The purest payload of fear is delivered in a scene that Nolan handles with forthright gusto. Tom Conti plays the sorrowfully detached Albert Einstein, and it has to be said that Nolan, rightly or wrongly, uses non-Jewish actors for Oppenheimer and Einstein, two of the most famous Jewish people in history and in fact doesn’t quite get to grips with the antisemitism that Oppenheimer faced as an assimilated secular American Jew.
Matt Damon is the boorish Lt Gen Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer’s exasperated military minder Kenneth Branagh is his genial scientific hero and mentor Niels Bohr Robert Downey Jr is the duplicitous Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss Florence Pugh plays his lover Jean Tatlock, whose heart he broke, while Emily Blunt is his wife, Kitty, also badly treated. Later in the 50s, there is the disillusioned, compromised administrator, hounded by the McCarthyites for his communist connections, nauseated by his own pointless celebrity, by his failure to establish postwar international atomic control and by a single denied thought: the Nazis surrendered long before there was any suggestion they had the weapon, and bombing the defeated Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was merely to cow the Russians with a ruthless demonstration of the US’s nuclear mastery.Ĭillian Murphy is an eerily close lookalike for Oppenheimer with his trademark hat and pipe, and is very good at capturing his sense of solitude and emotional imprisonment, giving us the Oppenheimer million-yard stare, eyeballs set in a gaunt skull, seeing and foreseeing things he cannot process.
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