Most of this movie concentrates on the life of Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman (born in 1918), roughly from age twenty to twenty-seven. During this time he got his Ph.D. from Princeton and participated in the Manhattan Project. Also in that time frame he met and married Arline Greenbaum. There are a couple of scenes, with Feynman being around the age of six, that establish his inquiring mind and his relationship with his father, but the main thrust of the movie details the relationship between Richard and Arline.
Having read Feynman's books "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" and "What Do You Care What Other people Think," as well as having viewed several of his videos on YouTube, I felt that this movie did not capture what I perceive as Feynman's impishness and openness. Maybe this was because during the time period covered Feynman was dealing not only with his early career challenges but also with the serious health problems of Arline. I thought the movie did a good job of detailing how Feynman coped with the difficult conflict between his professional ambitions and his love and devotion to Arline.
I suppose most people's image of the 1940s comes from looking at bleached out color photos and videos from that time. Whoever decided on the lighting for this movie must have been under the impression that that is what things looked like at the time, since there seems to be some sepia-toned cast to much of the film. I suppose the desire was to add some sense of nostalgia for a past era, but I found the rather dark filming fosters an overall fogginess.
Feynman's academic career was glossed over with there being little desire to inform the audience as to what his scientific interests were. There was no mention of what his contributions were to the Manhattan Project, or why he was chosen to go to Los Alamos. There was some odd editing like the insertion early on of a hand tossing out small pieces of paper from atop a wooden post. After the atomic blast at Alamogordo there is a scene of Fermi doing some measurements of how the pieces of paper were scattered in order to estimate the power of the blast, but this was not made clear enough for most people to make the appropriate deduction. Also, the movie has Feynman looking at the atomic blast with unaided eyes which would have caused retinal burns.
The score tries to be manipulative, but winds up being intrusive. Every time there is a tender moment some sappy music is played.
I wish this movie could have given more of a hint of Feynman's being a witty, free-spirited genius, which I think he was.
