MOVIE REVIEW : Making of the Atomic Nightmare

As the first atomic bomb roars to life in “Fat Man and Little Boy” (citywide), we see a chilling image, as horrific in its way as the roiling cloud overhead: project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, his mouth an opened O, the flesh of his face rippling like a sheet of rubber from the bomb’s air blast, twin yellow fireballs reflected in his black goggles.

This is the “mad scientist,” late 20th-Century-style; the cornerstone image of the film and director Roland Joffe’s cyanide-capsule comment on the intellectual tempted into playing God.

With co-writer Bruce Robinson, Joffe understandably sees this temptation as one with irrevocable consequences for the planet. But while his film makes that point with the fullest poignance, it also takes until its last quarter to gather its power, and its poetic eye is paired with a flat voice and an oddly tin ear.

It’s Gen. Leslie Groves (Paul Newman), a hefty, politically conservative engineer who becomes the unlikely Devil to Oppenheimer’s Faust. Not one to be argued with, Groves picks Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz) to head the Manhattan Project because he suspects the man’s genius and chooses to ignore Army counterintelligence warnings about the scientist’s left-wing background. Sports, Groves once conceded to an interviewer, were the only things he could see that Oppenheimer didn’t know everything about.

Newman and Schultz are arrestingly matched and not playing the title characters (Little Boy was the code name of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945, and Fat Man was the Nagasaki bomb, dropped three days later). Schultz’s “Oppie,” charismatic from his first exchange with Groves, is a believably complicated figure, a commanding, prideful, prickly egghead. It’s said that his style and his skill at the romantic gesture also made him irresistible to women, a quality harder to see. Oppie’s wife, Kitty (Bonnie Bedelia), and mistress, Jean Tatlock (Natasha Richardson), go through their own form of hell for him, but we’re never exactly sure why.

Newman’s Groves, unconvincing only at being bulky, is far from Oppenheimer’s disdainful appraisal of him as a meatball and a cipher. In an entirely different way, Groves is equally commanding, the sort of man who can say--and believe--that God is on the side of the bomb-builders. And in the film, he is the steam that drives the engine of Oppenheimer’s darkest ambitions. It’s one of Newman’s biggest stretches and most complex achievements.

The film cuts background explanations short, so that after Groves checks with Chicago-based nuclear physicist Leo Szilard (Gerald Hiken)--reduced here to a waggish bit role in the bathtub--to learn whether such a weapon could even be created, the focus quickly shifts to Los Alamos, built almost under our eyes. There, the Oppenheimer-picked team of physicists, biochemists and mathematicians, and their families, are literally isolated, and Groves’ strict code of secrecy and the scientists’ habits of sharing each discovery communally clash almost daily.

Along with the towering figures of the project--the Tellers, the Fermis, et al., whom we meet offhandedly as “Edward” or “Enrico,” and really never get to know as individuals--there is a fictitious pair, young Michael Merriman (John Cusack, supposedly a composite of several scientists) and an outspokenly dove-ish nurse, Kathleen Robinson (Laura Dern). Put there clearly to be the film’s young lovers-in-optimism, they are fine actors who give sweetness and reality to characters of the purest papier-mache.

Like the bomb itself, stirring to life over years, the film comes to life slowly. The push and pull of Groves and Oppenheimer remains the fascination of the story, but between them and the frustrations in bomb-building, the rest of the characters have to be content with little scraps of scenes. That’s especially hard when you have an actress like Bedelia, whose presence and complexities make you want to see more, not less of her. (Incidentally, showing Kitty Oppenheimer glowingly pregnant, then just as glowingly thin again, without explanation, is a terrible mistake. Birth? Death? Trauma? Diapers? Directors shouldn’t do this; audiences worry, even subliminally.)

There is tension throughout the movie, but its last quarter contains the film’s real philosophical meat, the moral dilemma of some of the scientists about whether, in the wake of V-E Day, the bomb they have raced to build should ever be detonated, even as a threat. To make this quandary immediate to us--here before August, 1945--the writers have created a lab accident that exposes one of the young scientists to a lethal dose of radiation, then intercut his agonies with preparations for the pre-dawn test in the desert. (There was a real accident, but it came after the war ended, and the length of time it took that scientist to die was more extended.)

This barefaced device does exactly what it’s meant to: No one seeing this suffering can help but multiply this young man by 200,000--the number of Japanese dead in both blasts. It might possibly be considered a forgivable invention.

But another, almost throwaway statistic, delivered by John McGinley’s doctor, that the government has been “injecting the old and mentally ill with plutonium” at Oak Ridge is more electrifying and harder to authenticate. It’s not mentioned in the bible on the subject, Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” and in a New York Times interview last week, Rhodes was quoted as being “bothered” by the scene because he “doubted that it happened.”

Ironically, that last statistic is actually extraneous. Remove it, and the last 20 minutes of “Fat Man and Little Boy” still qualify as civilization’s most authentic nightmare. Whatever his film’s contrivances as it builds, with this closing, Joffe has made a permanent contribution to our national insomnia.