Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer—and Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer

My partner and I watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer this past week (we decided to take it in three one-hour segments—it is a very long movie!). Maureen and I both thought it a fairly good film, and an interesting one—but we find it hard to understand why it would be so enthusiastically touted as the best film of 2023.

Oppenheimer is not only too long (at least 30 minutes could easily be cut); it’s also much too loosely organized. The film is constantly jumping about between the wartime story of the atomic bomb being developed; the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearings as to whether or not Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be revoked (because of his leftist political sympathies and his lack of enthusiasm for developing the hydrogen bomb); and the 1959 hearings as to whether or not Lewis Strauss should be confirmed as Commerce Secretary. A good deal of it is not easy to follow, and in its final 45 minutes or so, as Nolan focuses more and more on the 1959 Lewis Strauss hearings, the film veers off oddly in a largely new direction. Strauss (who had persuaded Oppenheimer to become the director of Princeton’s Advanced Study Institute in 1947, but had subsequently turned against him over the H-bomb controversies) lost the 1959 cabinet confirmation vote in the US Senate, in part because various scientists testified that he had persecuted Oppenheimer through the 1954 hearings. All that is unquestionably interesting, but with the film’s focus towards the end more and more on Strauss’s personal viciousness and vindictiveness towards Oppenheimer, the larger issues start to fade into the background. Was it right to develop the atomic bomb? Was it right to develop the hydrogen bomb? How should society deal with the inevitable tension between the need for security and the democratic principles of openness and tolerance? The film has something to say about all of these, but the film’s structure dilutes what it has to say.

A much tighter—and, I would argue, a much better—work on the same topic is Heinar Kipphardt’s play from the 1960s, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kipphardt was a practitioner of the Theater of Fact, a movement that incorporated material from real-life documents into drama. Much of his play is drawn directly from testimony given at the 1954 AEC hearings—and, unlike Nolan, he does a first-rate job of structuring that material into a tightly focused drama. Here the questions that tend too much in Nolan’s film to recede into the background are kept front and center—with one large question that Nolan pays scant attention to brought to the fore in Kipphardt’s drama: in what circumstances should scientists (should any of us, for that matter) place loyalty to our country and our government ahead of loyalty to humanity?

In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a play of ideas—Oppenheimer’s wife is not brought into it, and nor is Lewis Strauss—but the main characters are nevertheless vividly drawn, and the conflict between Oppenheimer and Edward Teller over whether or not to develop the hydrogen bomb creates real dramatic tension. (The text of the play is not entirely cut-and-pasted from the 1954 hearings; Kipphardt added several monologues, and they are a real help in stitching the story together and bringing the characters to life.)

Kipphardt’s play (which I first read thirty or more years ago—I pulled the old British Methuen edition off the shelf recently to re-read it) seems to be largely forgotten nowadays in the English-speaking world. An off-Broadway production was mounted at New York’s Connelly Theater in 2006, but the play seems to have been very infrequently performed since then. The book remains in print, but has only 15 ratings and 3 reviews on Amazon.com. It deserves to be far better known!