Something comparable might be said of Nolan,though the differences are as notable as the resemblances. Oppenheimer,according to one of his lovers,was so precocious he “never had a childhood”. Nolan has hardly needed to grow up,having built his career as an entertainer on subjects that might be expected to interest a bright 12-year-old:war,superheroes,time paradoxes,magic tricks,things that go bang.
Considering the grand scale of Nolan’s ambitions,his sensibility can feel almost grotesquely limited. Yet,he’s always had the knack of undermining his grandiosity from within. FromThe Prestige to his Batman trilogy to the wilfully incomprehensibleTenet,he’s made movies about men neurotically determined to leave their mark,through creation or destruction or both.
The latest in the series,Oppenheimer is on one level a traditional Great Man biopic,albeit more wedded to the facts than most (the starting point for Nolan’s script was Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s doorstopper 2005 biographyAmerican Prometheus). Gaunt and shock-haired,with depths of alarm in his big blue eyes,Murphy as the young Oppenheimer is everybody’s idea of a tortured genius – though there’s no denying the real man looked somewhat like this,and was indeed the sort of polymath capable of learning Sanskrit in his spare time for fun.
Dozens of well-known actors file past as prominent scientists and politicians of the mid-20th century,from Tom Conti’s cuddly Einstein to Gary Oldman as an unusually malevolent Harry Truman. Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt,as the two main women in the hero’s life,are minor players at best:even Pugh’s hyped nude scene is mainly a way of showing her character and Oppenheimer remain sexually involved without slowing down the conveyor belt of exposition.