Opinion: ‘Oppenheimer’ is a different kind of movie

Editor’s Note: Gene Seymour is a critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter @GeneSeymour. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion on CNN.

For what seems like a couple of lifetimes now, American movies have been assessed by media outlets like produce, appliances or dishwasher pods. Nuances and complexities in storytelling and (above all) character development tend to be tossed aside, or saved for reviewers, in favor of buzz factors, thrills-per-minute ratios and, of course, corporate investment. Even when manufactured dreams make tons of money on that investment, it can never be enough, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and its all-but-catastrophic impact on multiplexes and other exhibitors.

Gene Seymour

I get it. Bottom lines are important, especially when billions are at stake, as well as the future of an entire industry.

My bottom lines are — and always have been — different. Are the movies good? Or even great?

Summer is usually the wrong time of year to ask such questions. The blockbusters released this time of year are typically the movies that encourage you to turn your brains off and let the “product” work you over. You pay your money, buy your concessions, go home happy.

Or so the corporate pitch usually goes.

Not this time. Not with “Oppenheimer.”

After a cavalcade of hype in its own right and as part of the “Barbenheimer” juggernaut, “Oppenheimer” is finally out — and it is a very good, possibly great movie in a classic tradition of motion picture storytelling that doesn’t seem possible or, at least, plausible in a mid-summer release. And yet, it’s mid-summer, and a film based on a doorstopper of biography is here (and is generating enough buzz to put that 2005 biography back on bestseller lists).

US physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is often referred to as "the father of the atomic bomb."

Instead of a costumed superhero or a recycled action franchise, “Oppenheimer” submits a case study, steeped in mid-20th century history, of one of that century’s most magnetic, vexing, enigmatic and, ultimately, haunting geniuses. Even the shorthand description of J. Robert Oppenheimer as “the father of the atomic bomb” compels an ambivalent reaction at best, a grand reputation with troubling, even tragic ramifications for both its owner and the world he helped transform so irrevocably.

“His essence,” the late journalist Murray Kempton once wrote, “was…in the ambiguities of the divided soul.” Such souls are hardly rare in commercial movies. Can you say, “Michael Corleone”? Or, for that matter, any flawed protagonist of any adaptation of a Shakespearean tragedy?

But the eponymous lead character of “Oppenheimer” wears his ambiguities almost as strikingly as the wide-brimmed fedora that became his unofficial insignia as director of the fabled Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory, the top-secret installation in the New Mexico desert where the finest minds America could assemble worked to produce the “A-Bomb.”

A scene from "Oppenheimer" depicts J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy).

Cillian Murphy, the Irish actor best known for playing eerie and eccentric criminals in “Peaky Blinders” and the “Dark Knight” trilogy, previously made by “Oppenheimer” director Christopher Nolan, seamlessly inhabits “Oppie’s” dualities and contradictions from his youthful diffidence to his growing, if fitful sense of professional autonomy in and out of the classroom. At once skittish and coy, self-effacing and self-aggrandizing, owlish and sexy, Murphy’s Oppenheimer is, at times, his own kind of super-powered being. A moviegoer unfamiliar with the particulars of the history here might be forgiven for wondering whether Murphy’s Oppenheimer is Obi-Wan Kenobi or Darth Vader. The correct answer is neither, or both, and there are far more relevant quandaries posed by the movie, those of loyalty, love, honor and, ultimately, conscience.

Nolan, in what many critics say is his best work since 2008’s “The Dark Knight,” (I’d go even further back with 2000’s “Memento”) deploys his customary visual flamboyance in more circumspect ways here; yet his inferences are often startlingly acute, notably in Oppenheimer’s nightmarish visualizations of the horrors of his creation with members of his team as surrogates for Hiroshima’s victims. Here and elsewhere, such scenes arouse in their audiences the still-festering anxieties over impending nuclear Armageddon in our own time.

What will a moviegoing public, that’s still not altogether sure it wants to go back to the movies, make of such a complicated, ankle-deep, three-hour trip in the Wayback Machine? For those most likely to want to see it in the first place, there won’t be much suspense, since they’ll know the outcome (indeed, several outcomes) in advance?

There is, however, the always-compelling drama of behavior under immense pressure, as well as the near-miraculous fulfillment of collective action with tightly-wound, passionately brilliant personalities. And, as always, you’re on the edge of your seat waiting for that bomb to go off. Little wonder that the Manhattan Project has been a recurring subject for motion pictures like “Fat Man and Little Boy” and made-for-TV docudramas like “Day One,” both from 1989.

And, more than anything, there is the profound sense of tragedy implied through Nolan’s imagery of what happened to those Japanese destroyed by the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and through Oppenheimer’s postwar melancholy and frustration with trying to bring the monster he helped create under control. “Robert Oppenheimer can touch us still,” Kempton wrote, “because he was one of the few of those who have lived with the illusion of being history’s conqueror and the fact of being its victim.”

I’m there for it. Whether millions more will be…not my problem. I will remain amazed that it was brought about in the first place – and that it worked.