The Ham-Handed Genius of ‘Oppenheimer’
by Osita Nwanevu
I wasn’t especially diligent about seeing new movies last year, but I did somehow manage to see Oppenheimer twice, and I’m wishing it well at the Oscars. There may have been better films—Richard Brody was characteristically lucid and unsparing about Oppenheimer’s flaws in The New Yorker—but there’s something beguiling about this picture.
Early on, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) meets and beds Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), his mercurial, well-read Communist paramour. Mid-intercourse, she dismounts him, walks over to his bookshelf, picks up the Bhagavad Gita, and asks him to translate a passage of it at random. He obliges as she straddles him again: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
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