The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. The weight of the film's interests and meanings are carried by faces-not just Oppenheimer's, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon), Los Alamos' military supervisor Robert's suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer ( Emily Blunt), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened and Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey, Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer's post-Los Alamos career. ![]() This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer's career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact). The "fissile" cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. ![]() (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don't just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer's team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer's life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. Sometimes the close-ups of people's faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven't happened, or already happened. "Oppenheimer" rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy's face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. ![]() ![]() Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico's desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads-none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan's primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy) is a film about faces. For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face.
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