“Algebra’s like sheet music. The important thing isn’t can you read music, it’s can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?”
Or how the music becomes a cacophony. A film in which brilliance is a given and reputations precede men, and men alone, as they tend to be, in such a way as to anonymise rather than idolise, a hive of brilliant minds in service of the same goal, the same idea, the same breakthrough. Barked surnames, brief handshakes, numbers on badges. A collective effort led by one man, alone. A man who looks at a Picasso portrait, fragmented, vibrant and pensive, and sees himself, like Hanna and McAuley see themselves in each other in Heat. Only this painting is a mirror, not a table in a diner. J. Robert Oppenheimer is the father of the atomic bomb, the man who moved the Earth. A man longing to be looked upon by the world for his genius and not his creation, for the science over the war, for the success of the test over the horrors of its weaponization. And so the work continues. Men gather around chalkboards like students, frantically writing impenetrable equations and batting around ideas, as Oppenheimer, the wild hair and wide eyes of youth now lost to the weight of the world, looks on and listens, orchestrating the room and pushing its occupants towards the scientific breakthrough to come. And it does come, eventually, and the looming nightmare of losing an arms race with the Nazis fades away, replaced instead by the reality of a perilous new world on a knife-edge. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, the man who moved the earth, can barely handle the weight of his creation. The energy of his youth and the ferocity of his work have slowly rotted away, revealing a sluggish, sickly tiredness, and half-hearted plays for pity drawn out by incessant, self-flagellating cross-examinations in courtrooms across America. The atomic bomb has been fathered. The world has been moved. There’s nothing left to do but justify the actions of the past, again and again, as they echo into the future, in the vain hope that people might somehow understand. Oppenheimer is a man whose life is now open to interpretation, out of his control, left to others to form their own opinions. A cubist figure of history, perhaps, fragmented, vibrant and pensive, laden with a legacy that bears no resemblance to the man he imagines himself to be as time ticks by beyond him, marching ceaselessly towards a new world of his creation and even further beyond it. Of course, he closes his eyes.