THE CURRENT CINEMA SHOCK WAVES

“Oppenheimer” and Barbie.”

- ANTHONY LANE

The new film from Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer,” starts and ends in the round. In the opening shot, ripples expand in puddles as raindrops fall. Three hours later, we get a vision of Earth beginning to burn, as nuclear explosions bloom across the globe. 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. 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. How much roundness can you take?

The antidote to this circularity is J. Robert Oppenheimer. (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. Oppenheimer is played by Cillian Murphy, who catches the quiet inquietude of the man, and his tobaccosoftened speech. 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. “What happens to stars when they die?” he says, by way of small talk, at a party in Berkeley. There he meets the incandescent Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh); later, at her bidding, he translates a Sanskrit text as they make love. For Oppenheimer, no talk is ever small.