The American 'Oppenheimer' Belongs to Irishman Cillian Murphy

You could argue that post-war America, having gained the ability to obliterate entire sovereign nations, elected to focus its power on killing itself. The dogmatic conservative values, the ruthless Cold War paranoia, and the constant dog-piling on its nation’s most creative and radical thinkers (not to mention its militarized bigotry) made the 1950s a period where the United States was fixated on poisoning whoever it decided was a threat. Such a vague and nebulous threat makes the many motives of personal vindictiveness transparent to generations looking back today.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb, clearly doesn’t argue that everyone caught up in the political machinations of the first half of the 20th century deserves our deepest sympathies or even absolution. It does, however, convey the reactive, uncontrolled testing ground for latter-day American moral rot — and how easy it was for people to create the conditions of their own insanity.

Irishman Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) has appeared in six Nolan films, with Oppenheimer marking his first lead role. It’s almost like Nolan has had to shift his filmmaking around the talents of his leading man; a detailed, talky drama that (mostly) deserts spectacle for thorny, challenging psychology, where the IMAX cameras that film every single scene are solely interested in capturing the twitches and anxiety lines of our ensemble’s faces. That’s not to say Oppenheimer isn’t cinematic — in one of Nolan’s most visually impressive efforts yet (in Hoyte van Hoytema we trust), the director levels up his impressive command of blocking, sound, and editing to awe and amaze in more piercing and confronting ways than we saw in Gotham’s cityscape or worlds of inverted time.