As with James R. Hansen’s biography First Man, another biography that was adapted to film which I looked at recently, we’re not looking at a gargantuan piece of prose here. We’re not approaching an epic, War & Peace composition.
At the same time though, a work of this length still presents a significant challenge when it comes to adapting the prose into an entire cinematic spectacle. Some parts are going to be focused on more than others, and other bits will have to be cut out entirely. Christopher Nolan’s epic reaches just over three hours, yet still has to dispense with a decent amount of material to maintain audience engagement.
Starting off, one of the key aims of the filmmaker is to get the audience to engage and emphasise with the protagonist. He might be a bit eccentric, but not so eccentric that the audience is completely alienated. As such, the screenplay plays it pretty safe by only mentioning the apple incident when it tracks the early years of Oppenheimer’s life. During his time in Cambridge, Oppenheimer’s deteriorating emotional psyche ultimately led him to inject an apple with cyanide and leave it on the desk of his tutor Patrick Blackett, a man who he admired but simultaneously resented due to Blackett’s desire for Oppenheimer to do more laboratory work, an activity he despised. The film jumps past the fact that Oppenheimer was nearly expelled for this action, had it not been for the efforts of his father Julius (the J for which the beginning of Oppenheimer’s name actually stands for, despite Oppenheimer’s frequent claims that the letter doesn’t stand for anything).
While the event certainly presents the figure as strange in the film’s opening act, it does enough to draw intrigue without distancing the audience, something which potentially could’ve happened if filmmakers had chosen to mention a couple of other disturbing events in Oppenheimer’s early years. One of these incidents involved Oppenheimer’s friend Francis Fergusson, who one day informed Oppenheimer that he was soon to be married. Instead of giving his pal a word of congratulations or a pat on the back, Oppenheimer instead decided to try and strangle his best friend with a trunk strap. Luckily Ferguson was powerful enough to wrestle himself out of Oppenheimer’s grip. It’s hardly surprising that this particular event wasn’t chosen for inclusion in the film.
A similarly disturbing incident related by Fergusson occurred on a train, where Oppenheimer saw a couple kissing and tried to kiss the woman once her partner had left. He suddenly decided against it, apologised, then shortly after sighted the woman below him on the stairs and tried to drop his suitcase, unsuccessfully, on her head. The biography also provides a few examples of a young Oppenheimer’s poetry concerning women, some of which is decidedly creepy and unnerving. Depicting one example of Oppenheimer’s oddity with the apple incident? Fine. The audience is still on his side. Depicting those other incidents of his sexual frustrations and apparent murder attempts? That probably would’ve tipped the audience over the edge in terms of their ability to emphasise with their supposed protagonist.
If you’re adapting prose, especially if that prose happens to be a fairly lengthy biography, you’ll need to inject a decent element of drama. As is made clear from Oppenheimer’s opening images, in which we see Oppenheimer and Louis Strauss clearly presented at odds with the division between ‘Fission’ and ‘Fusion’ set out in the opening subtitles. The film begins with the two figures walking side by side, but Strauss doesn’t really come to the fore of the biography until over halfway through. In the case of the biography, this is clearly a necessity in terms of laying out Oppenheimer’s life in a cohesive, chronological structure; it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to dive into the two’s relationship at the start of a biography which needs to build up a sense of the man through his past childhood and adolescent experiences.
For the purpose of film, the audience needs to get a sense of who the good guys and the bad guys are, even if these terms don’t seem to be quite so black in reality. The Oppenheimer on screen, portrayed with typical nuance and brilliance by Cillian Murphy, doesn’t seem to have quite the same level of hubris and arrogance as many figures describe him in the biography. Equally, while Robert Downey Jr does a great job portraying the embittered Strauss, it’s intriguing to read how truly hateful the figure is on the page. Even after Strauss had succeeded in taking Oppenheimer’s security clearance, his determination to keep FBI sources on Oppenheimer and his family following his defamation are a damning and uncomfortable realisation. Funnily enough, the FBI don’t come out well in the biography either. Continuing to spite the Oppenheimers years after the fallout, they made sure not to grant security clearance to Oppenheimer’s daughter Toni when she was employed as a trilingual translator for the United Nations, ultimately losing her job and committing suicide at the age of 32.
Speaking of irredeemable bad guys, Oppenheimer doesn’t quite have time to get across the true villainy of the backstabbing Edward Teller. The biography relates the scientist’s apparent surprise at the cold attitudes of some of Oppenheimer’s friends when they refused to shake his hand after hearing of Teller’s betrayal during the 1954 hearing of the Atomic Energy Commission, after which he apparently had the nerve to apologise and shake his hand. This seemed somewhat difficult to believe, but biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman managed to compile some fascinating photographs for the book, one of which captures the exact moment when Teller shakes the hand of a smiling Oppenheimer during the latter’s acceptance of the Enrico Fermi award in 1954, while a disapproving Kitty Oppenheimer looks on. A fascinating photo, this made for a great recreation in the film’s final scenes, where Ludwig Göransson’s eloquent ‘Destroyer of Worlds’ dominates the soundscape.
I was also really intrigued to discover that context of my favourite scene of the movie, in which Oppenheimer addresses an audience of ecstatic citizens who are eagerly stomping their feet on the wood of the floor. This sound has been heard a couple of times in the film previously, but with no context as to its origin. Within the context of the book, the tale is told by physicist Sam Cohen, who reports Oppenheimer raising his hands in triumph as he tells the audience that the results of the bombing are uncertain, but he was sure that the Japanese didn’t like it, saying he was proud and only regretted that he hadn’t developed the bomb in time to use on Germany. From this point of view, it looks as though the Oppenheimer here was outwardly joyous before the crowd. The film, however, takes a vastly different – and far more psychological – approach to this account. Murphy’s Oppenheimer can be heard pausing in distress before delivering the first line about the uncertainty of the results. In a genius use of sound design, his voice is projected, while the enthusiastic shouts of the audience are blurred and indistinct along with their images. When he continues to announce that the Japanese didn’t like it, the roars of triumph are heard again, but Oppenheimer’s heavy breathing and clear anxiety is heard above all else. He delivers the next lines to the same responses of adulation, but the repressed sounds make clear that, inwardly, Oppenheimer is not at all comfortable with the words leaving his mouth. The subsequent insertion of a woman’s high-pitched shriek as Oppenheimer sees a vision of a static figure burned and haunted by the bomb he created confirms his utter horror at the events his actions have caused. I’m not sure who came up with the idea of turning this scene of victory into one of absolute fear and angst, but it was a masterstroke of filmmaking both in its cinematography and sound design.
(If you fancy reading my piece on the adaptation of the biography First Man, it’s posted below)
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