‘Oppenheimer’ Review …

The word “operatic” comes to mind when describing Christopher Nolan’s maddening, flawed, sometimes-brilliant “Oppenheimer.” It’s his boldest, most dense film and one that might come into clearer focus on subsequent viewings.

Even at three hours, the amount of story that Nolan packs into this film feels like it’s not enough to convey everything that he has to say. “Oppenheimer” closely resembles “Dunkirk” in the way it manages to weave countless storyline structures into this magnificent whole.

Of course, telling the story of Robert J. Oppenheimer, a man who poured blood, sweat and tears into becoming “the father of the atomic bomb” is a complicated one. The film wouldn’t have worked as well without the constantly brilliant editing techniques of Jennifer Lame, who absolutely deserves all of the accolades she is likely going to be getting for her work here.

Formally and conceptually, “Oppenheimer” is a staggering achievement as it zeroes on a clandestine weapons lab that was formed in the Los Alamos desert during the thick of WWII. This is Nolan’s most complex work and it has plenty of substance to boot, maybe too much.

Robert Oppenheimer, powerfully played here by Cillian Murphy, was a man tasked by the U.S. government to build the bomb, but the Nazis had a 12-month head start on him. It was the beginning of the arms race, one that would inevitably continue against Russia. In trying to beat the Nazis, Oppenheimer chose a crackling team of the world’s best scientists, many of them Jewish refugees from Germany, to build a weapon whose ramifications are still being felt to this day. It quite literally changed the world order.

In the film, Nolan goes back and forth between Oppenheimer’s early beginnings, as a theoretic physics student in 1920s Germany, to his Los Alamos testing site and, inevitably, to his shunning as a communist during the rage of the ‘50s Mccarthy witch-hunts.

Politician Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a conniving individual who gladly threw Oppenheimer under the bus to further his career, sleazily instigated the scientist’s security clearance hearing in 1954. Downey Jr, looking gaunt, and older, is given chewy lines of dialogue, all shot in black and white sequences, and he’s impeccably cast as the villain of the piece.

There’s also Oppenheimer’s affair with an American communist named Jean Tatlock (scene stealing Florence Pugh) — it eventually ends, hampered by her unwillingness to commit. He later weds alcoholic Kitty Harrison (an underused Emily Blunt), whose role is underwritten. Pugh, nude practically the entire time, is a wonderfully haunting presence, a fragile figure with a tragic fate.

The number of characters in this film are aplenty, all played by notably well-known actors: There’s physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Matt Damon as the General overseeing the Los Alamos project, Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, and Gary Oldman as President Truman. Benny Safdie even shows up as the thickly-accented Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and recent Oscar-winner Rami Malek, underused, is basically given just one scene.

Here’s the thing about “Oppenheimer:” when it works, it soars. Some of the scenes conveyed here by Nolan and Lame, aided by composer Ludwig Göransson‘s sizzling score, feel transcendent. However, the point of “Oppenheimer” is for it to have a cumulative and powerful effect on the viewer once the 3-hour runtime ends.

Can any other filmmaker in Hollywood work on this grand of a scale and get away with it? Maybe Martin Scorsese, but that’s about it. It helps that Nolan is aided by the talented cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, who shot the movie in 65-millimeter film. Sometimes van Hoytema’s luscious photography overshadows the chaotic storytelling to the point where you’re sucked in by the images and lose track of the story.

The film is filled with an innumerable amount of close-ups — in fact, most of the story is told via close-ups. If Nolan’s goal was to set the viewer inside Oppenheimer’s head, then mission accomplished. You can’t escape Murphy’s haunted blue eyes and it’s a towering performance from the Irish actor.

There’s also a substantial number of scenes that feel damn-near visceral. Consider the one where Oppenheimer speaks to a crowd of patriotic Americans, post-Hiroshima bombing, their applause drowning out into mute. Panic sneaks into his head, the sound design starts roaring trembling sounds, the camera shakes, Oppenheimer continues talking, but it’s all reverberating echo. This is where he realizes the magnitude of what’s he’s done, and that he has the blood of innocent Japanese citizens in his hands.

The trinity explosion has been spoken about plenty of times as well. Nolan didn’t use CGI, and the feeling you’re left with is like being there, at the first historic test of the bomb, as a literal light show occurs and a feeling of relief (and dread) seeps into the characters.

Nolan is absolutely obsessed with the subject at hand, maybe a little too obsessed in getting every detail of his story jammed into the film. And yet, it still feels as though “Oppenheimer” might be missing key moments that should have been added into its epic three hours.

“Oppenheimer” is a messy, sprawling, operatic statement from Nolan. It’s technically masterful, but can also keep you at a distance during crucial moments. But it’s also incredibly exciting to behold, a mosaic of intellectual cinema drenched onto the screen. There’s so much going on, in almost every frame, that it’d be foolish for one to believe that he or she can fully grasp it in just a single viewing. I can’t wait to see it again. [B+]