Handsomely shot by Vilmos Zsigmond and directed well enough by Roland Joffé, Fat Man and Little Boy falls into the trap of the mainstream film about a complicated and politically loaded subject - it has to waste too much effort making sure the mental 8 year-olds in the audience know what's going on. That doesn't leave enough time to be more than superficial. The script touches a lot of bases but avoids making up its mind about any of the issues involved, and the final third of the film is a painfully self-important series of arguments about lofty moral questions.

The Manhattan project is such a tough story to tell as entertainment, perhaps Fat Man and Little Boy is about as good as it can get. It's terribly easy to follow, with voiceovers reading from diaries and war news coming out of Public Address systems as in the lame Swing Shift. The science never gets any farther than the idea of a controlled implosion instead of a cannon, illustrated of course by a scientist squeezing an orange so we all get the idea. There's a heck of a good illustration of what a bad nuclear accident can do, but in general we discover that great scientific advances are created by putting a bunch of eggheads into a confined space and worrying a lot.

The arguments pro and against using the bomb get a massive workout here, with some scientists putting forth a petition for a demonstration instead of a direct attack on Japan. Fat Man and Little Boy gets the basics right: A lot of the Europeans contributed to the project for fear that Hitler would get the bomb first, but then questioned why it had to be built when Germany fell and Japan was near defeat anyway. That one's going to be argued forever.

The script for this film puts all the info of 50 years' worth of historical hindsight and disclosures into the conflict, and still opts for a "Gee, wasn't it a puzzle?" conclusion. Oppenheimer's unhappy wife Kitty (Bonnie Bedelia) thinks the boys at work are too busy trying to kill things. The Army chants rhetoric about the untold losses expected in the invasion of Japan, but seemingly wants the bomb dropped because they want the Japanese to rue the day they ever attacked the U.S. They also aren't keen on explaining where two billion taxpayer dollars went, if it didn't "win the war." (Gee, today nobody worries about 50 billion.) Oppenheimer breaks the stalemate by arguing that a nuclear demonstration for the Japanese observers could fail and make invasion even more difficult.

Fat Man and Little Boy is a very liberal picture that paints the birth of the bomb as a bad thing but is too chicken to say what made it bad, i.e., the post-war politics that turned the country into a Cold War furnace of fear and aggression. The picture refuses to acknowledge that Oppenheimer was truly left-leaning - we get scientists playing a Russian tune on a piano but professor O. is painted as a moral elitist who left his heart with his mistress in San Francisco, Natasha Richardson. Nowhere is there a hint of espionage going on, when General Groves probably did have reason to be concerned about a group of super-intellectuals whose ultimate loyalty was to humanity and not the U.S. of A. Their anti-attack petition is cruelly squelched by the brass, and Oppenheimer too, after Groves uses mild blackmail.

To really cook the stew, Fat Man and Little Boy creates a martyr to liberal decency in the John Cusack character. Everything about his romance with Laura Dern is above criticism performance-wise, except maybe the weird behavior of doctor Frazier (Peter de Silva), who seems to prefer a chimpanzee to Dern. Cusack's Merriman character is the picture's liberal conscience, writing a diary for Dad explaining his war service, and serving as the courier for the peace petition from the "radical" scientificos in Chicago. Merriman is set up for tragedy by the familiar war-movie cliché of openly talking about his great future with nurse Laura. Then he gets a massive exposure to plutonium, works out his own doom in a chalkboard equation and starts to plump like a hot dog in a microwave - frying from the inside out. It's pretty scary to contemplate a horrible sunburn, not just on the skin but in every tissue throughout one's entire body ...

I've read that the terrible nuclear accident that this is based on actually happened a year after the war. Placing it here serves the message of the story by keeping the successful first bomb test from being a jubilant occasion. Cutting the final bomb preparations in parallel with Merriman's awful suffering unfairly taints the test as an equally sick tragedy. The injection of too much art turns some stories turn into propaganda.

History takes over and the future of Oppenheimer and Groves is dismissed in quick text blurbs, a la American Graffiti, as if we already know what happened to them. The post-war race toward nuclear barbarism shoved Groves aside as bigger hawks horned in on the Army's newest toy; Oppenheimer was crucified for being a moral man when anything less than rabid patriotism was considered traitorous.

Those stories are just too controversial to be told in movie form, as any read of the facts would betray a bias - there's no way to be "fair and even" when discussing someone like Edward Teller, who took over from Oppenheimer. We dig our way through contradictory histories about this era and still have to wonder what the truth was. There seem to be two parallel truths about the subject in today's split America - the military version and the Atomic Cafe version. I certainly don't know which is real, as I can only read the same things everyone else can.

Fat Man and Little Boy doesn't have enough of a point of view to get us excited, incensed or eager to learn more. Oliver Stone may be a revisionist pain in the neck, but he at least inspired some good arguments.

There's a lot of good acting here, but it's all proscribed by the script. Newman's crusty, Godfearing general is a moral fellow for whom victory national and personal are inseparable. Dwight Schultz never comes into focus as a full personality, perhaps because the real Oppenheimer was too complex. He struts like an academic playboy and seethes with moral indignation, but as played it just looks like he wants to make his bomb, blow something up and go home. The ending with him receiving accolades for the successful test comes off as the wrong note for a guy who quoted apocalyptic Indian poetry during the blast. Instead we see The Sorcerers Apprentice in concert (gee, are these guys working for the Devil?) and hear the Nutcracker Suite during the countdown. Are deez classikal elusions?

I was amused by Oppenheimer's face distorting as the bomb went off, clearly achieved by blasting compressed air into his face while a hellish light reflects in his goggles. And this before the shock wave hits. The detonation is all similarly stylized, with a gaudy special effects explosion. Strangely, it's less impressive than a scratchy stock shot of the real thing would have been.

The box cover artwork skips the two hanging bomb prototypes, Fat Man and Little Boy that are given graphic emphasis throughout the film. This is artistic license gone nuts, as the movie makes it look as though the final shapes for the bombs were determined before the scientists knew exactly how they were going to function. All the explanations for why the bombs were dropped (when the Japanese were suing for surrender) pale before the simple evidence of the two prototypes - besides dramatically showing the world who had the ultimate big stick, the Army most likely wanted to compare the killing results of two different bomb mechanisms.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Fat Man and Little Boy rates:
Movie: Good -
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: none
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: May 2, 2004