![]() His Iron Man exoskeleton now finally retired for good, Downey reminds us what a versatile and emotionally intelligent actor he has always been, while playing a character much colder and more calculating than the charming scamps of his youth. In what may be the most memorable performance in a movie full of bravura acting turns, Downey plays Strauss as a would-be power player driven nearly to madness by his own petty vanity and unrealized ambition. Strauss was a founding member and eventual chairman of the AEC who led the charge to bring down Oppenheimer, using the Red Scare paranoia of the McCarthy era to paint the scientist’s long-ago left-wing alliances as opportunities for Soviet espionage. The other timeline, presented in black and white, provides the view of Oppenheimer’s chief postwar antagonist, the shoe salesman turned political operative Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), as Strauss testifies at his own 1959 Senate confirmation hearings. This timeline is narrated via Oppenheimer’s near-verbatim testimony about his life story at a humiliating series of 1954 hearings in which he was stripped of his security clearance by the board of the Atomic Energy Commission after he objected to the planned development of an even more destructive weapon, the hydrogen bomb. One, presented in color, provides Oppenheimer’s view of his life, from the 1920s, when Oppenheimer was a troubled student in Europe, to the 1930s, when he ran in Berkeley’s left-wing circles while romancing the fiercely political Tatlock, and through the mid-1940s, when he directed the Manhattan Project’s central laboratory while living with his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), also a onetime Communist sympathizer. The story zigzags freely and sometimes confusingly among two main timelines. The film’s narrative chronology is so fragmented it seems to have taken its cue from the recurring image of a black field studded with swirling points of light, a seeming reference to both the starry night skies above Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the subatomic micro-events the Manhattan Project team is trying to observe and manipulate.
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