He learns enough to give a lecture on quantum physics. During a youthful sojourn in the Netherlands, Oppenheimer doesn’t just learn Dutch in six weeks. Yet Nolan, who wrote the screenplay, has a fine taste for the delicious detail. Much is omitted in the adaptation there is no whisper, for example, of the fact that Oppenheimer was born into serious wealth. I hate to say it, but, if you zip through all six hundred pages of the book before seeing the film, you’ll enjoy the ride more. The film is adapted from “ American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” a 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. There he meets the incandescent Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) later, at her bidding, he translates a Sanskrit text as they make love. “What happens to stars when they die?” he says, by way of small talk, at a party in Berkeley. In the blaze of his blue eyes we see not candor but a kind of undimmed shock, as if he were staring straight through us at matters invisible to regular mortals. Oppenheimer is played by Cillian Murphy, who catches the quiet inquietude of the man, and his tobacco-softened speech. (Though named for his father, Julius, he insisted, with Prufrockian nicety, that the “J” stood for nothing at all.) Lean, sticklike, skullish in his gauntness, and too clever for comfort-his own or anyone else’s-he has gone down in history as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, in New Mexico, where the bomb was built, and it is from history that Nolan seeks to pluck him. The antidote to this circularity is J. Robert Oppenheimer. This obsession with scale is well served by “Oppenheimer,” in which the amassing of refined uranium, for the construction of an atomic bomb, is indicated by marbles piling up inside a goldfish bowl. Nolan is always entranced by the vast and the tiny “Inception” (2010), wherein city streets fold like paper under the pressure of dreams, concludes with a spinning top. Three hours later, we get a vision of Earth beginning to burn, as nuclear explosions bloom across the globe. In the opening shot, ripples expand in puddles as raindrops fall. The new film from Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer,” starts and ends in the round.
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