‘Oppenheimer’: politics and problems
Oppenheimer written and directed by Christopher Nolan.
When Oppenheimer first opened it received rave reviews. The Guardian called it “a towering achievement”; The Independent said it was “Christopher Nolan’s best and most revealing work”; The Daily Telegraph, which gave it five stars, called it “extraordinary”. The word “Barbieheimer” swept through social media in a PR person’s dream.
Of course, there is much to admire. Nolan is a gifted director. Since Memento (2000), a brilliant thriller with Guy Pearce about memory, and his Batman trilogy (2005-12), Nolan has established himself as one of the leading directors of the past twenty-five years. The New Mexico landscapes are breathtaking, the film addresses big issues about the political responsibility of scientists and, best of all, much of the casting is brilliant.
Robert Downey Jr. steals the film as the saturnine Lewis Strauss, who dominates the political sub-plot. Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) as the troubled but heroic J. Robert Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as his Communist lover and Emily Blunt as his heavy-drinking and volatile wife are excellent. In an all-star cast there are terrific cameos by Matt Damon (General Groves), Casey Affleck (Boris Pash, the menacing man from military intelligence), Rami Malek, David Krumholz (the best of the supporting cast of physicists of Los Alamos) and Gary Oldman (as President Truman).
But now that all the initial excitement has worn off, dissenting voices have started to make themselves heard. Anthony Lane, the best film critic on either side of the Atlantic, damned the film with faint praise in this week’s New Yorker. David Baddiel, writing in this week’s Jewish Chronicle, was one of a number of Jewish critics who were unhappy about the casting of non-Jewish actors in Jewish roles, casting Tom Conti (Scottish) as Einstein and Murphy (Irish) as Oppenheimer. Just when more and more people are calling for gay actors to play gay characters and disabled actors to play disabled characters, there is a growing concern among Jews like Baddiel, Maureen Lipman and Naomi Alderman for Jewish actors to play Jewish parts. Should Helen Mirren really have been chosen to play Golda Meir? Michael Bond made it clear he was not happy with the casting of Jim Broadbent, a fine actor, as the Jewish refugee Mr. Gruber in the Paddington films. Maureen Lipman wrote in The Guardian last year, “My opinion was that if the ethnicity or gender of the character drives the role then that ethnicity should be prioritised, as it is now with other minorities.”
Does this apply to Oppenheimer and Einstein? Absolutely. Einstein and many of the physicists at Los Alamos were Jewish refugees from central Europe. Tom Keve, in his brilliant study, Triad: The Physicists, The Analysts, The Kabbalah (2000), showed how many of the physicists and psychoanalysts in early 20th century Hungary were the sons and grandsons of orthodox Jews, rabbis and Jewish scholars — and, of course, encountered antisemitism. True, Ian McDiarmid and Nicholas Le Prevost, both fine actors, both non-Jews, played Einstein in Terry Johnson’s Insignificance. But that was in 1982 and 2005 respectively, now a long time ago. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Australian Geoffrey Rush (also non-Jewish) was cast as Einstein in the TV series Genius in 2017. The question needs to be asked. Isn’t it time for figures like Freud, Einstein and Oppenheimer to be played by Jewish actors? If it’s right for gay and disabled parts, for example, why is it not an issue for Jewish roles?
It is particularly significant for Oppenheimer because his Jewishness was so important to his career. Antisemitism was at the heart of McCarthyism. Arthur Miller and Oppenheimer were just two of the leading Jewish figures in post-war America who became victims of the witch-hunt. But the most notorious case was that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage in 1951.
In a fascinating article in The Jewish Quarterly in 2013, Remembering the Rosenbergs, Professor Nathan Abrams pointed out how many of the key figures in that famous trial were Jewish, including, of course, the defendants. According to Aviva Weingarten’s 2008 study, of 124 people questioned by McCarthy’s Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs in 1952 alone, 79 were Jews. Would Oppenheimer himself have faced this kangaroo court in 1954, at the height of the Red Scare, if he hadn’t been Jewish?
The Manhattan Project itself, as Naomi Alderman has pointed out, could not have happened without the work of countless Jewish physicists, many of them refugees from Nazism. She went on to write, “I don’t really understand how it’s possible to make a movie about the Manhattan project without talking about Jewishness.” In his article in the JC, David Baddiel points out that Oppenheimer liked to pretend he wasn’t Jewish – like the film. Baddiel observes that “the film lacks, perhaps because of the casting, … any profound sense of that ethnicity being key to who he [Oppenheimer] was…” Oppenheimer’s Jewishness wasn’t peripheral to the story. It was, Baddiel concludes, ‘perhaps the deepest undercurrent of the story.’ The Manhattan Project was as Jewish as latkes.
There is another issue about politics in Oppenheimer. He is presented throughout, but especially towards the end, as a liberal saint, a scientist tormented by the terrible choices he had to make at Los Alamos, on the Left, Jewish but not too Jewish. Were he and his circle naïve about Soviet Communism? The film doesn’t ask. What about Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet spy? In his 2019 book, Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History, Frank Close asserts that “it was primarily Fuchs who enabled the Soviets to catch up with Americans” in the race for the nuclear bomb. The debate about Fuchs continues to this day, but in the film it barely starts. At one point it is mentioned that John F Kennedy was one of the senators who made sure that the villainous Lewis Strauss was not given a cabinet post in 1959. There was a knowing laugh from the audience when I went to see the film. JFK good, Lewis Strauss bad. This is just one of the moments when the film wears its liberal politics on its sleeve. The key leftists in the film (Oppenheimer, his wife and his former lover) are all clearly ex-Communists. Fuchs, however, was a Soviet spy and was presumably a security risk at Los Alamos, but he remains curiously peripheral and the McCarthyites are so unpleasant that Oppenheimer seems saintly by comparison.
The politics of the film makes one wonder whether Oppenheimer is a symptom of the Trump years, a way of using the story of Oppenheimer and Los Alamos to fight the Trump Right. Perhaps this explains part of the film’s popularity. It has a political resonance in 2023 when there is a serious chance of Trump being re-elected next year.
Oppenheimer is a saint for our times. He was brilliant, not only as a scientist but also as a linguist. He knew Sanskrit, for example, and he learnt Dutch in six weeks so that he could lecture on modern physics in The Netherlands. He had a social conscience, gave money to refugees from the Spanish Civil War and agonised over the Bomb (and his former lover when she commits suicide).
But he’s not too perfect. The film presents him as a terrible father, tormented by mental illness as a young man, often too clever by half. How brilliant a scientist was he, compared to such contemporaries as Pauli, von Neumann, Einstein and Bohr? We are never told. We just see him scribbling frantically at a blackboard, which is film-speak for scientific genius. Above all, he made the cover of Time magazine.
This wouldn’t matter if Oppenheimer was better as history, whether political history or the history of science. The film mentions numerous key physicists —- indeed it is far too full of scientists who are briefly mentioned and then disappear, such as Leo Szilard — but we find out next to nothing about what they actually thought. What exactly is the point of having Niels Bohr, a great physicist but nothing to do with the Manhattan Project, in the film? As history of science this is poor and you would be better off watching the excellent BBC drama-documentary, Storyville: The Trials of Oppenheimer (available on iPlayer), with a brilliant performance by David Strathairn, much better than Murphy, and an excellent cast of historians.
Apart from Edward Teller, it is hard to keep track of the famous European physicists recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer is too long and too full of walk-on parts by famous scientists who contribute little to the story or the film’s account of the making of the Bomb. At times, it is hard to follow, and Nolan is clearly happier with the spectacular special effects and the romantic sub-plots.
Oppenheimer has been tipped for numerous awards. How sure a bet will this seem when the Oscars come round? Or perhaps it is a sign of the times in Hollywood? Maybe the film business’s flirtation with Black Lives Matter is over and white male biopics are back (Bohemian Rhapsody, 2018, Elvis, 2022, Reagan, 2023)? What exactly were the racial and gender politics of the Manhattan Project? We are never told. Like antisemitism, it just got lost amongst all the name-dropping and liberal politics.
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