"Oppenheimer": one-paragraph review

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer

2023's "Oppenheimer," directed by Christopher Nolan and based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, stars a gaunt and haunted-looking Cillian Murphy as the eponymous "father of the atomic bomb." The movie is a meditation on Oppenheimer's probable state of mind, his loyalty to the United States and, at least tangentially, the ethical questions surrounding the making of such a weapon. As such, the story has given itself a large load to carry, leaving it up to the director and to the cast to do the necessary heavy lifting. For the most part, the story works, jumping back and forth in time as we see moments in Oppenheimer's personal life, his hearing before the Personnel Security Board to determine his involvement with communism, and Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss's confirmation hearing to become a presidential cabinet member (Strauss, pronounced "Straws," was something of a frenemy of Oppenheimer). The film's cast contains many Nolan regulars, but central to this narrative are non-regulars like Emily Blunt (as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty), Florence Pugh (as Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock), Robert Downey Jr. (as Admiral Lewis Strauss) and Matt Damon (as General Leslie Groves). Oppenheimer, as portrayed in the story, is something of an arrogant womanizer, but he's also a brilliant visionary who, despite his drive to complete the development of the atomic bomb, feels pangs of conscience about what he is doing. Overall, the cast is solid, but in my opinion, the true star of the story is the often-soaring cinematography, with its sweeping, panoramic views of Los Alamos. Nolan's editing of the story moments feels somehow more aggressive than usual, and most scenes have a kind of rushed, in medias res feel to them as if the director were in a hurry to push us along to the next scene as quickly as possible. Despite this, there is no goal-driven tension about the drive to complete the Manhattan Project; I found myself mentally comparing this lack of directed tension with how 1995's "Apollo 13" handled its series of crises. A long, dialogue- and exposition-heavy film like "Oppenheimer" will inevitably contain some flabbiness, and while I wasn't bored by the film, I did feel it dragged at certain moments. The almost comical sex scenes with Florence Pugh feel exploitative and unnecessary—a hard thing to admit given that Florence Pugh is a good-looking young woman. I also had to roll my eyes, yet again, at the sheer number of non-Americans in American roles: Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, and Gary Oldman (as President Harry Truman) are all English; Jason Clarke (as Roger Robb, chief counsel at Oppenheimer's Personnel Security Board hearing) is Australian. Among the Americans, Jack Quaid is a surprising presence as a young Richard Feynman, but with a cast this huge, Quaid/Feynman barely registers. I respect "Oppenheimer" for its sheer ambitiousness, but in the end, I thought the ponderous story could have been cut down by a third to increase the sense of tension and get rid of some narrative flab. Not a bad movie by any means (despite Nolan's continued obsession with chronological nonlinearity), but a bit of a slow burn. Cillian Murphy, already thin, lost weight for the part; his hollowed-out expressions are, at some angles, reminiscent of the real Oppenheimer's. I'll give the film a cautious thumbs-up for the Big Ideas it presents to us, but in the end, I'm not sure how rewatchable it is.