‘Oppenheimer’: Christopher Nolan’s Starry Biopic Is Big, Loud, and a Must-See

《奥本海默》：一部众星云集、恢宏大气、震耳欲聋、不容错过的诺兰出品传记片

IN THE BEGINNING, there were simply explosions. Smaller bangs — the big one would come much later, in the New Mexico desert. But for J. Robert Oppenheimer, the quantum physicist who would guide the greatest scientific minds of his generation toward creating a doomsday device, it was all just a constant collision and coming apart of matter in his head. Put the man in a lab, and he’s hopeless. Let him roam in the world of theories, and Oppenheimer could hear what a mentor dubbed “the music of science.” Those symphonies gave him visions of black holes, collapsing stars, developing nebulae, gaseous eruptions, particles moving at the speed of light, molecules spinning, atoms splitting. He sees these things, and then we see these things, rendered in 70mm IMAX. Any filmmaker can create a cinematic universe. (Many have. Too many, some might say.) Very few can show you how a genius perceives the building blocks of our universe, right before that same person imagines something that threatens our existence in it.

This is what Christopher Nolan does in Oppenheimer, a biopic on the “father of the atomic bomb,” and in terms of getting you into the mindset of its subject, these bursts of abstract imagery are a brilliant move on his part. It’s not the only ace the writer-director has up his well-tailored sleeve, mind you — there are somewhere between four to five timelines bumping against each other at any given moment, it’s shot in both saturated color and stark black & white, its sound design equally prizes dead silence and deafening booms, and the cast is comprised of seemingly every third actor with a SAG card. Not to mention a depth-charge performance by Cillian Murphy as the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds, one that allows the tiniest surface ripples to communicate the agony and the ecstasy of changing the world.

But those interspersed shots of cosmic debris and microscopic detonations, some of which abruptly interrupt exchanges and others that smoothly transition viewers from one scene to the next, are perfect examples of how to let you experience someone like Oppenheimer’s perspective by showing, rather than telling. And it sometimes feels like those two camps — the cinematic and the chatty-to-a-fault — are fighting it out on Nolan’s massive canvas in a way that resembles nuclear fission minus the energy release.

电影开头只有一些噼里啪啦般的小爆炸，真正发生在新墨西哥州沙漠里的大爆炸出现在电影很后面了。然而，对量子物理学家J·罗伯特·奥本海默（J. Robert Oppenheimer）而言，物质的分裂和爆炸却一刻不停地在他脑海发生着，他将带领那个时代最伟大的科学家们制造一个“世界末日”装置。如果让奥本海默做实验，他毫无建树。但是让他肆意徜徉在理论的世界里，奥本海默便能听到某位导师所谓的“科学的音乐”。这些交响乐让他看到了黑洞、恒星的坍塌、星云的形成、气体的喷发，让他看到以光速运动的粒子、旋转的分子、分裂的原子。导演用70毫米的IMAX镜头让我们身临其境地看到他所看到的这些东西。任何电影人都可以创造一个电影宇宙。(许多导演可以。有人甚至会说，这样的人多如牛毛。) 但是，能够把一个天才是如何感知宇宙构成的过程如此呈现给我们的导演屈指可数。而这个天才在之后便开始想象威胁我们生存的东西。

这就是克里斯托弗·诺兰（Christopher Nolan）在《奥本海默》(Oppenheimer)中这部关于“原子弹之父”的传记片所做的。诺兰巧妙地通过奥本海默的视角使观众进入到他的思维中，以此去展现这些抽象意象的爆发。注意，这并不是这位编剧兼导演在这部精心拍摄的电影中掏出的唯一王牌 -- 首先，电影中的任何时刻，都对应着大约四到五条时间线中的某一条；其次，它运用饱和的彩色调和直白的黑白调进行对比拍摄，同时在声音设计上，既重视震耳欲聋般的轰鸣感，又重视万籁俱寂般的沉默感；再者，差不多三分之一的演员来自美国演员工会，组成了该片的豪华演员阵容。更不用说饰演“世界的毁灭者 - 奥本海默”的基里安·墨菲（Cillian Murphy）在片中奉献了史诗级的表演，甚至他的微表情都精准地向观众传达了奥本海默改变世界过程中的痛苦挣扎和欣喜若狂。

电影中多次穿插了宇宙碎片和微观爆炸的镜头，其中一些突然打断了人物的交流，另一些则将观众从一个场景自然过度到另一个场景。通过影像展示而不是台词解释让观众身临其境般地体验像奥本海默这样的人的视角，诺兰在这里为大家贡献了教科书般的处理方式。有时感觉这两个阵营——影像派和台词派——在诺兰创造的巨大画布上以一种类似核裂变减去能量释放的方式在角力。

Taking its cues from the exhaustive, Pulitzer-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer seeks to cram as much of the man’s life, his work, his elevation to national hero, his eventual persecution, and his personal demons into three hours. Just for good measure, Nolan throws in not one but two competing courtroom dramas as well. There’s a roll-the-dice sensation throughout: Scenes of people sitting in rooms talking can seem thrilling or plodding, clarify historical conflicts and complicated concepts or confuse the hell out of you. Set pieces feel sweeping one second, and like they’re sucking the oxygen out of the room the next. Then, suddenly, the movie cuts to a huge close-up of Murphy, his eyes suggesting a man wrestling for his soul, and you’re transfixed. As with so much of Nolan’s work, you can feel a truly great film peeking out in fits and spurts within a longer, slightly uneven one.

It’s a tough thing to admit, given that Nolan is one of Hollywood’s few name-above-the-title auteurs left standing. He can still get an original mega-budgeted film greenlit, and has taken on the mantle of keeping alive not just film as a medium but film as a physical means of storytelling. His work is intellectual yet visceral, philosophical yet pulse-pounding; he’s always managed to smuggle big ideas into multiplexes via blockbuster templates, even in genres he hasn’t completely terraformed. Like its better half in the joint entity now known as “Barbenheimer,” Oppenheimer isn’t afraid to talk up to an audience (although in Barbie‘s case, the degree of difficulty in doing that via a decades-old brand of dolls feels damn near revolutionary). And along with that shiny happy toy story, Nolan’s biography of a key figure of the 20th century has been burdened with the responsibility of saving motion pictures from financial instability and existential free fall. Heavy are the heads that wear the crown, etc.

《奥本海默》从凯·伯德和马丁·J·舍温所著的普利策获奖作品《美国普罗米修斯》中汲取灵感，试图在三个小时内尽可能多地讲述他的生平、他的工作、他成为民族英雄的经历、他最终受到的政治迫害以及他人性中的阴暗面。此外，诺兰还在电影中加入了两段相互竞争的法庭剧内容。整部电影会让观众有一种掷骰子碰运气的感觉:人物坐在房间里对话的场景要么紧张刺激，要么又臭又长；要么在阐明历史冲突和复杂的概念，要么又让你一头雾水，摸不著头脑。有些固定路数前一秒拍得还算丝滑流畅，下一秒又变得机械呆板。然后，突然，电影就把墨菲的一个面部特写怼到你面前，让你直视他那充满了与自己灵魂相互挣扎的眼睛，然后你被惊得一动不动。就像诺兰的许多作品一样，你倒是可以在略显磕磕绊绊地观影体验中若隐若现地看到一部伟大电影的样子，只不过这一部时间更长。

承认这一点的确很难，毕竟诺兰是好莱坞屈指可数尚未跌落神坛的大牌导演之一。他仍然可以让投资方为一部原创的大制作电影开绿灯，并且他一如既往地承担起了不仅让电影作为一种媒介，而且让电影作为一种讲故事的物理手段继续存在的重任。他的电影在烧脑之余又情感充沛，发人深省的同时又扣人心弦。他总是能够成功地将那些宏大的创意藏进标准的大片套路之中，并将他们带到无数的电影院。即使是他还不能完全掌控的影片类型，他也能做到这一点。大家现在用“奥本芭比”这个混合词把《奥本海默》和《芭比》相提并论，尽管芭比更好一些。就像“芭比”一样，“奥本海默”不惧向观众呈现大量的台词和对话。（在“芭比”中，通过一个历史久远的洋娃娃品牌的故事来达到这一点，其难度可谓是革命性的。）并且，和“芭比”这一阳光欢快的玩具故事一样，诺兰这部关于20世纪最重要人物之一的传记片同样肩负着将电影从金融动荡和存在主义危机中拯救出来的责任。正所谓“欲戴皇冠，必承其重”。

So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on, as evidenced by the early scenes of Oppenheimer and his military liaison, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, all mustache and bluster), assembling the eggheads. Their plan is to turn the small New Mexico burg of Los Alamos into a self-sufficient, family-friendly town for a group of scientists and a top-secret think tank for a weapon of mass destruction. The military need the end result of the Manhattan Project to win WWII, preferably before the Germans develop their own version of “the gadget.” Oppenheimer, both compelled by and wary of the opportunity, wants them to maintain the “moral advantage” after the world sees what this thing can do.

Concentrating on the mounting pressure to deliver, the miniature steps forward with each behind-the-scenes breakthrough, and the accountability factor causing friction between the project leader and his patrons, Oppenheimer becomes its own ticking time bomb. All the while, fractures are happening within the team, and the precariousness of the situation, along with Oppenheimer’s willingness to go through with opening this Pandora’s Box, brings things to a tipping point. These scenes remind you of how Nolan understands the use of sound and vision as a means of emotional engagement (helped in no small part by his regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and composer Ludwig Göransson‘s score); how his ability to fold complex ideas into presentations of human behavior, and vice versa, comes through in his writing; how the timing of a cut and the framing of an image can transform a moment from grandiose or mundane to sublime. The gent is a genuine filmmaker. He’s a big-screen artist, the bigger the screens the better.

And these sequences, in particular, reinforce the notion of Nolan as a great director of actors, even if the performances overall are across the boardin terms of screen time and effectiveness. Not just Murphy, who’s worked with The Dark Knight director before and deliversan Oppenheimer that goes far beyond the there-goeth-the-great-man clichés associated with many biopics. There’s Damon, whose repartee with Murphy approaches screwball levels. There’s Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who turns a perceived slight into a postwar vendetta against Oppenheimer. (It’s not an exaggeration to say that Downey does some of the best work of his long career here.) There’s Gary Oldman as President Harry S. Truman, who turns a single scene in the Oval Office into a damning portraitof the POTUS as a complete bastard.

There’s Florence Pugh, and Emily Blunt, and Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck, Jason Clarke, Matthew Modine, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich… it’s actually quicker to list who’s not in Oppenheimer. Nolan has said he wanted to cast recognizable faces so that audiences could keep track of who’s who easier, but he also gives them opportunities to flex, whether it’s for a minute or the majority of the running time. And given that there are so many scenes of people conversing, reading, lecturing, interrogating, handwringing and musing over the morality of mass destruction, they have to keep things afloat as much as their ringmaster.

那么让我们来夸夸这些由名人拍摄的关于名人的电影吧。“奥本海默”绝对是一部典型的“诺兰式电影”，“诺兰式电影”这个词其实是一种毁誉参半的评价。先说赞誉的一面：“奥本海默”中有多组镜头会让你感受到，为什么那些电影极客、类型片狂热分子以及“理论连篇”的艺术电影学究们无一例外会对这位52岁的导演推崇备至。对他们而言，“诺兰驾到，一呼百应”。正如电影开篇，奥本海默和军方联络官莱斯利·格罗夫斯将军（马特·达蒙扮演，全程留着络腮胡子，一副威风凛然的样子。）召集各路精英科学家的场景那样。他们的计划是把新墨西哥州的小镇 - 洛斯阿拉莫斯变成一个自给自足、适合家庭居住的城镇，以此供一群科学家和一个研究大规模杀伤性武器的绝密智囊团居住。军方需要“曼哈顿计划”的最终结果来赢得第二次世界大战，最好是在德国人开发出他们自己的“小玩意”之前。奥本海默对这个机会难以抗拒，又对这个机会保持警惕，他希望在全世界看到这个东西的能力之后，他们能保持“道德优势”。

考虑到“原子弹”与日俱增的交付压力，一个个重大技术突破背后项目却进展缓慢，以及一旦项目失败面临的追责问题引起的项目负责人和其资助者之间矛盾，奥本海默自身就成了一颗定时炸弹。这个时候，团队内部开始出现分歧，（认为）“原子弹项目”本身预期极不明朗（而想要终止项目）的人，和想要随着奥本海默一起打开潘多拉魔盒的人，两派之间的矛盾使整个项目计划处于危在旦夕。这些场景会让观众看到诺兰是怎样娴熟地运用声音和视觉手段去表现情感（当然，他的摄影师老搭档霍伊特·范·霍伊特马（Hoyte van Hoytema）和作曲家路德维希·戈尔松的配乐提供了巨大帮助）；怎样将复杂的想法藏在人物的行为之中，然后反过来又呈现在电影里；怎样通过神级剪辑及构图将枯燥无味抑或华而不实的桥段化腐朽为神奇的。诺兰是一位真正的电影人，他是大银幕艺术家，银幕越大他做得越好。

尽管从出境时长和表演效果来看，演员们的表演总体上已是全面（而无可挑剔）的。整场电影的镜头调度仍就再次为我们展现了诺兰作为一个伟大导演调教和指导演员的本事。不仅仅是墨菲，尽管他之前曾在电影“黑暗骑士”中和诺兰有过合作，他演绎的奥本海默远远超越了许多传记片中，主角（生搬硬套地）还原历史人物生平那种常规表演。还有马特达蒙，他和墨菲之间的唇枪舌剑让观众仿佛在看神经剧一样（既让人目不暇接，又充满了机智讽刺）。小罗伯特·唐尼饰演原子能委员会主席刘易斯·施特劳斯（Lewis Strauss），（因一次听证会）认为奥本海默没把他放在眼里，而在战后把他对奥本海默的私人恩怨上升到对奥本海默的“血海深仇”。（毫不夸张地说，唐尼在电影中完成了他职业生涯最精彩的表演之一。）而加里·奥德曼（Gary Oldman）饰演哈里·s·杜鲁门（Harry S. Truman）总统，仅用总统办公室内发生的一幕变活灵活现地刻画出了美国总统的混蛋形象。

还有弗洛伦斯·皮尤、艾米丽·布朗特、本尼·萨夫迪、乔什·哈内特、拉米·马利克、肯尼斯·布拉纳、凯西·阿弗莱克、杰森·克拉克、马修·摩丁、奥利维亚·蒂尔比、戴恩·德哈恩、奥尔登·埃伦里奇……事实上，列出谁不在奥本海默的名单会更快。诺兰曾说过，他想让演员们饰演的角色菱角分明，这样观众就能更容易地认出谁是谁。同时他也给了他们自由发挥的空间，无论是电影中的一分钟还是大部分时间。但是，考虑到有那么多人物交谈、阅读、讲课、审讯、对大规模杀伤性的道德问题束手无策和深思熟虑的场景，演员们也必须像他们的指挥一样让事情顺利进行。

Oppenheimer peaks with the Trinity test, a roughly10-minute sequence that follows the lead-up to the detonation of the first atomic bomb, its blast, and the sense of shock and awethat greets this game-changing “gadget.” Soon after, we see Oppenheimer addressing his fellow scientists about their victory, and he’s greeted withvisions of blinding lights, burnt corpses, and empty bleachers. It’s a climactic gut punch… and there’s still another hour or so to go. Which leads us to the less-than-stellar aspects of Nolan’s A-list A-bomb-creator’s origin story. Threaded in between the race against time to craft this killing machine prototype are recreationsof a 1954 tribunal over renewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance, in light of the Soviets now having their own nuclear weapons, and a 1959 congressional hearing on Strauss’s bid to join President Eisenhower’s cabinet. It’s here that we get flashback glimpses of the physicist’s career before Los Alamos, his tenureat UC Berkeley, his marriage to Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer, his attempt to reconcile what he’s unleashedon the world and what turns out to be a contentious relationship with Strauss.

It’s also where the movie starts to waver in terms of storytelling, cutting back and forth to create a tapestry of the 20th century that’s meant to enrichthe scenes of science being used and abused in the name of warfare(Nolan’s politics are a moving target in this film, as they are in much of his work, though it’s safe to say he’s solidlyanti-nukes here). They end up drawing both the focus and the momentum away from the movie, even if they do flesh some aspects out and give Downey a primo showcase. You suddenly become more aware of Nolan’s tendency to favor giant compositions and conceptual overreaches over connecting narrative dots in certain places, which has been a longstanding criticism. There are some questionablebits of business that play out as well. It’s one thing to let Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, whose Communist affiliation would still haunt J. Robert decades after their torrid affairended, to be the one who hands him the Sanskrit poem that would be his response to Trinity: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” It’s another tohave her do it while she’s writing toplesson top of him, which is… a choice. And the less said about her and Murphygetting hot and heavy during an interrogation-session hallucination, the better - we can now say that sex scenes are not Nolan’s forte.

As those two trials intertwineand paint a picture of Oppenheimer as both McCarthy-era martyr and, ultimately, the victor over Strauss’s smear campaign during the movie’s last act, there’s a slight sensation of listening to wind blowing through torn sails. In attempting to get a 360-degree picture of his subject’s life and times on as big a scale as possible, it feels as if Nolan occasionally loses sight of the big picture as a whole. Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens. Nolan has made what can sometimes feel like a maddeningly elusive attempt to make a grand statement about then and now, only to continually drown himself out in the technical equivalent of the Zimmer Honk. He’s also given us one of the only movies of the summer that you really have to see.

“三位一体试验”将整部电影逐渐推向高潮，将近10分钟的片段概括了世界上第一颗原子弹的准备、爆炸的全过程以及这个改变了游戏规则的“小玩意儿”给世人带来的震撼和敬畏。很快，奥本海默便开始向科学界的同行们讲述他们的胜利，而充斥在他自己脑海中的影像却是炫目的光、烧焦的尸体、空荡荡的露天看台。电影在奥本海默备受煎熬的内心戏中达到了高潮，然而继续用大约一个小时的时长为我们讲述了这位大名鼎鼎的“原子弹制造者”人生中并不光鲜亮丽的一面。在争分夺秒地制造这台杀人机器原型机这一主线剧情之中，电影穿插着重现了两场重要的会议：一是1954年（原子能机构内部）针对是否延长奥本海默的安全许可身份而进行的特别审查会，而是1959年施特劳斯申请加入艾森豪威尔总统内阁的国会听证会。也就是在这个过程中，我们得以瞥见这个物理学家在洛斯阿拉莫斯基地之前的种种，他在加州伯克利大学的任教经历，他和Kitty（艾米丽勃朗特扮演）的婚姻，他在把原子弹带给世人后又试图去平衡原子弹给世人带来的威胁，以及他和Strauss针尖对麦芒般的敌对关系。

电影从这里开始在叙事上摇摆不定，镜头来回切换，以便在这幅展现20世纪的画卷上尽可能多地描绘科学是怎么打着战争的旗号而被利用和滥用的（就像他的其他作品，诺兰在这部电影中的政治立场同样是飘忽不定的，唯有一点可以确定：反对核武器。）。这样就导致电影主次不够分明、后劲儿不足。尽管电影又通过一些细节刻画丰富了主线剧情，并且给了唐尼一个绝佳的舞台充分展现其演技。在这一刻，就出现了“诺兰式电影”的另一面，你会突然意识到诺兰总喜欢在电影架构和概念上玩儿花活，反而忽视了在剧本叙事逻辑上下功夫，这也是他一直以来被人所诟病的点。电影中还有一些桥段让人觉得有些跳脱。比如Florence Pugh饰演的琼·塔特洛克（Jean Tatlock），她和奥本海默有过一段火热的私情，而在这段感情结束后的数年间，Jean的美共身份给奥本海默带来的影响却久久无法散去。其中第一个尬点就是：（在后面的剧情里）奥本海默引用博伽梵歌里的诗句：“此时此刻我变成了死神，世界的毁灭者。”来回应“三位一体”试验，（我）并不能理解为什么一定要安排Jean对奥本海默说出这句诗；第二个尬点就是：Jean对奥本海默写出这句诗的场景被安排在了她袒胸露乳地和奥本海默翻云覆雨的时候。嗯....也许诺兰就想这么表现吧！还有，在对奥本海默的特别审查会上，为了把他俩当初欲火焚身的情景扒光了展示给大家的片段，还是短一点更好。总之，诺兰真的不擅长表现性爱镜头。

在电影的最后一幕，两场听证会交织在一起，共同刻画了奥本海默作为麦肯锡主义殉道者，同时又是摧毁斯特劳斯的“猎巫行动”的胜利者的双重形象，颇有一种“千山鸟飞绝，万径人踪灭。三十功名尘与土，八千里路云和月。”的感受。诺兰在整部电影中试图用尽可能宏大的影像全方位为观众呈现奥本海默的一生以及那个激情燃烧的年代，但还是有部分镜头时不时地游离在这幅恢弘巨制之外。《奥本海默》绝对是那种野心勃勃的电影，惊心动魄的同时让人云里雾里，高能烧脑的同时让人眼花缭乱，目不暇接的同时又让人意犹未尽。《奥本海默》又是这样一部电影，它会让人联想到过去那些很难让人看进去的超越时代的长篇巨制，从《烽火赤焰万里情》到《太空先锋》。《奥本海默》是一部成年人拍给成人向的电影，但又给人一种通常在青年向电影中才能看到的快节奏和压迫感。诺兰试图对过往和现在做一个宏大的陈述，但这种尝试有时让人无法形容，琢磨不透，结果就是不断地把自己淹没在“汉斯季默式”的音效声中。（不管怎么说），他还是为我们带来了一部今年夏天为数不多值得你掏钱买票的电影。