Oppie

 

I was interested to go to see Oppenheimer, but then I was reluctant to make it my first movie visit in maybe five years. Then when my friend Benj wondered if I might review it for him for his on line periodical First of the Month, I was willing to fight the obstacles. The full houses that put off my seeing it for a week; the new technology of being ticketed on-line which led to double booking for my seat J-19 and kept me expectantly waiting for the rightful owner of the empty seat J-16, where I had perched, to appear and claim the seat. When we got to 2:30 I thought I was home free until I realized all the mindless previews only ended at 2:55, but I managed to stay where I was unimpeded. And then the new technology for paying for parking which involved loading an app and getting a movie employee to enable the scanning machine to get my voucher recognized. Good thing I had time, nowhere to go, it was summer and so still light outside. Yet, I had to wonder yet again, is advancing technology worth it? How appropriate.

(Not to mention that for a half-hour lead in and a three-hour film, I got so uncomfortable later on that I had to leave momentarily to visit the bathroom, about when Kitty faces the inquisition committee that ultimately nixed renewing Oppie's security clearance, so I won't be commenting on that, except that "inquisition" is the right word in these very religious rites. We get so comfortable with streaming, bathroom and refrigerator nearby, pause button at the ready.)

But forget all that. Benj had suggested I review Oppenheimer because of my unquestionable credentials – security, science, movies, and taste for men who love women. That was too much of an inducement to ignore. And then, despite Nolan's once again, as in Dunkirk, overusing loud, insistent music that sometimes drowns out dialogue, this is a brilliant, even genius movie. He's making a familiar story into myth, in the best way possible, in the new technological advance over literature, the movies.  A technology that was itself questioned by lovers of books, although now that books and movies comfortably co-exist, the bleats of objection are muted.)

It could only be told by interweaving the later time plot line of (1) trying to renew Oppie's clearance followed by Strauss's failure to be confirmed by the Senate for a post in Eisenhower's cabinet, and moving back and forth to (2) Oppie's personal history and the well-known Manhattan project trajectory. A straight chronological time line would have been deadly; the script is just brilliant at heading to two climaxes simultaneously. (And, after all, we're dealing with physics here, and the imponderablity of time running only one way and the undecipherability of quantum physics, so moving time around is altogether appropriate.) The use of black and white for the post war plot line, and full color for the sunnier times of war and fighting fascists, is once again brilliant. The McCarthy era deserves nothing more than black and white, truth and myth over reality let's not uplift emotions for those guys. One reviewer regretted that the full depth of Oppenheimer's genius for languages and art went unplumbed, but to my mind, just alluding to it was startling and revealing, and the unstated depths were just the back story you can get if you read the books. The man was a genius, folks, and that's what geniuses do. But it doesn't mean they're good at relationships or politics, let's get that straight. Here in the movie, the allusions were perfect, and that's what is great about movies, the small items, hardly even noticed, that you have to take real time to allude to in books.

And then the mixing of the personalities, the human stories, and the science. The picture of individuals with all their weaknesses and evil – their humanness – unlocking the locked boxes of the gods, the knowledge, the Furies. That's really what it is.

The scientists are, well, scientists. They are like the people who think that explaining the facts will make Red states get vaccinated. Oppie argues with facts to make his case for his personal survival and resurrection and conquering his foes, no strategy but that, “if I only explain to them.” His wife says, fight! She smells out Strauss for the jackal he is, and what a performance by Robert Downey Jr. It might be his best performance ever, and it's brilliantly written as the truth only gradually becomes apparent – it had me distrusting what I knew about his being awful when I experienced the time as a young teenager, was I wrong? Downey plays it perfectly, as finally the truth of his petty perfidy and consummate skills as a bureaucratic infighter come out, in black and white as it should be.

Nolan makes the whole story mythic, how the power was unleashed by people who all saw only slivers of the picture. Scientists as technicians who think they know more than that, political and military figures who know more than the scientists about uses but have less vision of what is possible, perhaps, or perhaps more vision of what is realistic in international relations. It could be this way, we could trust each other and find a common path to peace, says Oppie. I didn't see it in the movie, maybe I missed it, but Einstein said to him, don't you see, they need you, you don't need them, walk away. But then, that's Einstein, with his weaknesses for the reality of everyday life and love that we saw in the series where he can't handle women. Einstein dives back into his private life of contemplating sitting on light beams and feeding ducks, but Oppie can't do that, he's involved, which isn't to say he knows how to play the game. Einstein thinks he's foolish for that, I think Oppie has the impulse to be more socially responsible than Einstein. But people are different.

And then there are the sex scenes – brief but enjoyable, prolonged look at female nudity without shame or desire – the burden that wife Kitty has to bear with this husband whose capacity for showing affection might be limited but whose libido is not, and she's had her own troubles, of course. I think people tend to treat the foibles of the scientists with less compassion than they should; if it were a straight love story, we would, but here it's just backdrop to the main issue of the unlocking of the secrets of the gods by mortals, so compassion for foibles is in short supply. People just open the damn locked box because they are people.

The picture we get of a scientific genius becoming an organizational genius who bumbles through his private life (although he's shown as very brave politically in resisting social pressure to join the Party,) of the times when smart scientists thought life could be organized scientifically as socialism because it was reasonable, of the politicians who don't realize that it's not a new weapon it's a new world – all this makes you think, how can Armageddon not happen, one way or the other? An unanswered question, likely for all time, until it's decided unfavorably, and then we know. (See my review of the final book of Dan Ellsberg – a review that Ellsberg himself liked a lot – here http://buddshenkin.blogspot.com/2018/02/ellsbergs-doomsday-machine.html).

It's not disrespectful to make these events into a story, into myth. The spectacular use of special effects, prospects of dead and disfigured people in blanched-out flashes as projections of Oppie's vision of crazy guilt or seer's vision of reality as seen by gods, is appropriate and not overdone, as it could well have been. The quieting in the soundtrack of screaming crowds and explosions you half-expect to see, the counterpoint to the insistent music (that, again, I didn't like any better here than in Dunkirk), that's fine, too. Not too flashy for flashy's sake, more masterful, I'd say.

So, finally, a brilliant movie that I was set to dislike. Maybe one of the great ones. Just goes to show you – don't predict, let them play the game. 

Budd Shenkin