2023-08-21 07:11:53
by Paolo Mereghetti
«Oppenheimer» is a must-see film, whose strength stems above all from the fluidity with which the director’s screenplay narrates the various moments in the life of the American physicist
Whether it’s masked avengers or CIA agents, simple soldiers or astronauts, the characters that fascinate Nolan have to come to terms with the fact that their intellectual superiority is held back by some unacknowledged secret, and at the same time deal with the complexity of a hostile world that seems indecipherable, crossed by an opaque and difficult to manage violence, to face which one can even arrive at sacrifice or a previously unthinkable renunciation.
For this the meeting with Julius Robert Opennheimer, the physicist that the United States put in charge of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos to anticipate the Nazis in the construction of the atomic bomb, had to arrive sooner or later: precocious genius of quantum physics, intolerant of controls at least as narcissistic and fickle, confident in his intelligence and stubborn in defending his convictions (including political ones, in the 1930s close to the communist party), he was the perfect anti-hero to tell the story of the intertwining of the laws of Nature and the choices of History which often fascinated the director (and who in «Inception» or «Tenet» had two textbook examples).
But the charm and strength of the film “Oppenheimer” goes beyond the choice of subject and arises above all from the fluidity with which the director’s screenplay tells the various moments in the life of the scientist (Cillian Murphy), where they intertwine at first the studies and direction of the team gathered at Los Alamos, then the moral doubts on atomic armament and the confidential investigation of 1954 on his alleged patriotic infidelity and finally – third block – the subsequent public investigation which involved the ambitious politician Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey jr) called to explain why after the war he had wanted Oppenheimer on the Atomic Energy Commission despite knowing his youthful political sympathies and his aversion to the development of a hydrogen bomb.
The 181 minutes of the film do not follow the chronological course of the events but jump back and forth over the years, alternating the color (for the first two narrative blocks) with the black and white of the third (probably because it was television, at the time black and white, to pass it on to us) without however ever having to suffer the fluidity of the story. Compared to other films that use the same mechanism to reconstruct a historical fact (an example above all «JFK» directed by Oliver Stone), Nolan seems to make a point of honor in avoiding any possible narrative asperity: the scenes are not arrive at the explanation of some thesis (Oppenheimer was good or bad, faithful or unfaithful) but chase each other to help understand what has just been shown, as if a “superior narrator” (and Nolan wants to be) made each time available the scenes that can help to better understand what we have just seen.
Nolan’s cinema is pure logic, as taught by the golden rule of the classic cinema of yesteryear (everything that is shown is necessary for understanding the film) and for this reason the duration does not matter, because everything here is really functional and essential to accompany the viewer into the complexities and contradictions of that man out of the ordinary who was the “father of the atomic bomb” (to quote the famous cover of the American weekly “Time”).
And so, proceeding by analogies and consequentiality, the film makes us understand the challenge of the Manhattan Project wanted by General Groves (Matt Damon), the doubts and anxieties of a man who does not want to reason with interested political opinions (exemplary meeting with President Truman, admirable cameo by Gary Oldman), the pettiness of some and the envy of others, his desire not to betray his friends (the so-called «Chevalier affair»), the controversial relationship with his wife (Emily Blunt) and the lover (Florence Pugh) and above all that idea of having to deal with Death, with man’s ability to create and destroy, which runs through all the scenes and which is the true message of a must-see film.
August 21, 2023 (change August 21, 2023 | 07:11)
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