Fat Man and Little Boy Reviews

Despite the considerable creative and technical talents of those involved, FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY is slow, stilted, and stultifying. Paul Newman plays General Leslie Groves, the tough-minded career soldier who oversees the Manhattan Project, which was to create the atomic bomb. The liaison between scientists and military is physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz), whose left-leaning political past and affair with radical Jean Tatlock (Natasha Richardson) have brought him under constant government scrutiny. Ironically, Groves, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, finds himself in the position of defending Oppenheimer from his detractors. Besides the uneasy relationship between Groves and Oppenheimer, conflict arises when a group of the scientists advocate disbanding the project after the Allied victory in Europe (the project had been initiated in the belief that the Germans were working on their own atomic bomb). Despite the volatile potential of his material, director Roland Joffe (THE KILLING FIELDS, THE MISSION) fails to find a single engaging personality among the cast of characters, and, as a result, little genuine drama is generated. Newman manages to make his Gen. Groves at least periodically interesting, but Schultz's Oppenheimer is so bland he's boring. Regrettably, so is most of the rest of the cast. Bonnie Bedelia as Oppenheimer's wife, weaving through the turgid drama, martini glass in hand, gives the film's only wholly believable performance. Mainly the cast is done in by Robinson's script, which alternates some of the most insipid dialog to be found outside of a bad miniseries with an endless stream of soapbox speeches.