"Oppenheimer"

 My favorite kind of story is a crime story--I think because I know what it's like to make bad choices. I have deep love for Billy Bigelow--who decides on a life of theft as a way of supporting "my boy Bill." (Billy dies in a knife fight before his child is born.)

People can be sloppy, thoughtless, and weak, and still relatable; this is something that becomes clear in fiction and drama, over and over again.

So it's a brilliant choice to build a movie around J. Robert Oppenheimer. This guy is a criminal; we're aware within the first twenty minutes of the movie. He becomes enraged with a particular tutor, and, in a nod to the Bible, and to fairy tales, he poisons the tutor's apple. Hours later, he realizes what he has done, and he seizes the apple right before it kills a man--not the nefarious tutor, but an esteemed scientist who has wandered into the lab. Actions have unintended consequences: This is the blueprint for the entire film, in a five-minute interlude.

Again and again, Oppenheimer makes a mess. He is careless with his "bit on the side"; is this why she kills herself? He can't be bothered with fatherhood, so he quickly judges the depth of his wife's postpartum depression, hands the kid to a neighbor, and charges onward. He sets off a bomb in New Mexico--and he seems to forget that this test could have consequences for the Native American population clustered around the perimeter. He gives certain forms of technology to Truman--and then approximately 200,000 Japanese people die. But, without the bombs, the Japanese might have refused to surrender. Right? Or maybe this is just a comforting lie for America?

I liked this movie much more than "Barbie"--although I am a Greta Gerwig completist, and I will always tip my hat to "Frances Ha," "Maggie's Plan," and especially "Lady Bird."

I keep on thinking about Cillian Murphy.