Detached from the rich particulars of personality and thought, “Oppenheimer” reveals itself to be “a History Channel movie,” tnyfrontrow writes.
. We meet Oppenheimer as a student making the grand tour of European science capitals, in the nineteen-twenties—Cambridge, Göttingen, Leiden—before returning to the United States and taking up joint appointments at Caltech and Berkeley. At Berkeley, he becomes a union organizer and donates to the anti-Fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War. He hangs out with Communist Party members, including his brother Frank , also a physicist, and Frank’s wife, Jackie .
The movie is structured as a sort of mosaic. Deftly edited by Jennifer Lame, it intercuts the various periods of Oppenheimer’s life—rise, struggle, fall, aftermath—continually connecting the early leftism and later pacifism with the tribulations during the McCarthy era. It’s natural to figure that such a fractured chronology would have a destabilizing effect—Nolan directed “Memento,” after all—but, in fact, the temporal scheme makes “Oppenheimer” less complex rather than more.
Then again, the film is so intent on making Oppenheimer an icon of conflicted conscience that it pays little attention to his character over all. He was a renowned aesthete with a bearing so charismatic that his students would try to emulate it, but we get little more than a couple of artsy name-drops to suggest that he has any cultural life at all.
The extended scenes of the closed-door security-committee hearing in which Oppenheimer’s political record and personal life are subjected to cruelly intrusive scrutiny come off as a scourging that he endures with a sense of self-punishment.
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