Oppenheimer, flawed genius

No one was surprised when Oppenheimer, the riveting movie on the life of the American theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, swept the Academy Awards with seven gongs. That’s a pretty good showing but not a record — Ben Hur, the 1959 Charlton Heston starrer blockbuster, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King of 2003 won 11 Oscars each in their time.

Catty Hollywood suggested that the movie received disproportionate accolade because: (a) it resonated politically (accomplished scientist bullied by a conservative establishment); (b) it rode, per Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken in the box office hit Barbie on the coattails of Barbenheimer publicity in the summer of 2023; and (c) Christopher Nolan was due an Oscar.

Even if all the above were true, Oppenheimer is still a very good film and Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr richly deserve their awards. But there is something to be said for political timing in enhancing the virtues of a film. Note that another Nolan film won three Oscars. This was the 2017 film Dunkirk, a schmaltzy portrayal of the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940 in a celebrated operation in the face of Hitler’s blitzkrieg in France.

It was hard to miss the timing; a heroic British retreat from the European mainland being feted just as Britain was struggling with its far more problematic decision to exit the European Union.

After Dunkirk, Oppenheimer  is undoubtedly an upgrade. Anyway, Nolan deserves his first directing Oscar, having given us so much entertainment with thrillers such as Inception and Dark Knight (both Oscar winners) in the past.

Oppenheimer is based on a Pulitzer-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin called American Prometheus. It focuses on his years as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the development of the world’s first atomic bomb and his defence against accusations of treason at security hearings in 1953, an act of revenge by Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of which Oppenheimer was a member.

When it was first published in 2003, American Prometheus attracted strong criticism from the American right wing. They claimed that the book downplayed Oppenheimer’s links with Communists (it didn’t) and they refuted the notion that the security hearings were unfair (they were). This was, remember, the age of the neo-cons who precipitated the US into an ill-judged war in Iraq. In India, objections to his quoting from the Gita in a fleeting sex scene are also reflective of the times.

Murphy portrays superbly the dynamic flawed brilliance of a complex polymath, his extra-marital affairs, leftist political sympathies, association with communists, and betrayal of friends and former students. Bird and Sherwin took 25 years to write their book and the detail they reproduce, including the atmospherics and the structure of the interrogation room, are instantly recognisable in the film. Relatives of American physicist Isidor Rabi, a close friend of Oppenheimer and consultant for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, were delighted to hear David Krumholtz, the actor playing Rabi, repeat lines from the testimony that had become family folklore. Defending his friend, Rabi said, “We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and what more do you want, mermaids?”

Book and film shape Oppenheimer’s story as a tragic hero and confirm his reputation as “father of the atomic bomb”. What both miss is Oppenheimer’s solid achievements beyond this narrow perspective. One of them was his role in making the US the centre of research in theoretical physics in the 1930s, a field previously dominated by Europe, which enabled him to pull in the brightest minds around the world for the Manhattan Project. Not for nothing did Americans say after World War II that “our German scientists were better than Hitler’s German scientists”.

The Oppenheimer story also underplays his years in Caltech and Berkeley, where he conducted significant research into, among other things, the quantum theory of molecules and an understanding of cosmic rays and neutron stars and predicted the emergence of “black holes”, work that scientists built on several decades later. A better understanding of Oppenheimer’s contribution to physics can be had in another brilliant biography by Ray Monk called Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Centre (2014). It offers a fuller portrait of an extraordinary man who was undeservedly punished by an establishment from which he obsessively sought approval.