‘Oppenheimer’ is for Gossips and Haters

And if I say I love it, then what?

Major spoilers for Oppenheimer follow. But if you aren’t sure how Oppenheimer ends baby open Wikipedia right now…

This image is my guy-in-Tangled-surrounded-by-knives. Photo: Warner Bros.

I went to a brunch showing of Oppenheimer at my local Nitehawk a few weekends ago. I brought Andrew because he’d only half-watched the movie one weekday night, and that was unacceptable to me. “I bet this theater is going to be full of fucking sickos,” he joked as we were walking over. When we arrived to theater number two, it was totally empty. We were the only people there. That fucking sicko turned out to be me.

Oppenheimer might seem like Men, m3n, MEN: the movie, but that is a woeful misunderstanding of the text. Oppenheimer is a movie for gossips. Oppenheimer is a movie for haters. Oppenheimer is a movie about not being able to look at someone because you find him that annoying, and you don’t even care to hide it, not even a little bit. Oppenheimer is also a movie about Albert Einstein appearing out of nowhere because it’s the middle of the night and he needs to start some drama. I love Oppenheimer. I will never give it up.

Oppenheimer is about a friendship breakup, I’d say, but that would imply there was a friendship to begin with. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy and expertly applied Tom Ford Bronzer) seems unimpressed by — and eventually irritated by and later disgusted by — the bureaucrat Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr., and stunningly not Tracy Letts¹). Their meeting is inauspicious: Strauss tries to entice Oppenheimer, by then the world’s most famous scientist and the father of the atomic bomb, into a position at Princeton. Oppie has an attitude almost immediately.² He’s not interested in Princeton, or Strauss, or the fact that the position comes with a nice house and a short commute. Strauss — probably in an attempt to assimilate — pronounces his name “straws.” It’s a small moment, but it’s the first indicator that Oppenheimer finds him at best an idiot, and at worst, intolerabe. “‘Oh-ppenheimer,’ ‘Aw-ppenheimer’,” he says begins. “Any way you say it, they know I’m Jewish.”

It gets worse from there. Oppenheimer asks Strauss if he’s a physicist. “No, I’m not trained in physics, or anything else. I’m a self-made man.” Strauss says it proudly, even a little smugly. “I can relate to that,” Oppenheimer says wryly. “My father was one.”