August 3, 2023

Just two days apart, I watched the movie Oppenheimer and read the most recent indictment of Donald Trump by the “United States of America.” In watching the film, even before reading the indictment, I sensed parallels in the hounding of both Oppenheimer and Trump.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”); } }); }); }

The indictment suggests that the two men were persecuted for the same offense — free speech. “The defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election,” insists prosecutor Jack Smith. Similarly, no one denied Oppenheimer his right to lobby for one-world government and international cooperation.

The problem in each case is that the speaker had too big a platform and too loud a voice. That said, the motives for shutting down Oppenheimer were far more substantial than they are for Trump. The penalties imposed on Oppenheimer, however, were far less. He lost his security clearance. That’s pretty much it.

Great American Movies (GAM) come along rarely, more rarely, it seems, with each passing year. Oppenheimer ends a 10-year drought since Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. To qualify as a GAM, in my humble estimation, a movie should tell a big story, tell it exceedingly well, and tell it fairly. Oppenheimer, I believe, does all the above.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”); } }); }); }

In a story this complex and nuanced — Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is no Abe Lincoln — there a thousand ways to go wrong. British-American writer/director Christopher Nolan avoids at least 990 of them. The one major ideological snare that Nolan sidesteps is the whitewashing of America’s Reds. The people hovering in Oppenheimer’s orbit — his wife, his brother, his mistress — are not merely persecuted liberals, as Hollywood usually depicts its commies, but card-carrying members of Josef Stalin’s Communist Party.

At least a few of the communists are seen plotting to betray the United States by giving America’s atomic secrets to the Soviets. One of them, the German-born Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham) who worked under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, was eventually arrested and imprisoned for espionage.

Although Fuchs’s arrest is an important plot point, Nolan gives this subplot no more than two minutes of screen time. If a viewer misses the point, the fault is not Nolan’s, but the state of public education. To appreciate the movie, it would help viewers to acquaint themselves beforehand with the cast and characters.

A more developed subplot involves Oppenheimer’s close friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall), a Berkeley colleague Oppenheimer knows to be a communist. When Chevalier tries to enlist Oppenheimer in a scheme to share secrets with the Soviets, Oppenheimer fails to report the overture to his superiors. Then, when found out, he lies to protect Chevalier. Knowing this, viewers understand the reasons why authorities might have wanted to rescind Oppenheimer’s security clearance after the war.

Nolan also avoids the red herring that Oppenheimer, a secularized Jew, was a victim of anti-Semitism. As the movie makes clear, German anti-Semitism proved to be America’s greatest asset in developing the atomic bomb. Several of the most prominently scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, directly or otherwise, were Jewish refugees. Those seen in the film include Einstein, Leo Szilard, and, most critical to the plot, Edward Teller (Benny Safdie).

One major plot line pits the Hungarian-born Teller against the American Oppenheimer in shaping America’s nuclear future. Nolan lets Safdie play Teller as something of a heavy with no larger goal than to build a “super,” a hydrogen bomb capable of blowing up the word. The unknowing audience member instinctively sympathizes with the peace-loving Oppenheimer who restrains Teller’s ambitions.