Fat Man and Little Boy
by Roland Joffé
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DVD details
Actor: Bonnie Bedelia, Dwight Schultz, John Cusack, Laura Dern, Paul NewmanDirector: Roland Joffé
Cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond
Writer: Roland Joffé
Editor: Françoise Bonnot
Producer: John Calley
Producer: Kimberly Cooper
Producer: Tony Garnett
Writer: Bruce Robinson
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); English (Original Language); French (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Digital Sound, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Surround Sound, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.77:1
Running Time: 127 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-04-27
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Paramount
DVD Reviews of Fat Man and Little Boy
DVD Review: Some fine moments trapped in a poor film
Summary: 2 Stars
There are few surer signs of failure on an epic scale, both financially and artistically, than a film changing its title when it is released outside the USA, and so it proves with Roland Joffe's clumsy Fat Man and Little Boy, a would-be epic retelling of the development of the Atom Bomb that crept out into the smallest screens in a handful European cinemas as Shadow Makers when no-one was looking. It's the kind of film where you can see how it could have been excellent, but it remains an infuriating mixture of the good and the bad: some striking imagery gets lost amid some more mundane filmmaking, good performers struggle with cardboard characters and risible dialogue (even Paul Newman visibly squirms when required to deliver "[...] If my primadonnas don't deliver, you are looking at a piece of dead meat!") while the weaker cast members flounder and even Ennio Morricone's score alternates between routine by-the-numbers scoring and the odd moment of inspiration like the truly haunting final elegy.
The chief culprit is Bruce Robinson and Joffe's script, which broadly tells the story and raises the moral dilemmas in what is too often the tritest and most clichéd of fashions, giving the film a feeling of a D-movie script that somehow got A-list production values lavished on it in the hope that they'd distract audiences from the dramatic deficiencies. Much criticised at the time for only showing a single American victim of radiation (a lab accident that actually happened after the bombs were dropped but moved forward for dramatic purposes), it's not the only deviation from history - Oppenheimer's wife, a scientist in her own right, becomes a stereotypical cuckolded lush, for example, while the `Chevalier incident,' when Oppenheimer was unsuccessfully approached by a fellow communist to pass nuclear secrets on to Russia, is curiously ignored beyond a brief elliptical line of dialogue - but the problem is less one of accuracy than that the dramatic license taken doesn't result in a great deal of drama.
There's great potential for conflict between the idealistic chief scientist Robert Oppenheimer, who tries to convince himself he's merely working on a technical problem, and the practical General Groves, who sees the potential political power of `the device,' and the film does acknowledge the manipulation and mind games needed to keep the disparate scientists focussed on the project rather than the moral implications of their actions, but the film rarely makes anything play half as well as it should. Joffe's usual sledgehammer subtlety even has Groves watching a performance of The Sorcerer's Apprentice to hammer home the point just in case the audience missed what the characters have been talking endlessly about for the preceding hour-and-a-half. Moments do stand out - the ominous shadows of the bombs that gave the film its original title in an aircraft hanger, a blazing row with John McGinley's doctor, the shockwave from a strikingly recreated test blast distorting the faces of onlookers and Oppenheimer's moment of triumph freeze-framed into something more uncertain and horribly aware - and the film does finally pick up some dramatic momentum in the last third, but too often it just furrows ground that's been raked over to better effect by television many times before.
Turning down Harrison Ford in favor of The A-Team's Dwight Schultz to play Oppenheimer was a brave move, but one that doesn't quite pay off: he's good, but not good enough to really carry a picture with this many flaws, though the real surprise is how terrible Paul Newman is as General Groves for much of the time, overplaying the bluster but only ever convincing in his quieter moments of exasperation at the scientific mindset and morality. But his performance really only follows the general tone of a fatally uncertain movie that swings between crude bombast and good intentions. There's enough about it that does work to keep you watching, but not enough to really grab you, and for one of the biggest stories of the 20th Century that's not really good enough.
No extras on the DVD but an acceptable 2.35:1 widescreen transfer.
Description of Fat Man and Little Boy
Despite the combined star power in front of and behind the camera, Fat Man and Little Boy is a largely tepid retelling of the history of the Manhattan Project, the atomic testing project that led to the U.S. bombing of Japan during World War II (said bombs were dubbed "Fat Man" and "Little Boy"). The Nevada-based project is headed by General Leslie R. Groves (a testy Paul Newman) and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz of the TV series The A-Team), who later regretted his cooperation in the project. The problem with the film lies not with the acting, which includes solid performances by Bonnie Bedelia, Laura Dern, John Cusack, and future U.S. Senator Fred Dalton Thompson, but with the script by director Roland Joffé and Bruce Robinson (Withnail and I and Joffé's The Killing Fields). A subject as morally complex as the creation of a supreme weapon requires a strong and thoughtful script, but Fat Man and Little Boy never gets further than establishing that indeed, atomic power is something to reckon with. Joseph Sargent's 1989 made-for-TV film Day One, with Brian Dennehy as Groves and David Straithairn as Oppenheimer, covers the same story with twice the depth and avoids the pitfall of a romantic subplot (Oppenheimer's dalliance with a communist played by Natasha Richardson), which this film stumbles into. Cusack's doomed scientist is actually a combination of two real-life physicists, Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotkin, who died from radiation poisoning, albeit long after V-J Day. --Paul GaitaBestsellers in DVD
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