Oppenheimer

Ciilian Murphy in “Oppenheimer.” Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures via IMDB.com.

Christopher Nolan's “Oppenheimer” is a tale of triumph and apocalypse, as haunting and haunted as the man whose story it tells.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the brilliant theoretical physicist chosen to lead America's World War II effort to build an atomic bomb before Adolph Hitler did. For many filmgoers, writer-director Nolan's three-hour thriller provides the introduction to this world-changing figure. He was dubbed “the father of the A-bomb” by a grateful, war-weary America, but a few years later fell victim to McCarthy Era character assassination for his left-leaning political views.

For me, the movie is not only sweeping and magnificent – it's personal. Oppenheimer was a name I knew well, ever since boyhood.

My father, Dr. Alfred Chatenever, was one of the scientists who worked on the top-secret program to develop the bomb, dubbed The Manhattan Project. The project eventually stretched across the country all the way to the tiny town of Los Alamos, secretly constructed from the ground up in the middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. But my dad's assignment kept him in Manhattan, working in a clandestine lab hidden in a converted parking garage. 

All of this was highly classified at the time. My dad couldn't even tell his wife what he did, or explain to anyone else why he wasn't with the rest of the boys over there in Europe or the South Pacific. But in the years following the war, all three Chatenever kids eventually heard the stories. We knew the players destined for key roles in Nolan's complex narrative – not just Oppenheimer, but other scientists including Albert Einstein, Nils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Edward Teller. And Army General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the two-billion-dollar project – that's billions in 1940s dollars – and personally picked Oppenheimer to guide it.

Stops on Chatenever family summer road trips in the '50s included Oak Ridge, Tennessee, another city built in secret, to house laboratories and facilities to enrich the uranium needed for the bomb. On another trip, we visited Los Alamos itself.

Like Oppenheimer, our dad carried the weight of the bomb on his conscience for the rest of his life. True, it ended World War II … but it also ushered in a new age perhaps more lethal in its ultimate consequences than the firestorm explosions that leveled the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claiming more than 100,000 lives.

Working on the bomb had been a moral imperative at the time. Many of the scientists were Jewish, knowing all too well the consequences if Hitler got the bomb first. But once it was clear that Germany's efforts wouldn't succeed, the prospect of whether or not to drop the bomb on Japan became far more ambiguous. A number of top scientists on the project signed a petition urging President Harry Truman not to use the weapon.

It was all grist for the mill in discussions around the Chatenever dinner table. So I had a leg up before setting foot in the theater to see Christopher Nolan's version of these events based on the book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

In the lead role, Irish actor Cillian Murphy doesn't portray Oppenheimer so much as he resurrects the boundless genius and many failings of this complex man. Trained at Harvard, Oxford and Germany's University of Gottingen, Oppenheimer received his PhD at age 23. He introduced America to quantum physics, and spoke six languages including Sanskrit, but might as well have been wearing one of those T-shirts embossed with the words “I'm with Stupid,” atop an arrow pointing at his crotch. His activities supporting leftist causes would also come back to haunt him when an intellectual rival Louis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) targeted Oppenheimer out of a misplaced sense of betrayal.

The genius of Oppenheimer and his peers was accompanied by mighty egos, deep insecurities and rock-star vanity. 

Just keeping track of all the details of the story would be daunting enough, before trying to recreate the sights, sounds and textures of '40s and '50s America so authentically. But filmmaker Nolan further complicates matters with a nonlinear script, sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, that jumps back and forth between key incidents – both high and low – in its protagonist's career. 

Every detail of Nolan's screen artistry shimmers with blinding brilliance, like micro glimpses of the staggering power unleashed by splitting an atom. Atoms, of course, are invisible to the naked eye, but “Oppenheimer” makes invisible things visible, just as it takes us into the greatest scientific minds of the 20^th Century and helps us see what they saw.

In a movie season generally devoted to mindless action for the dumbed-down masses, it's a thrilling work of intellect and taut excitement, providing lessons in history and science against panoramic backgrounds worthy of a classic Western.

Cillian Murphy's star turn is not the only great performance in “Oppenheimer.” Emily Blunt as his alcoholic but ultimately tough-as-nails wife Kitty, is superb. So is Matt Damon's Leslie Groves, whose exchanges with Oppenheimer feel electrically charged. Oscar winners like Kenneth Branagh and Rami Malek show up in cameos, attesting to the quality in every facet of Nolan's grand design that's only slightly less ambitious than the Manhattan Project itself.

When the Los Alamos scientists successfully exploded their first bomb prototype in a test labeled Trinity, Oppenheimer is said to have recited from memory a Sanskrit passage from the Hindu spiritual text the Bhagavad Gita:

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst in the sky,

that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One –

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.

Our faith in technology was the ace in the hand that helped us win World War II. But three-fourths of a century later we keep learning that the legacy of believing in technology is unintended consequences. 

It's an ironic postscript that the great minds that created the atomic age left it to new generations that not only lack their intelligence and wisdom, but fear them as well.

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