This doc on an operatic ode is an Atomic bomb

Like a flimsy target town thrown together on a test site, the subject of this documentary—John Adams and Peter Sellar’s opera Dr. Atomic—is completely blown away by the power of radioactive material. As audiences learn here, the fascinating “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer “had no patience for opera,” and it’s hard to believe that many will have any patience for Adams and Sellar’s perplexingly pretentious take on one of the most significant events of the 20th century.

Ultimately, the composer and director are obliterated by Oppenheimer himself, who proves absolutely arresting in black-and-white archival interviews intercut with color contemporary footage chronicling the efforts of a highly trained—and, at times, highly confused—cast’s struggle to inject anything approximating human emotion into what is essentially an assemblage of declassified government reports. “It might as well be in Russian,” grumbles Kristine Jepson, who played Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, in Dr. Atomic’s world premiere at the San Francisco Opera in 2005.

As the film points out, there is an essential dichotomy in our perceptions of the nuclear weaponry whose development Oppenheimer spearheaded as the director of the Manhattan Project. On the one hand, the mushroom cloud was the nightmarish harbinger of the Cold War, but it was also an iconic image imbued with a deadly beauty that is almost, yes, operatic in its grandeur.

And plutonium was—and is—not only so radioactive as to be toxic, but also so rare as to be precious. Unfortunately for the capable creative team behind Wonders Are Many, the side of the equation that proves the most memorable here is the toxicity of Sellars, whose shrill attempts to make something precious out of clunky faux poetry barely removed from scientific jargon ultimately bring to mind the jokey atomic symbol that one of the first scientists to produce and isolate plutonium managed to sneak onto the periodic table: “Pu.”

Distributor: Actual Films
Cast: John Adams, Peter Sellars and J. Robert Oppenheimer
Director/Screenwriter: Jon Else
Producers: Bonni Cohen and Jon Else
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 94 min.