The new film from Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer,” starts and ends in the round. In the opening shot, ripples expand in puddles as raindrops fall. Three hours later, we get a vision of Earth beginning to burn, as nuclear explosions bloom across the globe. Nolan is always entranced by the vast and the tiny; “Inception” (2010), wherein city streets fold like paper under the pressure of dreams, concludes with a spinning top. This obsession with scale is well served by “Oppenheimer,” in which the amassing of refined uranium, for the construction of an atomic bomb, is indicated by marbles piling up inside a goldfish bowl. How much roundness can you take?
The antidote to this circularity is J.Robert Oppenheimer. (Though named for his father, Julius, he insisted, with Prufrockian nicety, that the “J” stood for nothing at all.) Lean, sticklike, skullish in his gauntness, and too clever for comfort—his own or anyone else’s—he has gone down in history as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, in New Mexico, where the bomb was built, and it is from history that Nolan seeks to pluck him. Oppenheimer is played by Cillian Murphy, who catches the quiet inquietude of the man, and his tobacco-softened speech. In the blaze of his blue eyes we see not candor but a kind of undimmed shock, as if he were staring straight through us at matters invisible to regular mortals. “What happens to stars when they die?” he says, by way of small talk, at a party in Berkeley. There he meets the incandescent Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh); later, at her bidding, he translates a Sanskrit text as they makelove. For Oppenheimer, no talk is ever small.
The film is adapted from “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J.Robert Oppenheimer,” a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and MartinJ. Sherwin. I hate to say it, but, if you zip through all six hundred pages of the book before seeing the film, you’ll enjoy the ride more. Much is omitted in the adaptation; there is no whisper, for example, of the fact that Oppenheimer was born into serious wealth. Yet Nolan, who wrote the screenplay, has a fine taste for the delicious detail. During a youthful sojourn in the Netherlands, Oppenheimer doesn’t just learn Dutch in six weeks. He learns enough to give a lecture on quantum physics. The irony is that what makes the movie challenging is not the scientific theory—which is delivered with a diplomatically light touch—but a glut of political paranoia.
Like “The Social Network” (2010), “Oppenheimer” is structured around two inquisitions, each of which is designed to load us with information and to trigger significant flashbacks. If, in the process, we feel dumb and dumber, tough. The first is a closed hearing, in 1954, at which Oppenheimer’s security clearance is revoked—an affront from which he never recovers. The revocation (which was not officially voided until last year) turns upon his left-wing sympathies before the war, but it has clearly been engineered by the F.B.I. and by certain figures who have Oppenheimer’s worst interests at heart. The second occasion is a Senate hearing, in 1959, that is held to confirm the appointment of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey,Jr.) as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. And what does that, you may wonder, have to do with blowing things up?
The answer is far from simple, and the tangle left me genuinely torn. The upside is that Downey, liberated from the stranglehold of Marvel, provides the least mannered and the most densely textured performance of his career. Polite, bespectacled, and immune to panic, Strauss—a chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—comes across, in Downey’s rendering, as the most pitiless of Machiavels. The downside is that he all but commandeers the film. Even Oppenheimer’s marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt), troubled but enduring, seems to flit by in snatches when set beside the enmity of Strauss, who believes that Oppenheimer has humiliated him. Addicts of Cold War conspiracy will be in bliss, but not everyone, I suspect, will thrill to the truffling up of former Communists in West Coast academia. Folks want some bang for their buck.
The bang is Trinity—the first detonation of a nuclear device, in July, 1945. The name was chosen by Oppenheimer, in tribute to a sonnet by John Donne. (For the complete poem, listen to the agonized aria sung by Oppenheimer in “Doctor Atomic,” John Adams’s 2005 opera.) The explosion, two hours into the film, reaches to the pure core of Nolan’s visual intensity. For once, in the midst of this talkative movie, the chattering dies down. Many observers, including Oppenheimer’s boss, General LeslieR. Groves (Matt Damon), lie flat on the ground. One scientist, confronting the blast, wears sunscreen and shades, as if he were at the beach. All music is finally hushed. The sole sound is human breathing, in and out. The clock counts down; time stops; then comes the flowering of fire.
It’s a hell of a sequence, and, as you might expect, it’s infernally beautiful to behold. Rising in the wake of such images is the issue of moral decorum: What can you, or should you, show? When slides of Hiroshima are projected at Los Alamos, some people look away, unable to countenance what their loyal efforts have wrought. Not a frame of this film is set in Japan; Nolan relies on his leading man to suffer the fallout in spirit. There are screen-filling closeups of Oppenheimer, who appears to be haunting himself. Now and then, the very space around him quivers in response, as if his tremors of conscience were giving off shock waves. (“That crybaby,” Harry Truman says of him.) The grandeur is tremendous, and yet, this being Nolan, it needs to be surrounded with the little things. When Groves is searching for someone to oversee the creation of the bomb, he walks into a classroom for his first meeting with Oppenheimer and, to his face, calls him theatrical, egotistical, and unstable. Oppenheimer smiles. He gets the job.
What’s the difference between Greta Gerwig’s previous movie, “Little Women” (2019), and “Barbie,” her latest enterprise? Well, one is based on a book by Louisa May Alcott, and the other on a well-thumbed classic toy by Mattel. (I won’t spoil things by saying which is which.) Also, if memory serves, Jo, Beth, and the other girls didn’t spend that much time on fluorescent Rollerblades. Their loss.
Powering the new film is the idea that there’s a magical place called Barbie Land, which is home to all the Barbies, not least the Barbie (Margot Robbie), who is proud to describe herself as “stereotypical.” She sleeps in a heart-shaped bed, in a house that lies so brazenly open for inspection that J. Edgar Hoover would moan with delight. Being a doll, Barbie kicks off her day with a dry shower, has her breakfast without consuming it, and floats down to ground level rather than taking the stairs. The dominant, not to say overbearing, hue of her existence is pink. Watching the first half hour of this movie is like being waterboarded with Pepto-Bismol.
Barbie has a male chum, Ken (Ryan Gosling), though he wishes he were more than that. “We’re girlfriend-boyfriend,” he tells her, running the words together into a single unit. Smooth. They can’t have sex, although a showing of “Team America: World Police” (2004) might give them some handy tips. Still, they can party every night. All is well until Barbie starts having thoughts of death, whatever that may be; bewildered, she consults Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who lives on a hill, does the splits, makes a case for being “sad and mushy and complicated,” and proposes a trip to reality.
What we have here, in short, under layers of stylization, is a standard-issue journey of discovery. Barbie, with the uninvited yet eager Ken in tow, follows the pink road like a shrimp-colored Dorothy, travelling not from Kansas to Oz but from Barbie Land to Los Angeles. There she meets a teen-ager named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), one of whom is or was Barbie’s owner; if Barbie is feeling depressed or messed up, it’s because of them. By a helpful coincidence, Gloria works at the headquarters of Mattel. “Barbie in the real world—that’s impossible,” she says, summarizing the hook of the film and, incidentally, echoing the hero of “Oppenheimer,” when he learns that German scientists have split the atom. “That’s not possible,” he says. (I was hoping that he’d shout out “Fission: impossible!” but you can’t have everything.)
A further similarity: just as Downey threatens to pull Nolan’s film out of orbit, so, in “Barbie,” does Gosling attract a dangerous share of the dramatic energy. His line readings keep taking you by surprise; a late-night solo dance, outside Barbie’s house, has a mournful shimmy; and he is the beneficiary of Gerwig’s most inspired joke, which is that Ken, in California, discovers—and totally digs—the patriarchy. “I’m just going to pop into the library and see if I can find some books on trucks,” he says. He then spirits that leathery masculinity back into Barbie Land, which he rechristens Kendom. He fights with his fellow-Kens, plays guitar not to but at Barbie, and (this has to be peak Gosling) pauses in mid-conversation with her to smirk at the bulge of his own biceps.
