After months of building
anticipation, writer-director Christopher Nolan’s new
movie Oppenheimer arrived
in theaters Friday, kickstarting an opening weekend where it’s expected to
collect around $50 million at
the domestic box office.
The three-hour (and nine second)
biopic centers, as its title suggests, on J. Robert Oppenheimer (played
by Cillian Murphy), the theoretical physicist widely known as the “father of
the atomic bomb” who infamously summed up his life’s work in a 1965 NBC News documentary by
reciting a line from the sacred Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become
death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning 2006 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph
and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer—currently no. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller
chart, thanks to the film—the movie jumps
back and forth through time as it explores the life and legacy of its subject.
“What I wanted to do was take the audience into the mind and the experience of
a person who sat at the absolute center of the largest shift in history,” Nolan
said in the film’s production notes. “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is
the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for
better or for worse.”
Here’s what to know about how the true story of
Oppenheimer’s life compares to the movie.
Oppenheimer’s
early life
Oppenheimer’s childhood doesn’t
play out on screen in the movie, but his upbringing contributed to views he
espouses throughout the film. He was born in 1904 into a wealthy secular Jewish
family in New York City and educated at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture School,
graduating in 1921. Although his parents were first- and second-generation
Americans of German-Jewish descent, Oppenheimer refrained from embracing his
heritage for much of his life.
“To the outside world, he was always known as a
German Jew, and he always insisted that he was neither German nor Jewish,” Ray
Monk, the author of Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, told
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But it affected his relationship
with the world that that is how he was perceived.”
Antisemitism impacted him
throughout his time studying at Harvard, and later, amid the Nazis’ rise to
power in Germany, changed the way he engaged with his Jewishness.
“I had a continuing, smoldering
fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany,” he said at his 1954 hearing
before the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which is part of the
movie’s central framing device. “I had relatives there, and was later to help
in extricating them and bringing them to this country.”
Years in
Europe
After graduating summa cum laude
from Harvard in 1925, Oppenheimer traveled to England, as the film depicts, to
conduct research at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory under
British physicist and 1906 Nobel Prize winner J. J. Thomson. There, he
struggled with mental health issues and ended up on probation.
American Prometheus reports that, during this time, Oppenheimer relayed
a story to friends about lacing an apple with chemicals and leaving it on the
desk of his tutor, Patrick Blackett (played by James D’Arcy). The book cites
Oppenheimer’s friend Jeffries Wyman as suggesting that Oppenheimer might have
exaggerated the incident somehow: “Whether or not this was an imaginary apple,
or a real apple, whatever it was, it was an act of jealousy.”
The way the film depicts this alleged event, Oppenheimer snatches the apple out of the hand of his idol Niels Bohr (played by Kenneth Branagh) before the legendary physicist can take a bite.
Oppenheimer
ultimately transferred to the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he
earned his Ph.D in quantum physics. During his time in Germany, he studied with
a number of prominent physicists, including Max Born and Bohr. Oppenheimer
attended Göttingen alongside Werner Heisenberg (played by Matthias
Schweighöfer), who would go on to lead the German effort to develop an atomic
bomb.
Ties
to the Communist Party
In 1929, after returning to America, Oppenheimer accepted
an assistant professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, in a
special arrangement that also saw him teaching at the California Institute of
Technology. Over the next 14 years, he established Berkeley as one of the
greatest schools of theoretical physics in the U.S. and garnered a loyal
following of up-and-coming physicists. The film depicts the program’s growth by
having just one student show up to his first class, then showing the classroom
bursting at the seams within a short time as word of his class spreads among
students. He also worked alongside, and became good friends with, leading
experimental physicist Ernest O. Lawrence (played by Josh Hartnett), who would
later help involve him in the Manhattan Project.
After entering into a tumultuous relationship with Stanford Medical School
student and Communist Party member Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh) in
1936—when she was 22 and he was 32—Oppenheimer began taking an interest in
left-wing political causes, from supporting anti-fascists during the Spanish
Civil War to unionizing academics. While Oppenheimer never officially joined
the Communist Party, many of his closest friends and family members, including
his brother Frank Oppenheimer (Dylan Arnold), friend Haakon Chevalier
(Jefferson Hall), and future wife Katharine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt), were
members at various points in time.
The
movie shows how the U.S. government was aware and skeptical of Oppenheimer’s
communist affiliations early on, but chose to overlook them during the
Manhattan Project when it became clear he was the right man for the job.
However, these associations would ultimately come back to haunt him and lead to
the destruction of his career at the height of American anti-Communist hysteria
in the 1950s.
Romantic
relationships
As the movie notes, over the years, Oppenheimer developed
a reputation as a womanizer.
While Tatlock broke off their official relationship in
1939, Oppenheimer remained in contact with her and visited her in San
Francisco, where she was working as a pediatric psychiatrist at Mount Zion
Hospital, as late as 1943. That was several years into his marriage to
biologist Kitty Puening.
Nearly seven months after Tatlock and Oppenheimer’s final
June 1943 meeting, Tatlock’s father found his 29-year-old daughter dead in her
apartment on Jan. 4, 1944. Tatlock had suffered from clinical depression and
her death was ruled a suicide. However, some suspected there was foul play
involved as Tatlock had been placed under surveillance by the FBI due to her
relationship with Oppenheimer and past involvement with communist politics.
Oppenheimer
wed the already-pregnant Puening on Nov. 1, 1940, shortly after she divorced
her third husband, Richard Stewart Harrison. The Oppenheimers’ first child,
Peter, was born in May 1941. Kitty later gave birth to a daughter, Katherine
Toni, in December 1944, while living at Los Alamos. The couple remained married
until Oppenheimer’s death in 1967—despite his relationship with Tatlock and
rumored romantic entanglements with other women, including psychologist Ruth
Sherman Tolman (played by Louise Lombard), the wife of his close friend,
chemist Richard Tolman (Tom Jenkins).
The movie portrays Kitty as struggling with alcoholism and
displaying an ambivalent attitude toward motherhood, having largely given up
her scientific career, though she did serve briefly as a lab technician at Los
Alamos. But she loyally supports her husband through thick and thin. She
remained by his side throughout the 1954 AEC hearing and was one of his
steadfast defenders.
The
Manhattan Project
In early 1942, Oppenheimer was recruited for the Manhattan
Project, the United States government’s secret World War II undertaking to
build an atomic bomb. Later that year, General Leslie Groves (played by Matt
Damon) appointed Oppenheimer as the scientific director of the program and, in
early 1943, construction began on Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico—one of a
number of laboratories in secret locations across the country, including
Chicago and Oak Ridge, Tenn., involved in the operation. Oppenheimer convinced
Groves that Los Alamos should be turned into town where scientists could live
with their families, since many might refuse to relocate otherwise.
Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top scientists of the
time to live and work at Los Alamos until the bomb had been completed. Less
than three years after the laboratory’s founding, the world’s first nuclear
weapons test, dubbed the Trinity test, took place in the nearby Jornada del
Muerto desert on July 16, 1945. The test was successful in proving that the
bomb worked, but it caused decades of immense harm to Indigenous people living in the
surrounding area.
Three weeks later, on Aug. 6 and 9, respectively, the
United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, ending the war. The bombings together killed between an estimated
110,000 to 210,000 people, most of whom were civilians.
Oppenheimer’s
post-war life
Following the war, public opinion about the use of the
atomic bomb wavered. While visiting the White House in October 1945, as shown
in the movie, Oppenheimer told President Harry S. Truman (played by Gary
Oldman), “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.”
However, Oppenheimer was hailed as a national hero by many
and, in 1946, was awarded a Medal for Merit. When the Manhattan Project came
under the jurisdiction of the newly-formed AEC, the agency charged with
overseeing all atomic research and development in the U.S., Oppenheimer was
named chairman of the General Advisory Committee. As chairman, he staunchly
opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb—a “Super Bomb” conceived by fellow
Los Alamos scientist Edward Teller (played by Benny Safdie) that was a thousand
times more powerful than the atomic bomb—when Cold War tensions began to rise
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
In 1947, Oppenheimer had also been appointed director of
the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton by Lewis Strauss (played by
Robert Downey Jr.), who would go on to become chairman of the AEC.
The
AEC hearing
During his tenure as chairman of the General Advisory
Committee, Oppenheimer’s controversial stance on the hydrogen bomb made him a
number of political enemies. Strauss, whom Oppenheimer had humiliated at a
Congressional hearing about whether or not to ban the sale of radioisotopes,
took a particular dislike to the physicist.
In
November 1953, William Liscum Borden (played by David Dastmalchian), a close
confidant of Strauss and former executive director of Congress’s Joint
Committee on Atomic Energy, sent a letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
suggesting that “more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the
Soviet Union.”
The letter was passed on to President Dwight D. Eisenhower
and Oppenheimer was informed his security clearance had been revoked in a
December 1953 meeting with Strauss. Oppenheimer appealed the decision and, on
April 12, 1954, a monthlong security hearing began during which Oppenheimer’s
previous communist leanings and associations, views on U.S. nuclear policy, and
other personal transgressions were used to discredit him in a kangaroo
court-style proceeding led by AEC lawyer Roger Robb (played by Jason Clarke).
Later
life
The result of the security hearing came to define
Oppenheimer for the rest of his life, with Oppenheimer’s close friend and
fellow physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi (played by David Krumholtz) later saying that,
“[Oppenheimer] was a man of peace and they destroyed him. He was a man of
science and they destroyed this man. A small, mean group.”
Oppenheimer stayed on as director of the Institute for
Advanced Study until 1966, shortly before dying of throat cancer at his
Princeton home on Feb. 18, 1967. Prior to his death he was presented in 1966
with the AEC’s highest honor, the Enrico Fermi Award—the award we see him
receiving in a flash forward while talking to Albert Einstein (played by Tom
Conti) in the movie’s final scene—by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
In his acceptance speech, Oppenheimer referenced former
President Thomas Jefferson’s odes to “the brotherly spirit of science.”
“We have not, I know, always given evidence of that
brotherly spirit,” he said. “This is not
because we lack vital common or intersecting scientific interests. It is in
part because, with countless other men and women, we are engaged in this great
enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and live without war as the great
arbiter of history.”
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