What the hit biopic gets right - and wrong - about the American Prometheus. Photo / Universal Pictures
What the hit biopic gets right - and wrong - about the American Prometheus. Photo / Universal Pictures
By now, you’ve no doubt seen Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece about the life of J Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who was responsible for developing the first atomic bomb, as part of the Manhattan Project. Not only has it been a box office smash hit, but it has also attracted rave reviews from critics falling over themselves to praise Nolan’s combination of cerebral insight and pulse-racing thrills.
Yet, inevitably, Hollywood and factual accuracy always make uneasy companions. Although Nolan is an unusually exacting and conscientious filmmaker - and Oppenheimer is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the physicist, American Prometheus – there have already been grumblings and suggestions that some of the film’s most eye-catching and striking moments and scenes have been invented. But which ones display cinematic licence, and which ones are based - however incredibly - on fact?
Did Oppenheimer really poison his tutor’s apple?
Early on, there is a striking scene in which a young Oppenheimer, then a student at Cambridge, injects the professor Patrick Blackett’s apple with cyanide, in a fit of fury after Blackett causes him to miss part of a lecture by Niels Bohr (who later became a mentor of sorts to the physicist). It’s a striking scene - and bears a coincidental resemblance to the death of another brilliant, troubled man, Alan Turing, who died after supposedly eating a cyanide-laced apple. But according to Oppenheimer’s grandson Charles, it’s pure invention.
“The part I like the least is this poison apple reference,” he told Time. If you read American Prometheus carefully enough, the authors say, ‘We don’t really know if it happened... There’s no record of him trying to kill somebody.’ That’s a really serious accusation and it’s historical revision. There’s not a single enemy or friend of Robert Oppenheimer who heard that during his life and considered it to be true.”
Yet both American Prometheus and Raymond J Monk’s 2012 biography of Oppenheimer suggest that the incident occurred. As Monk writes: “In what looks like an attempt to murder his tutor, or at the very least to make him seriously ill, Oppenheimer left on Blackett’s desk an apple poisoned with toxic chemicals”.
The author notes that it became part of the Oppenheimer myth: “The incident was hushed up at the time, and none of his friends knew about it until they were told of it by Oppenheimer himself, usually in some more or less misleading version. That his feelings toward Blackett mixed fervent admiration with fierce jealousy, however, was obvious to those who knew him well.”
Monk suggests that, somehow, his actions were discovered, but he was allowed to continue his studies in exchange for agreeing to be seen by a psychiatrist on Harley Street. Had he been expelled from Cambridge, or imprisoned, then a seismic career would have been curtailed before it began.
One moment in the film, however, is pure cinematic invention, according to Monk. “I think we can be fairly sure that Niels Bohr did not pick up the apple and that Oppenheimer did not smack it out of his hand,” he says. Even Nolan is not immune from the temptation of fabrication for its own sake.
Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Was Jean Tatlock murdered?
One of Oppenheimer’s most intriguing characters is Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, a Communist Party member who was romantically involved with Oppenheimer before, and during, his marriage to Kitty. Although she is only in the film for a relatively short time, she makes a substantial impression - not least in the depiction of her suicide in January 1944, when, under surveillance by the FBI for her political sympathies and suffering from clinical depression, she took barbiturates and drowned herself in the bathtub.
The presence of a suicide note - “I think I would have been a liability all my life - at least I could take away the burden of a paralysed soul from a fighting world,” it read in part - seemed to make it clear that she wished for her own end, and the inquest recorded a verdict of suicide, motive unknown.
However, Nolan provocatively includes a scene - depicted as a vision, or fantasy, of Oppenheimer’s - of a gloved hand, belonging to an unknown person, pushing Jean’s head under the water. This might be seen simply as artistic licence, were it not for the fact that this alludes to a well-known conspiracy theory suggesting that Jean’s political views, and involvement with the director of the Manhattan Project, made her dangerous, and therefore expendable to the greater good.
This theory has been bolstered by the fact that her body contained chloral hydrate when she died; combined with barbiturates, this meant that she had what might be called a “Mickey Finn” in her system - a non-fatal dose of drugs that would immobilise her, before she was forcibly drowned. As American Prometheus records one doctor saying: “If you were clever and wanted to kill someone, this is the way to do it.”
The release of Nolan’s film has overshadowed an earlier picture on the same subject, Roland Joffe’s Fat Man and Little Boy, but that film’s co-screenwriter Bruce Robinson - best known for writing and directing the seminal Withnail and I - became convinced that Tatlock had been murdered, and that the public records of her autopsy were, in his words, “an inadequate invention”.
As Robinson said to the writer Alistair Owen in his collection of interviews Smoking in Bed: “Piece by piece we get to the point where, had I been the cop, I would have made the arrest. The G2/FBI people had her murdered. They gave her chloral hydrate to knock her out, slung her in the bathtub, faked a note, and within a day or two - because her father was a very prominent man in the Berkeley area - there are newspaper reports talking about Jean Tatlock’s suicide.”
Whatever the truth behind Tatlock’s death, Nolan’s film undeniably hints at a larger story than just a tragic self-inflicted demise - and undoubtedly will lead others to ask questions again, too.
Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, left and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Photo / Universal Pictures
Could the Trinity test really have ended the world?
Tatlock’s interest in the poetry of John Donne inspired Oppenheimer to name the first atomic bomb test “Trinity”, after Donne’s religious verse. Yet it was the fear of extinguishing the planet, rather than poetic contemplation, that leads Matt Damon’s General Groves to ask Oppenheimer in the film what the chances of global annihilation are. “Near zero,” the physicist replies. In one of the picture’s lighter moments, Groves’s horror at this revelation leads Oppenheimer to say “What do you want from theory alone?” The military man replies: “Zero would be nice.”
The “atmospheric ignition” scenario that the film suggests was a genuine fear of many scientists, including Oppenheimer’s colleague Edward Teller, who worried that the splitting of the atom would lead to a chain reaction that would destroy the world. But by the time the Trinity test took place, it was universally accepted that such a seismic occurrence was impossible.
As Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, commented to the Washington Post: “This thing has been blown out of proportion over the years. The question on the scientists’ minds before the test wasn’t, ‘Is it going to blow up the world?’ It was, ‘Is it going to work at all?’”
The conversation between Groves and Oppenheimer is therefore a moment of dramatic licence on Nolan’s part that effectively dramatises the concerns that the military - who were funding the operation - had, but the major worry was that of the test succeeding, rather than its causing the apocalypse.
Alfred Eisenstaedt - Albert Einstein & J. Robert Oppenheimer, Princeton University, 1947 pic.twitter.com/IOcC6RmZsM
Did Oppenheimer and Einstein’s final exchange happen?
A recurring motif throughout the film, and one only fully explained at its climax, is an encounter between Einstein and Oppenheimer when the latter becomes a senior figure at Princeton, under the auspices of his future nemesis Lewis Strauss. The meeting between the two men - misinterpreted by Strauss, who self-aggrandisingly assumed that they were criticising him - shows a mournful Einstein suggesting that Oppenheimer’s invention of the atomic bomb could have destroyed the world, and Oppenheimer replying: “I believe we did.”
This is, of course, an invention of Nolan’s that elegantly portrays both the shared values and the differences between the two men. But they certainly knew each other in real life, first meeting in 1932 at the California Institute of Technology, and then working together at Princeton after the war, where Oppenheimer remained until 1966. The two men were respectful colleagues rather than intimate friends, and Bird and Sherwin suggest that the younger man saw Einstein “as a living patron saint of physics, not a working scientist”.
Nonetheless, Einstein respected Oppenheimer, calling him “an unusually capable man of many-sided education”, and later defended him when his security clearance was threatened, saying publicly that “I admire him not only as a scientist but also as a great human being” and privately that “the trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him - the United States Government.”
Oppenheimer returned the compliment, saying in a lecture in 1965: “Einstein is also, and I think rightly, known as a man of very great goodwill and humanity. Indeed, if I had to think of a single word for his attitude towards human problems, I would pick the Sanskrit word Ahinsa, not to hurt, harmlessness.” Although Einstein had written a letter to President Roosevelt that had convinced him of the necessity of developing an atomic programme, he was never involved in the Manhattan Project, and believed ultimately in the power of science as something to create - rather than to destroy.
President Harry S. Truman in 1952. Photo / AP
Did President Truman call Oppenheimer ‘a crybaby’?
In one of Oppenheimer’s most effective scenes, President Truman - as played by Nolan regular Gary Oldman - meets the physicist, ostensibly to congratulate him for his work on the Manhattan Project. But when Oppenheimer shows contrition for his involvement in the project and suggests he has blood on his hands, Truman sardonically waves a handkerchief at him, before remarking, on Oppenheimer’s ejection from the Oval Office: “Don’t let that crybaby in here again.”
It seems almost on the nose, unlike much of the rest of the elegant script, but this is one instance where a dramatic confrontation is based on documented fact. Monk’s biographer attests to Truman referring to Oppenheimer as a “crybaby scientist” to his aides, and told his Secretary of State Dean Acheson that he never wished to see him again.
While this is contracted into one brief scene, with Oppenheimer overhearing his dismissal, it is nonetheless true that Truman was angered by the scientist’s principled objection. “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have,” he was recorded saying. “You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”
This image released by Universal Pictures shows filmmaker Christopher Nolan on the set of Oppenheimer. Photo / AP
Was Kyoto not bombed because a politician went on honeymoon there?
In a moment that epitomises the mixture of horror and black comedy that defined much of the Manhattan Project, the US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, deciding where will be legitimate targets for the atomic bombs to be dropped, suggests that Kyoto should be spared, partly because of its cultural and historical significance to Japan - but also, Stimson says cheerfully, because he and his wife honeymooned there.
The line - which was suggested by James Remar, the actor who played Stimson - seems like the perfect encapsulation of institutional caprice. “It has this bureaucratic quality of a group of men discussing massive destruction and how they’re going to do these awful things.” Nolan has said. “And you’re suddenly seeing a human face to these negotiations.”
It is unclear whether Stimson went on honeymoon to Kyoto, let alone whether his personal affection for the city resulted in its near-arbitrary salvation. Yet it is documented fact that Stimson visited the city several times, when he served as Governor of the Philippines in the 1920s, and that he personally lobbied Truman not to bomb it.
The President was in agreement with him, as Stimson recorded in his diary on July 24, 1945. Truman, he wrote, “was particularly emphatic in agreeing with my suggestion that if elimination was not done, the bitterness which would be caused by such a wanton act might make it impossible during the long post-war period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that area rather than to the Russians”.
Yet others claim that, rather than Stimson or any other politician, the credit for saving Kyoto should instead go to the archaeologist and art historian Langdon Warner - one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones - who, in his role on the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archive section of the military, made a persuasive case against bombing Kyoto, along with Nara and Kamakura. To this end, monuments to Warner have been erected in Kyoto and Kamakura; a gesture of gratitude to a man who truly understood the awfulness of what would have happened if Japanese culture had been swept away by Oppenheimer’s invention.
Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Photo / Universal Pictures
Did Kitty testify on behalf of her husband at the security hearings?
Emily Blunt’s presence in the majority of Oppenheimer is slightly perplexing; for a film revolving mostly around men, the A-list star is largely limited to domestic scenes at home that show both her alcoholism and frustration with being sidelined to her husband’s work.
Yet she has a magnificent scene towards the end that will probably earn Blunt at least an Oscar nomination, when Kitty attends the security hearings and passionately both defends her husband and attacks their right to hold the quasi-kangaroo court that will eventually result in the withdrawal of his security clearance.
It’s largely drawn from the transcript of the hearings - as is much of this narrative thread - and shows Kitty as “forthright and unflustered”, as Bird and Sherwin suggest, and that “she acquitted herself easily, coolly and precisely answering each question”.
Rubbishing the idea that her and her husband’s previous association with the Communist Party might make them security risks, Oppenheimer’s biographers conclude that “Kitty did not give an inch. Not even [Roger] Robb [the attorney cross-examining at the hearing] could touch her. Calm and yet alert to every nuance, she was undoubtedly a better witness than the husband she was defending.”
This image released by Universal Pictures shows Cillian Murphy in a scene from "Oppenheimer." Photo / AP
Did Oppenheimer really learn Dutch in six weeks?
Early in the film, there is an amusing scene when Oppenheimer is about to give a lecture to a group of Dutch students. His colleague confidently expects that he will speak in English to widespread confusion, but instead Oppenheimer delivers a complex technical talk in fluent Dutch. When asked how long it took him to master the language, Oppenheimer replies “six weeks”.
This might seem like a piece of pure invention, designed to show off Oppenheimer’s savant-level brilliance, but it is entirely true; the physicist had a facility for mastering languages that enabled him to learn Dutch and Sanskrit in record time; reading the Bhagavad Gita in the latter was what led him to come out with his famous comment, after the success of the Trinity test, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds”. His friend Harold Cherniss paid tribute to his ability to get to grips with any intellectual challenge, saying: “When he became interested in anything, he very quickly picked up an enormous amount of knowledge about it.”
Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.
Did he follow a martini and cigarette diet?
Cillian Murphy’s brilliant performance as Oppenheimer is due, in part, to the naturally slim actor’s weight loss, which makes him look as intensely gaunt as the real-life man. Oppenheimer himself was only 127 pounds (not even 58kg) and failed an Army medical because he was considered too underweight to become an officer. At his most extreme, during the activity of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer’s weight dropped to a mere 115 pounds (52kg).
Bird and Sherwin wrote that “his energy level never flagged, but he seemed to be literally disappearing little by little, day after day.” He may not literally have lived off cigarettes and martinis, as the film suggests, but food was increasingly secondary to the more immediate stimulation provided by nicotine and alcohol; as one of his neighbours observed: “My God, if the man ate a thousand calories a day it was a miracle.”
Did Kitty Oppenheimer refuse to shake Edward Teller’s hand?
At the film’s conclusion, there is a powerful brief scene where, as an older and rehabilitated Oppenheimer is awarded the Femi Award at the White House, his friend-turned-Judas Edward Teller (who testified against him at the security hearings) offers his hand to shake. Oppenheimer does so, apparently without resentment or anger. But when Teller offers Kitty his hand in turn, she scowls furiously at him, and he withdraws it, abashed.
It might seem like a convenient piece of dramatic invention, but onlookers testified as to its accuracy, and offers confirmation - as if it were needed - that Kitty’s passion and anger were an invaluable foil to her husband’s cooler and more analytical temperament.
