NOLAN MASTERPIECE

IN REVIEW

MURPHY DELIVERS LACONIC PERFORMANCE FOR MASTER FILMMAKER

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Christopher Nolan uses the splitting of atoms as a narrative device in this compelling biopic about the nuclear physicist behind the invention of the atomic bomb.

The Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico was meant to design a weapon that would bring an abrupt end to the long and gruesome carnage of World War II.

Cillian Murphy provides another laconic performance, this time in the lead role as nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, part of an ensemble cast of talented actors that includes Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, in charge of the Manhattan Project, Kenneth Branagh as physicist Niels Bohr and Jason Clark as special counsel Roger Robb. These established performers are then supported by a number of actors performing the roles of nuclear physicists known and unknown around the world at the time, such as Tom Conti, working with the aid of the hair and make-up department, as Albert Einstein.

Robert Downey Jr has a substantial role in the back story as Lewis Strass, a colleague and admirer of Oppenheimer who incrementally becomes an adversary by 1954.

Hair and make-up have a role throughout the film as the 3 hour runtime ages the characters through several stages in life experienced along the way.

Murphy humanizes Oppenheimer who was well known at the time, literally appearing on the cover of Time Magazine, but whose iconic stature has slipped into the many fissures of historical time since then.

Nolan explores the reasons for this marginalization, as part of the overall vision for the film, in typical Nolan fashion, throwing on layers upon layers of esoteric information presented for a broader audience often with the use of aesthetics.

The score provides significant energy to the narrative throughout the film which allows Nolan to develop the characters and the script with the use of thoughtful dialogue without the film falling flat. Scenes filled with deeper dialogue that might otherwise drop away are pushed forward with the score.

Scenes also oscillate between long scenes and short scenes as well as short scenes interchanging between the main narrative and the back story, sometimes creating uncertainty as to which is which, but overall providing kinetic energy to move the narrative forward. The three hour runtime moves quickly as a result.

The initial scene sequences create a bit of exasperation as the back story about an inquiry into whether Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be renewed drags on a bit until you beg the question just when the director is going to ‘get on with it’ and start telling the story everybody came to the theatre to watch.

Murphy humanizes the famous physicist as much as he can by having a passion for love and family as Americans were encouraged to do in the 1940s and 1950s. But Oppenheimer is motivated by physics and nuclear science as much if not more than Kitty and his two children.

Similarly to Inception  (2010) in which Nolan explores dreams and time within dreams, the aesthetics used in depicting transcendental realities becomes one of several elements that complement the characters on their journeys along the narrative line.

Nolan also keeps the camera moving, and as a result, like the atom being split, the narrative becomes a series of unique compositions, with nearly every scene being different with an ever changing tone and atmosphere to the overall film project.

All of this great imagination being crystalized in story boards and then film footage, is edited well together under the supervision of a clearly master filmmaker infusing all his experience and dedication to the art of cinema in telling the story of the biopic character. Americana never looked so good in this capture by the meticulous camera hand, and objective eye of a non-American filmmaker with an international cast of actors.

Murphy captures the leading American physicist in his fanaticism about science, space and the matter of substances. Oppenheimer, like many scientists, believed that science not humanism could end global conflict only to discover the achievements in science can be used just as quickly for evil as for good.

The development of the atomic bomb exemplifies the debate in many scientific journeys that unleash the power and magic of God only to discover that humanism may manipulate what has been discovered to a very myopic end.

Kenneth Branagh plays an enigmatic scientist with a very clinical view of the world but who is also possessed with the confidence of a person believing in the ability to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Branagh previously played Victor Frankenstein in the retelling of Mary Shelley’s 19^th Century Gothic novel (1818) about medical science, in the film Frankenstein (1994).

Emily Blunt puts on a character specific mask to her design of an assertive, independent female protagonist that self-medicates the emotional difficulties encountered in life with alcohol.

Kitty has the botanist’s clinical ability to assess situations. But both Kitty and Robert love and want to live with love and children and find a way to make family life work in and around their scientific obsessions.

Nolan had created a below the grid long gradual incremental promotional campaign for the film that began with early releases about his next film project and which actors had answered the casting call. Unfortunately, the film release date was announced well in advance, and the premiers eventually became hijacked by other films being released on, in and around those release dates.

Oppenheimer is well worth the trip to the movie theatre.