolent gusto by Robert Downey, Jr. Strauss, believing himself the victim of what turned out to be an imaged slight by Oppenheimer, is all too happy to destroy an American hero because it will ease his confirmation as commerce secretary, a position he desperately wants.
In the end, Strauss succeeds in ruining Oppenheimer, but, with true Hollywood justice, is denied the cabinet post at the very last second, largely because of the no vote by a young, unknown senator from Massachusetts named Kennedy. (So ignorant are Americans of their own history that the character giving Strauss the news has to append “John F.” so the audience will know who he is talking about.)
Although the basic facts of this shameful episode are accurate, the real situation was more nuanced. Strauss was indeed crusty, rigid, and widely disliked, all of which were at least as responsible for his defeat as the antipathy of the scientific community, as was his “condescending and disdainful attitude toward members of the Senate” during his confirmation hearings. In addition, while the film implies Strauss, unlike Oppenheimer, tried to downplay his Jewishness, in the 1930s, he was one of the few voices in Washington pushing for Franklin Roosevelt to admit tens of thousands of Jews fleeing Hitler, which Roosevelt refused to do. As it was, he helped many German Jews escape, but berated himself afterward for not doing more.
But a Hollywood good guy/bad guy story needs to avoid moral ambiguity if the filmmakers want to sell tickets. And so, in pursuit of box office success, in addition to rendering Oppenheimer and Strauss as cardboard cutouts, they made another egregious but sadly predictable decision.
They never depicted the dreadful human cost that atomic weapons exact.
Nolan has been praised in many quarters for avoiding sensationalism by not showing scenes of the horror and devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after these terrible devices were used. In theory, the bombs were dropped to avoid the necessity of an amphibious invasion of Japan which could have cost as many as 100,000 American lives. Afterward, however, it came out that many American officials were aware that Japan might well have surrendered without an invasion, but Harry Truman was making a point to Stalin as much as to the Japanese.
Nolan also chose not to show the impact on residents near Los Alamos, which included widespread birth defects and sharp increases in cancer, or that a disproportionate number of scientists who worked on the project, including Richard Feynman, died of cancers widely attributed to their work at the site.
By avoiding “sensationalism,” if that were actually his intention, Nolan again minimized the moral ambiguity inherent in pushing scientific knowledge to cataclysmic limits, even in a noble cause, which the real Oppenheimer, after the bombs were dropped, surely did not. What Nolan really did was to sanitize and simplify, as much as possible, a series of decisions that defy simplicity. Instead of providing the morality lesson he clearly intended, he played into the sort of easy solution, facile thinking that currently plagues the United States.
Just the reverse is desperately needed. The unwillingness to weigh the consequences of immediate gratification, future-be-damned behavior is what got we Americans into our current, increasingly precarious mess. Slick, one-dimensional treatment of complex issues won’t get us out.