Oppenheimer (1980)

with Sam Waterston

So, I'm breaking the mold here, this isn't really a movie, actually it's a television show. But I liked it a lot and thought it was worth a mention.

I was going through things that Sam Waterston had done which I could rent on netflix. There are a lot of them, but for whatever reason, I chose this one, probably because of all the rave reviews from geek girls on svelte young men blathering on about nuclear physics. Actually, the people aren't too ostententatiously good looking in this one: Fermi looked like Fermi from pictures I'd seen, and Teller looked like Teller. Nuff said.

This is a cheap television show, so not only do the sets, costumes and direction ressemble that of a soap opera, but a lot of the actors aren't really worth mentioning either. Sam Waterston is by far the best of the lot, although I thought the guy who played Fermi was extremely convincing (it was an extremely small part, but I can imagine, formidable).

The story is pretty decent though, in fact it's more than decent, it was everything I could have wanted and more. I like it when the story matter is something on the dark side, and in the first twenty minutes the main character takes some heavy emotional abuse from his girlfriend, has make-up sex, and lights up a cigarette, lies back on the pillows and takes some more. I think at some point in this scene we're supposed to come to the conclusion that said girlfriend is mentally unstable.

Actually, it's a running theme throughout the miniseries that the main character must deal with somewhat ambiguous moral situations. I suppose you could argue, rightly enough, that creating a weapon of mass destruction is hardly morally ambiguous. I think the counterargument was that they believed at the time that Germany was also developing its own nuclear weapon, but you can watch the miniseries yourself to see how that progresses. But that's one of the more boring ones.

You see, even though Oppenheimer eventually dumps girlfriend number one, gets a new one, then marries her, he still continues his relationship with his former girlfriend. It's unclear if he's doing because he wants to, he feels sorry for her, or because she is blackmailing him into doing so by threatening suicide. More tenuous than his personal relationships is the one he holds with the US government. Oppenheimer, while he is definitely not a communist, has many old friends who are communists. He remains loyal to these friends, despite their putting him in difficult situations with his job as head of Los Alamos.

Edward Teller, creator of the hydrogen bomb,
is played by the inimitble David Suchet

The most outstanding feature of this miniseries was the various displays of vile human behavior. Oppenheimer is finally portrayed as an older man, used and abused by both his friends and his enemies, tortured by his wife, too tired and dispirited to do much but sip coffee and read on the porch of his whitewashed retirement cottage.

Does any of this bear any ressemblence to the truth? I don't know. One of these days I'll buy myself a copy of Oppenheimer's biography from half price books. Until then, well, I was entertained.