‘Oppenheimer’: Bravura filmmaking

Complex, fact-based story is a fascinating slice of history

By Derrick Bang Enterprise film critic

This is, without question, one of the most ambitiously powerful films ever made.

Director/scripter Christopher Nolan’s attention to detail, and his flair for dramatic impact, are nothing short of awesome. Viewed on a giant IMAX screen, the result often is overwhelming.

This deep dive into the tortured life of J. Robert Oppenheimer also boasts a panoply of wellsculpted characters: many familiar by reputation (or notoriety), others just as fascinating. All are played by an astonishing wealth of top-flight acting talent.

Best of all, Nolan’s adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” — published in 2005, and written over a period of 25 years — has the political complexity and narrative fascination that we’ve come to expect from Aaron Sorkin and William Goldman. Jennifer Lame’s powpow-pow editing also is terrific.

All that said, Nolan does himself no favors with a needlessly outré prologue that blends ostentatiously surreal imagery — representing the anxiety-laden guilt and terror that later plagued Oppenheimer — with Ludwig Göransson’s shrieking loud synth score. It’s much too intentionally weird and off-putting.

R, for profanity, nudity and strong sexual content

Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh, Jason Clarke, Tony Goldwyn, Tom Conti, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Matthew Modine, Gary Oldman

Available via: Movie theaters

Göransson’s score and the film’s equally thunderous sound effects remain distracting during the first half-hour, obscuring dialogue while we struggle to absorb the initial character and information dump.

Nolan eventually settles comfortably into a multifaceted storytelling structure that cuts back and forth between Oppenheimer’s post-World War II security clearance hearing, held in the spring of 1954; and the June 1959 Senate hearings over whether former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman Lewis Strauss would be confirmed as President Eisenhower’s choice pick for U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

The former was a one-sided witch hunt deliberately kept out of the public eye, the latter a headline-generating circus very much in the public eye.

Oppenheimer, present throughout his 1954 hearing, reads a statement that opens the film’s third — and primary — narrative focus: his own life and career.

These sequences, as Oppenheimer’ history unfolds, are filmed in glorious 65mm color. (It remains true: Well-crafted film stock still is more satisfying — sharper, more vibrant — than digital.)

The Strauss Senate hearings — an event beyond Oppenheimer’s control, in which he plays almost no role, although his presence is felt throughout — is shot in grainier black-and-white. The result feels more sinister and mysterious; first impressions of the key players ultimately prove misleading, as Nolan craftily moves his film into its third act. But that comes much later.

As a young physics student hapless at math and lab work,

Oppenheimer nonetheless earns early degrees at Harvard (1925) and Germany’s University of Göttingen (1927). His life-changing moment comes during a chance encounter with Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh, simply sublime), who encourages the young scholar to pursue quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

By 1936, when Oppenheimer

— now played by Cillian Murphy

— becomes a full professor in the UC Berkeley physics department, he has blossomed into a prickly, excitable academic whose huge intellect is matched by impatience and arrogance. He’s adored by students and fellow scientists, who throng to his lectures.

But he’s also difficult to like, as a person; this is key to Murphy’s performance. On the one hand, Oppenheimer is candid, almost to a fault; on the other, he dismisses any censure of his behavior, even when it comes from his beloved brother Frank (Dylan Arnold), also a scientist.

Murphy’s expressions and bearing are sincere when Oppenheimer insists that his actions always are proper, and he’s genuinely bewildered when challenged; how could anybody argue with one so intelligent? Murphy unerringly nails the man’s intensity and posture, along with the hat and pipe that become ubiquitous.