Bringing Fire from the Gods
The following is a condensed version of "Bringing Fire from the Gods" by David Krugler, published at Law & Liberty.
The unbilled star of the film Oppenheimer is a metal monster named Gadget, which resembles a heavy-plated diving bell bristling with cords. Its creation required three years, $2.2 billion, and 130,000 workers. If Gadget works as designed, conventional explosives packed within will detonate, compress plutonium in the center, and produce a fission chain reaction.
If it works. Viewers know, of course, that it does—the successful test, known as Trinity, on July 16, 1945, made possible the use of two atomic bombs to end the war with Japan. Our foreknowledge of the outcome does not diminish the dramatic tension of director Christopher Nolan’s transfixing recreation. Observers lay prostrate in neat rows, clutching rectangles of smoked glass to shield their eyes. The beauty and horror of the blast—blinding light, enormous clouds of red, orange, and black—brings both joy and dread. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” J. Robert Oppenheimer whispers, quoting the Bhagavad Gita.
The test scene is spectacular, but the sustained drama in Oppenheimer (based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus) comes from its sensitive depiction of the life and travails of the bomb’s most vital architect. Nolan centers the story around Oppenheimer’s 1954 closed hearing before a security board of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Despite Oppenheimer’s undisputed accomplishments, his prior associations with communists have made him a target at the height of the Red Scare. Oppenheimer’s greatest nemesis is the AEC’s former chairman, Lewis Strauss, who is shown appearing at his own hearing, before the Senate, for confirmation as the Secretary of Commerce. Flashbacks from both proceedings take viewers back into Oppenheimer’s life and into his falling-out with Strauss.
Robert Downey, Jr., as Strauss, brilliantly depicts the former shoe salesman’s suave manners, egotism, and ambition. As villains go, Strauss seems harmless at first, but as his confirmation hearing drags on, his recollections of Oppenheimer take on an ominous tone. His temper is always in check, but Downey deftly uses mundane gestures to capture Strauss’s impatience and vindictiveness. When he cinches his tie after a lunch break, it’s as if Strauss is tightening a noose around Oppenheimer’s neck.
Cillian Murphy so thoroughly inhabits the character of Oppenheimer that viewers are excused for believing the scientist has come back to life to play himself. Cillian’s smoothly planed face here appears weathered, even craggy, like Oppenheimer’s, and his piercing blue eyes miss nothing. The pressures on Oppenheimer, once he agreed to head the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico, were relentless and profligate, a veritable chain reaction of crises and demands. Murphy conveys Oppenheimer’s stress with gentleness and precision. Frequent close-ups show his eyes darting nervously or his hands striking a match to light a cigarette. Oppenheimer was a man of many contradictions—aloof and affectionate, cautious and reckless, pragmatic and idealistic—and Murphy’s understated, measured performance presents him in all his complexities.
Murphy’s and Downey’s performances are enhanced by Nolan’s command of historical detail and his eye for adding juicy dramatic touches. As a student, Oppenheimer did poison a tutor’s apple, a reckless act that almost got him expelled. In the film, Murphy rushes back to the classroom in the nick of time to prevent the visiting Niels Bohr from taking a bite. Having Oppenheimer’s girlfriend order him to translate Sanskrit (as they make love) allows us to hear, long before the Trinity test, Oppenheimer’s famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita.
The film is notably lacking in female characters. Florence Pugh is excellent as Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s girlfriend (and, later, mistress), but the role is mostly limited to tempestuous scenes in which the couple fight and make up. Emily Blunt, entrancing as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, only comes into her own late in the film when she exhorts Oppenheimer to fight back against the rigged security board hearing. Watching her fume, we can’t help but wonder: Why have we waited so long to see her on the front line?
The film’s efforts to dramatize the ethical quandaries of the atomic bomb project occasionally fall flat, marred by soap box-like dialogue, but no sloppiness is evident in the film’s engrossing exploration of Oppenheimer’s dual torment, the first coming from his profoundly mixed feelings about his creation. He fervently believed the United States must build an atomic bomb before Germany did. Once it became evident the Nazis would not complete their bomb, Oppenheimer worried that harnessing the power of the atom to save American democracy from the menace of fascism and militarism could, in the long term, spell the destruction of not just democracy but the world itself. After the war, he called for international control of atomic energy to prevent a World War III with nuclear arms. This advocacy brought an additional torment: ostracism and humiliation. Did Oppenheimer’s dalliances with communism or his outspoken views on the control of nuclear weapons cause his fall? Or was Lewis Strauss singularly responsible? The film abjures an easy answer, trusting and challenging viewers to come to their own conclusions.
David Krugler is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, where he teaches courses on the modern United States, U.S. foreign policy, and African American history.
