Fission For Truth: Oppenheimer The Genius, The Hero, The Communist

Snap movie review: What The Right Stuff was to the space race, Oppenheimer is to the race to create The Atomic Bomb— plus, Communism.

Yes, Christopher Nolan turning a film about the esoteric building of the Bomb into virtuoso cinema is stunning. So is juggling a cast laden with stars such as Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Tom Conti, Remi Malek and Gary Oldman. In Nolan’s telling Oppenheimer might just as well have been named It’s Complicated as he’s swallowed by the vicious politics surrounding him urging more and bigger bombs.

Less surprising, considering today’s zeitgeist, is Oppenheimer’s lengthy diversion into communist politics in the West from 1930-1960. Liberal Hollywood is still obsessed with the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee blacklist that saw the film community split by those, like Elia Kazan, who testified about their Commie past, and those like Charlie Chaplin, Ring Lardner Jr., and Orson Welles who clammed up— and lost much of their livelihood.

Previous Tinseltown efforts to demonize senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communists include Good Night, And Good Luck about journalist Edward R. Murrow’s defiance of HUAC; The Way We Were with dedicated lefties Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford as star-crossed commies in 1950s Hollywood; The Front with Woody Allen as a beard for writers barred from Hollywood; Trumbo with Bryan Cranston as the eponymous Dalton Trumbo, the banned screen writer; Chaplin with Downey Jr. as Charlie Chaplin pursued by the HUAC heavies; and Hail Caesar! the Coen Brothers’ witty spoof on Hollywood communism.

Oppenheimer is not them. In lesser hands the father of the atomic bomb would be a naïf, the baddies really, really bad. Maybe the A bomb would be a setup job, like Covid-19, from the powers of the day. He never stood a chance. But Nolan is not a studio hack.

Given the collective artistic amnesia about HUAC, Nolan patiently recreates the times as America heads into its existential race for the atomic bomb against Nazi Germany. Many of intellectuals on the Manhattan Project were disillusioned by WW I and the Depression and— inspired by the Russian Revolution— saw the future in communism. They permeated every layer of the state, right up the Queen Elizabeth’s art consultant.

Nolan’s take on Oppenheimer empathizes with their worldview. His friends, lovers and colleagues are all— or were— unapologetic Marxists. He is tailed by the FBI, pestered by union leaders. But Oppenheimer, played hauntingly by Murphy, apparently steers clear of getting a card in the Party, especially when the U.S. Army pays a call and General Louis Gates, played by Damon, asks him to lead the Manhattan Project.

In this principal plot line, the U.S., not the Nazis, get the Bomb. Nolan orchestrates a great chase that ends up with Oppenheimer a national hero for his work. And a target on his back. Oppenheimer, now guilt-stricken over the impact of the bombs, tells president Harry Truman that he has blood on his hands after Nagasaki and Hiroshima. To which Gary Oldman’s Truman calls him a “cry-baby scientist… I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”

Here the film might easily have concluded to the satisfaction of many. But Nolan shows Oppenheimer later punished for preaching détente with the Russians, sharing nuclear secrets to create mutually assured destruction (which eventually happened). The final scenes where he’s denied his security clearance under cross examination from actor Jason Clarke are brutal— then he’s betrayed by Lewis Strauss, his mentor at the Atomic Energy Commission. There are suggestions that ant-semitism— many of the Manhattan Project scientists are Jews— also plays a part is his being banned.

Ambivalence is at the heart of Oppenheimer. Nolan sees his protagonist as a brilliant-but-flawed man. But, like the authors Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, whose book was the source for Oppenheimer, he sees no communist.

However, that conclusion is under assault. Researchers Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes insist that even when their biography came out in 2005, “there was already abundant evidence that Oppenheimer had indeed once been a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Their efforts to explain away or obfuscate the clear evidence that Oppenheimer lied under oath about it have been further eroded by material that has emerged from Russian archives since. But… writer-director Christopher Nolan did not look deeper into the question when he crafted his screenplay.”

While useful idiots like singer Pete Seeger were in denial about the USSR’s spying well into the 1970s, many fellow travellers had begun to see the horror’s of Stalin’s Russia in the 40s, the pitiless show-trial politics and the murder of millions by a cruel orthodoxy. They’re given a pass here as duped innocents, even when the USSR signs the Molotov pact with the Nazis and the Rosenburg’s perfidy was exposed.

Rather than fess up, most simply pivoted on Marxism, saying “That wasn’t real Communism under Stalin”— a line they repeated about Mao, Pol Pot and other heartless dictators. As we see today, they’re making a comeback under the guise of world government or financial controls.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Nolan’s impressive movie is the fact that a three-hour drama about a science nerd in the 1940s is on its way to earning a billion dollars at the box office. Just when most had surrendered film output to comic-book heroes, #BLM propaganda and feminist rom-coms, Oppenheimer is a celluloid unicorn.

Yes, the IMAX-enhanced depictions of particle physics and atomic fission are as stunning as Spiderman or Batman (a previous subject for Nolan). So is the magnetic soundtrack. But this is a movie to which you must give your attention the entire time. It’s for adults, and we can hope that more of this intelligent subject material is permitted.

Sign up today for Not The Public Broadcaster newsletters. Hot takes/ cool slants on sports and current affairs. Have the latest columns delivered to your mail box. Tell your friends to join, too. Always provocative, always independent.  https://share.hsforms.com/16edbhhC3TTKg6jAaRyP7rActsj5 


Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx