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Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer has been praised and the grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the film's subject — enjoyed it with just one qualm to report.
Speaking to TIME, Charles Oppenheimer discussed Nolan's film at length. There's a scene early on in the film when the young physicist attempts to poison his professor via an apple. He ends up aborting the plan when Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), an unintended target, nearly eats it. Charles took issue with this scene he calls a “really serious accusation” and “historical revision.”
“The part I like the least is this poison apple reference, which was a problem in American Prometheus (the book Oppenheimer was based on),” Charles said. “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.”
He continued, “American Prometheus got it from some references talking about a spring break trip, and all the original reporters of that story—there was only two maybe three—reported that they didn't know what Robert Oppenheimer was talking about. Unfortunately, American Prometheus summarizes that as Robert Oppenheimer tried to kill his teacher and then they [acknowledge that] maybe there's this doubt.”
Later in the interview, Charles doubled down on his criticism of the apple scene in Oppenheimer. When asked if there was anything he would've advised against during the production of the film, he said, “I definitely would have removed the apple thing.”
However, he also recognized that it'd be hard to give an accomplished director such as Christopher Nolan advice. “But I can't imagine myself giving advice about movie stuff to Nolan. He's an expert, he's the artist, and he's a genius in this area,” Charles confessed. “But one amusing family story is that, if I invited myself to the set, they would entertain me coming, which I did twice. And so one time I visited the set in New Mexico. I saw them film and, in that particular scene, Cillian Murphy walks into a room and part of his line was calling someone an ‘asshole.' And when I went back to Santa Fe and told my dad, he was horrified. He said, ‘Robert Oppenheimer never swore. He was such a formal person. He would never, ever do that.' And I was like, ‘Well, it's a dramatization.' But I was worried that in the movie he would be this swearing, abusive guy. Anyway, I think he said one swear word in the movie and I just happened to be in the room. So there is a chance that if we had been consultants, we could have added some details and depth. But there's such a complete record. It was enough for Nolan to tell the story he intended to.”
