Oppenheimer; and American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

I have allowed the passage of years to distract me from my quest of watching every Oscar-winning film, and realised that with the 100th Academy Awards coming up, I had better get my list completed. So I found some time in September, mainly on Eurostar, to watch Oppenheimer, which won Best Picture in 2024; and then some more time, mainly in China, to read American Prometheus, the book that the film was based on.

As well as the Best Picture award, Oppenheimer won six other Oscars: Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy in the title role), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr. as Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. The Hugo for that year went to Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves and the Ray Bradbury Award to Barbie.

The other films up for Best Picture were American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Past Lives, Poor Things and The Zone of Interest. I have seen Barbie and thought it was better; I started but could not be bothered to finish Poor Things. The only other 2023 film that I am sure that I have seen is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I certainly intended to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny but I cannot remember doing so. I was the Hugo administrator that year and things were busy – I still haven’t seen the Hugo winner, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves, though everyone tells me it is great. IMDB users rate Oppenheimer top film of 2023 on one scale and 4th on the other. So (spoiler) my negative take below is a minority report.

Here is a trailer:

None of the cast seems ever to have been in Doctor Who. The many returnees from previous (and one future) award-winning films include the star himself, Cillian Murphy, who was in Inception as Robert Fischer, the chap whose dreams are infiltrated by Leonardo di Caprio and friends.

Matt Damon, the Nice Soldier General Groves here, was in Hugo/Bradbury winning The Martian as the protagonist, and was also the police mole in Oscar winner The Departed seventeen years earlier.

The gorgeous Florence Pugh is Oppenheimer’s lover Jean Tatlock here; the following year she was Princess Irulan in Dune Part 2.

David Krumholz is Oppie’s friend Isidore Rabi here, and was the hacker Mr Universe in Serenity.

David Dastmalchian is anti-Communist Lewis Borden here, and was very briefly Piter de Vries in Dune Part 1. I also know him as Gurathin in Murderbot.

At the end we have Christopher Denham, who is Klaus Fuchs here and (looking a bit older in a film made twelve years earlier) played fugitive American diplomat Mark Kijek in Argo.

Slightly cheating, as he does not speak in the earlier film, but Kenneth Branagh, impressive as Niels Bohr here, is in a crowd scene in Chariots of Fire.

And one more to note – Richard Feynman is played by Jack Quaid, better known (to me anyway) as Boimler in Star Trek: Lower Decks.

In case you somehow did not know, it is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who set up the scientific base in New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was developed in the 1940s; framed by the narrative of how he lost his security clearance in 1954 due to his pre-war associations with Communists (including his lover and his younger brother); itself framed by the 1959 Senate hearing in which Oppenheimer’s earlier persecutor, Lewis Strauss, was denied nomination as U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The punchline is that the supposedly little-known John F. Kennedy casts the crucial vote against Strauss.

So, all in all: I did not like this film. I thought it was dreadfully slow; the two different hearings were chopped up confusingly; I didn’t get why we were supposed to care about Lewis Strauss; I thought Cillian Murphy’s acting in the lead was one-note; and there was an awful lot of men talking to each other to explain what was going on, with occasional breasts. The music is intrusive and tells us what to think, because the acting generally doesn’t.

The writing hangs particularly heavily in the hearing scenes, where the script leans too much on the official transcripts. This rarely works. Writers should use creative freedom to depart from the historical record and come up with words that work for their actors and for their production team. The story of Oppenheimer’s security clearance is scandalous and dramatic, and the official record alone does not really do it justice.

There is a particularly silly moment early in the film where Oppenheimer stuns his American friends by giving a lecture in fluent Dutch. Except that the words spoken by Murphy are not Dutch at all; he may perhaps be making an effort to pronounce what someone wrote in his script, but it has only the most distant of resemblances to the real language. Half an hour with a voice coach could have sorted that out; I refuse to believe that no native Dutch speaker was available to the production team.

I will admit that the landscapes are wonderful, and I also thought that Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, Tom Conti as Albert Einstein and the two lead women, Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, lifted the scenes that they were in. But I was left baffled by the reverence that IMDB users, and Oscar voters, clearly had for this film. In my list of Oscar winners, I’m putting it in 82nd place out of 96, more than five sixths of the way down, immediately below A Beautiful Mind (a similarly disappointing biopic) and above No Country for Old Men (which shares a desert setting and unpleasant and unconvincing male characters).


Not for the first time, I found that the book the film is based on, American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is much much more to my taste. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

In mid-September 1925, he boarded a ship bound for England. He and Francis Fergusson had agreed that they would meet in the little village of Swanage in Dorsetshire, in southwest England. Fergusson had spent the entire summer traveling about Europe with his mother and was now eager for some male companionship. For ten days they walked along the coastal cliffs, confiding to each other their latest adventures. Though they had not seen each other for two years, they had kept in touch through correspondence and remained close.

This is an excellent top-to-toe biography, starting with Oppenheimer’s immigrant parents who moved to New York and became rich and finishing with his comfortable exile in Princeton, with refuge in the Caribbean, and the subsequent deaths of his wife and daughter. There were two particular points about his background that helped the whole story make sense for me. The fact that his family was rich meant that Oppenheimer never really had to worry about money, and that perhaps encouraged a lack of responsibility in some ways. But the philosophical foundation that he learned at an early age from his parents’ adherence to the Society for Ethical Culture pushed him in the opposite direction, to be aware of the moral consequences of his actions, especially when they affected the lives and even more so the deaths of many.

His fascination with the desert is brought out in the film, but less so his fascination with riding, which seems to have been an obsession from an early age. The ins and outs of his relationship, and Lewis Strauss’s, with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton are also a very important element of the story, taking it beyond the question of national security to in-fighting in the academic world, where Oppenheimer usually defeated the less gifted Strauss – but not always.

The book also gives a much more rounded picture of Kitty Oppenheimer, who had been married three times before ending up with Robert, and was actually German by birth. She claimed to be related to the Belgian royal family, which sent me on a genealogical wild-goose-chase (in short: I don’t think she was). She was also a serious professional botanist in her own right; and an alcoholic. The film hints at some of this but the book reveals much more.

At 900 pages, it has the leisure to examine the accusations levelled against Oppenheimer in detail, and also to look at the motivations of his accusers from a distance of decades. One of the best lines in the book comes from, of all people, Albert Einstein, who when told of Oppenheimer’s security clearance problems said, “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States government.”

It took me quite a while to get through – helped by two overnight flights to and from China last month, and two three-hour internal flights while I was there – but unlike with the film, I felt that my efforts were justified. You can get American Prometheus here. (I will also say that, judging by the front cover, Murphy does a great job of working up his physical resemblance to Oppenheimer.)

I had not realised it until earlier this year, but it is apparently conventional wisdom that Oppenheimer was the basis for Shevek, the protagonist of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. He was a close friend of Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, Ursula Le Guin’s parents, in Berkeley in the 1930s, and she must have observed his complex love life, emotional distance and scientific genius at close hand.

One more Oscar-winning film to go – this year’s Anora.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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