{"id":10183,"date":"2024-02-25T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-25T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10183"},"modified":"2024-02-25T00:07:14","modified_gmt":"2024-02-25T05:07:14","slug":"oppenheimer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/25\/oppenheimer\/","title":{"rendered":"Oppenheimer."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Oppenheimer <\/em>is an achievement. It\u2019s a biopic, a deep character study, a thriller, a heist movie, and a Shakespearean tragedy (well, except the title character doesn\u2019t die at the end), wrapped up into a three-hour movie that never lets up its pace. It\u2019s incredible that a major studio bankrolled this and gave it such a long theatrical release, given its subject and its three-hour run time, but I hope its runaway success encourages studios to take more risks on prestige films like it. (It\u2019s streaming now on Peacock, or rentable on amazon<\/a>, iTunes<\/a>, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on the biography American Prometheus<\/em> (which I have not read), Oppenheimer <\/em>tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the physicist who led the United States\u2019s effort to develop a nuclear weapon, known as the Manhattan Project. It\u2019s framed by the events that came after the war, when Oppenheimer became an advocate for international control of the very weapons he helped to develop, leading to a sham hearing that led to the revocation of his security clearance and a subsequent public hearing that led to the downfall of his chief antagonist, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.). The movie itself runs from the 1920s, when Oppenheimer was still a student, meeting Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and studying under Max Born (mentioned but not depicted), through his time as a professor at Berkeley, his tenure in Los Alamos leading the Manhattan Project, and the post-war attacks on his reputation. The movie focuses on his professional efforts, but his personal life, including his marriage to the biologist Katherine (Emily Blunt) and his affair with the psychologist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), although the movie drags when the focus shifts away from the thriller at the heart of the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writer and director Christopher Nolan packed Oppenheimer<\/em> with dialogue, so there are very few moments of silence in the film, and any time the movie is focused on the professional arc, it flies. (If I were a more pandering sort, I might say it moves at the speed of light, but I\u2019ll leave those jokes to the least common depunimator.) The script underscores just how massive the undertaking and how unlikely the assembled team of physicists and other scientists was. It\u2019s easy to let hindsight make the development of the first atomic bomb seem like an inevitability, but it was a gigantic effort that required the participation of scientists from across the west, including some refugees from the Nazi regime, and coordination across multiple agencies and university laboratories. The physics behind nuclear fission was only discovered in 1938, and the plants refining the plutonium needed for the bombs didn\u2019t even come online until 1943 and 1944. We know how the story ends, but the movie puts you into the action enough that you can feel the tension and the uncertainty among the scientists \u2013 who knew what was at stake, but had no idea if they\u2019d succeed or when.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oppenheimer\u2019s marriage and infidelity make up the film\u2019s secondary plot, and while it\u2019s an important part of his story and is intertwined enough with his professional life \u2013 including his pre-war flirtation with the Communist Party \u2013 that it has to be in the film, but there\u2019s so little development of Katherine\u2019s or Jane\u2019s characters that neither role amounts to much beyond one good scene apiece. There\u2019s not enough screen time for either of them, since neither was involved in Los Alamos, and the result is that two Academy Award-nominated actresses are little more than props \u2013 which makes Blunt\u2019s nomination for Best Supporting Actress more than a little surprising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two best performances are, unsurprisingly, the two that earned Oscar nods \u2013 Murphy for Best Actor and Downey Jr. for Best Supporting Actor. Murphy has worked with Nolan before in Inception<\/a> <\/em>and Dunkirk<\/a><\/em>, and he gives a superb performance here as the title character, depicting the scientist as a sort of aloof genius whose determination and focus allowed him to lead the project to completion, while also showing his confusion at how his actions affect people around him, including his wife and his mistress. Downey\u2019s career resurgence has been fun to watch, although if you\u2019re old enough to remember his earliest work as part of the so-called \u201cBrat Pack,\u201d you probably saw how talented he was; I remember his supporting performance in the 1995 adaptation of Richard III<\/em>, which was the first serious role I\u2019d seen of his, and how compelling he was in every scene, often overshadowing other more accomplished actors. Downey isn\u2019t known for dialing it down, but that\u2019s what he does here, to great effect, so that Strauss comes across as an intense, ruthless, yet very professional politician, someone who often acts in his own self-interest but never out of emotion. As much as the movie puts Oppenheimer at its center, Strauss has his own story arc within the movie where Oppenheimer is often just a bit player, giving Downey the chance to be the lead actor in this film-within-a-film. Two outstanding performances in a gripping, wide-reaching story would put just about any film near the top of my annual rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oppenheimer<\/em> was nominated for 13 Oscars this year, and I\u2019d guess it\u2019s going to win a slew of them, including Best Picture, Best Actor (for Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (for Downey, Jr.), and Best Director, although I haven\u2019t finished all of the nominees in any of those categories yet and can\u2019t offer an opinion on whether it\u2019s deserving. Of the films I\u2019ve seen from 2023 so far, though, it is the best, just ahead of Past Lives<\/em>, which is a tighter and far more affecting film, but without as much ambition or as wide a scope. It did not receive a nomination for Best Visual Effects, however, despite the stunning scene where the first atomic test takes place in Los Alamos; perhaps that\u2019s not enough compared to the other nominees, none of which I\u2019ve seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oppenheimer is an achievement. It\u2019s a biopic, a deep character study, a thriller, a heist movie, and a Shakespearean tragedy (well, except the title character doesn\u2019t die at the end), wrapped up into a three-hour movie that never lets up its pace. It\u2019s incredible that a major studio bankrolled this and gave it such a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1357,1377,1380,1378,1376,1379,1292,161,215],"class_list":["post-10183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2023-movies","tag-2024-best-actress-nominees","tag-2024-best-adapted-screenplay-nominees","tag-2024-best-director-nominees","tag-2024-best-picture-nominees","tag-2024-best-supporting-actor-nominees","tag-biopics","tag-highly-recommended","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10184,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10183\/revisions\/10184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}