NOW I AM BECOME BARBIE GIRL, DESTROYER OF BARBIE WORLD
MELTING PLASTIC, IT'S FANTASTIC
FALLOUT IN THE AIR, DESTRUCTION EVERYWHERE
ANNIHILATION, END OF ALL CREATION
...ahem. Anyway...
Oppenheimer (2023)
Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language
Score: 5 out of 5
Christopher Nolan is a very talented filmmaker who I have very mixed feelings about, and one who I think has been considerably overrated by film geeks of my generation who fixate on his successes and ignore his failures. On one hand, his Batman trilogy still holds up and has left a lasting mark on the character beyond just film, ensuring that his legacy in geek culture would be an enduring one even if he never made another movie. Inception, meanwhile, was a brilliant sci-fi thriller, and Dunkirk is one of the best war movies of the last ten years. What's more, his loving embrace of practical effects and old-fashioned storytelling is one that Hollywood could use more of in a time when it seems that bloated, CGI-fueled, franchise-baiting monstrosities are leading it down a road to ruin. On the other hand, his and Zack Snyder's attempts to apply The Dark Knight's deconstructionist approach to Superman with Man of Steel produced a movie that I didn't really like then and which has held up only worse with the hindsight of ten years of the DC Extended Universe, his sci-fi epic Interstellar was beautiful to look at but had a plot that went straight up its own ass and betrayed its pretensions towards "hard" science fiction, and while I did not see Tenet, his actions and public statements concerning the release of that film theatrically even during a pandemic struck me as pretentious to the point of callousness. What's more, he's popularized a rather annoying trend in sound mixing of trying to make audio more "realistic" that, in practice, means that dialogue often gets drowned out by ambient noise, especially during action scenes where there's a lot of loud noises going on in the background.
That said, while I believe that Nolan is ultimately human, I can also acknowledge that there's a reason why he's considered one of the best filmmakers working today. When he hits, he typically sends it out of the park. And Oppenheimer is Nolan at his best. He takes a three-hour historical biopic, one whose only real scene of spectacle is the Trinity test, and makes it feel like a three-hour epic. It has a sprawling, all-star cast and takes place over multiple time periods, often jumping back and forth between them as it needs to, but keeps its focus on a number of important threads in its subject's life in a manner that keeps it cohesive. The entire cast does amazing work, above all else longtime Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy as the title character, a man who slowly and then all at once starts to realize what his groundbreaking scientific work has unleashed on the world. This was not the sort of movie that had me checking my watch even with its great length; no, I was gripped the whole way through, all the way to its tragic conclusion as J. Robert Oppenheimer looks back on his life and tribulations and wonders if he will go down in history as the man who destroyed the world. It is a grim film, and knowing just the barest amount about the subject matter going in, there's a reason why my double feature of this film and Barbie had me watching this one first. But it is a worthwhile one, and one that I think will go down in history as a modern classic and one of Nolan's best.
Much of the film is told in flashbacks from the year 1954, as Oppenheimer is undergoing a security hearing to determine whether or not his Q clearance should be revoked due to suspicion that security leaks at Los Alamos National Laboratory under his watch may have enabled the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to take great strides forward on its own atomic weapons project. We start in the interwar period as Oppenheimer establishes himself as one of the world's leading nuclear physicists, continue through his establishment of the Los Alamos laboratory, the Manhattan Project, and the first and only wartime use of nuclear weapons, and conclude in the postwar years as he grows increasingly concerned about the destructive potential of the atomic bomb and especially the hydrogen bomb, becoming a leading voice in favor of arms control instead of an arms race. Through it all, his left-wing sympathies, owing to him being both a Jewish man watching the rise of fascism and a scientist whose profession strongly values the free flow of information, bring him first a measure of soft distrust during the war and then a more hard-edged suspicion afterwards as East/West wartime collaboration breaks down into the Cold War, especially given his interaction throughout his life with people and organizations (including his brother Frank, his wife Katherine, his mistress Jean Tatlock, and the Berkeley professor Haakon Chevalier) who were at one point or another connected to the Communist Party of the United States.
The film starts and ends with Cillian Murphy, who plays Oppenheimer at various points over the span of more than twenty years and is captivating in all of them. In his early scenes, between his hair and his performance, he evokes the feeling of a young "rock star" intellectual with his sights set on a bright mission to change the world, bringing with it the requisite ego. Being tapped to run the Manhattan Project forces him to clean himself up, literally and figuratively, adopting a more traditional haircut and dress while ending his overt dalliances with the various communists around him; while he remains with his wife after she explains to him that she lost faith in communism after her fiancé ran off to fight for the Spanish Republicans and died there (in real life, it was more complicated, but it's implied anyway that she's not being wholly honest here), he pulls back from Chevalier when he tries to get him to spill some nuclear secrets to pass along to the Soviets. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki leaves him haunted after he finds out just how much damage his weapon did, best conveyed in a scene where Nolan's sound mixing is actually used well as the congratulatory speech Oppenheimer is giving to his fellow workers at Los Alamos is drowned out by his own internal panic. Before the Trinity test, the possibility is raised on more than one occasion that the atomic bomb might ignite Earth's atmosphere and destroy the world; while that obviously didn't literally happen, the film ends with Oppenheimer wondering whether or not he might have done so metaphorically.
This is not a movie that glamorizes Oppenheimer. On one hand, it spotlights how he was not only one of the greatest minds America had at the time, but also somebody with a strong moral code, from how his politics were motivated by a genuine desire to do right by the world to how he helped recruit numerous European Jewish physicists into the Manhattan Project by recognizing how Adolf Hitler's antisemitism was causing him to cut off his nose to spite his face. On the other hand, by the time he realized what he unleashed and put aside his dispassionate pursuit of science for its own sake in favor of activism, the cat was already out of the bag, and what's more, his idealism, paired with his womanizing, blinded him to the threat of spies seeking to steal his research and use it to empower the Soviets, ultimately destroying his hope that the postwar era would see global cooperation for the betterment of all instead of the competition for power and glory that it ultimately became. He may be the main character of this film, but by the end, even he wouldn't tell you that he was any sort of hero.
The story here is big, and Nolan wades right into it and makes it feel big. At times, the number of supporting characters, famous faces in both the historical figures and in the all-star cast playing them, was almost too many to keep track of, but Nolan keeps it focused on the big ones, specifically how they all interact with J. Robert at various points in his life. In a unique touch, the "present-day" scenes in 1954 are shot in black-and-white, and the flashbacks in color, a choice meant to show that the security hearings are purely fact-based while the flashbacks are colored by Oppenheimer's memories of the events but which I think also served to highlight how, by the time the Cold War was in full swing, his youthful idealism had long since withered in the harsh light of how things actually played out.
And more importantly, even though this was a very "talky" movie, it felt as propulsive as any of Nolan's other films. Ludwig Göransson's score lent a sense of urgency and impending dread to the proceedings, knowing that it was telling the story of the inventor of the most fearsome and deadly weapon ever conceived and always seeming to be driving the film forward. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema crafted a visual style that feels naturalistic in true Nolan fashion without necessarily going grim and gritty, whether it's the musty old libraries and classrooms that have a hint of dark academia to them or the vistas of Los Alamos, New Mexico that feel consciously designed to evoke Westerns, a comparison that Kitty herself makes when she first sees the town, highlighting the irony of how that older, simpler age of American history was about to be brought to an end through a project carried out in the kind of scenic Western vista that John Ford himself might have shot a movie. It was a long movie, but it was not a bloated one in the slightest. After all, how can you be when you're telling the story of a man who, for better or worse, changed the world?
The Bottom Line
Oppenheimer is another film that proves that, when Christopher Nolan is on the ball, he knows how to make a masterpiece. Whether you're a movie buff or into history or science, this will probably stand the test of time as a classic, and a definitive treatment of the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
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I was told that the preferential viewing order for this would be to screen Oppenheimer first and then Barbie, so that's exactly what I did.
Barbie (2023)
Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language
Score: 4 out of 5
As a toy, a character, and a pop culture icon, Barbie is a figure with a lot of baggage. On one hand, when she first debuted in 1959 on store shelves that were otherwise lined with dolls of babies and young children, she was a game-changer, one who turned dolls from a fantasy of motherhood to a fantasy of being all grown up. She was the original ideal of the modern, liberated woman: beautiful, glamorous, and, as time went on, capable of working every career under the sun, while also having a handsome (boyfriend? Best friend? It's varied over the years) named Ken. On the other hand, having Barbie, a very '50s/'60s idea of a modern, liberated woman (even one who was herself designed by a woman, Ruth Handler), as an ideal to live up to has done a number on the self-image of generations of young girls, especially when it came to standards of physical beauty, and her aspirational marketing often ran head-first into a world where women and girls often found themselves treated as second-class citizens compared to men and boys.
As such, the announcement of a movie based on Barbie, officially licensed by Mattel, was inevitably going to have to tackle all of this head-on: what Barbie was originally conceived as versus what she had come to represent. And when it was announced that Greta Gerwig, a young filmmaker known for naturalistic, relationship-focused dramas who came up through the "mumblecore" scene in indie cinema, would be directing and co-writing the film with her longtime partner (both creative and romantic) Noah Baumbach, I thought I'd figured out exactly what kind of movie I was going to get just from the trailers: a stinging satire of Barbie's complicated relationship with womanhood and girlhood, wrapped in over-the-top girly aesthetics. That is more or less the film that they delivered, but not in the directions I was expecting. Make no mistake, Barbie is an avowedly, unapologetically feminist film, and one that I'm not surprised has already inspired plenty of unbridled, predictable rage from a certain class of commentator. But it's one that surprised me, and one where really getting into the meat and potatoes of its message would require giving away some of the best moments of the movie.
So, to keep this brief, I had a blast with Barbie. It is undoubtedly a very snarky parody of the doll line, its commercialization, and how people have reacted to it over the years, but it is also an affectionate one made by somebody who clearly spent much of her childhood playing with Barbie dolls and suggests here that they played a big role in making her who she is today. It couldn't have had better casting, not just in its sprawling all-star cast but also in its leads, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, who not only perfectly look the part of the iconic characters they play but take them to some very interesting and even daring places over the course of the film. It's a visual treat, especially in how it imagines the neon-pink world that Barbie and Ken live in, and its jokes were not only hilarious but also hit very close to home, like the most biting Saturday Night Live parodies of Barbie done on a blockbuster budget. Even if you're the most rugged, bearded manly man who thinks he's above this kind of movie, I guarantee, you'll laugh your ass off watching it.
The film starts in Barbieland, where all the Barbies and Kens live. It's presented to us as a utopian matriarchy where all the Barbies are successful women living their best lives and running everything, and the Kens are eye candy who are happy to live for their girlfriends. Robbie and Gosling's characters are the classic, stereotypical Barbie and Ken we all think of when we hear the names "Barbie and Ken", the beautiful blonde bombshell and her hunky-yet-chaste romantic partner whose life revolves around two things, Barbie and the beach. It's established early on that the Barbies know they live in a fantasy world connected to a toy line in the "real world", and that their purpose is to serve as an aspirational ideal to young girls so that they can become better women when they grow up. Which makes the thoughts of death that Barbie has one day rather unfortunate, especially as they mark the beginning of a breakdown of her perfect life. Turning to "Weird Barbie", a wise older Barbie who lives alone and is connected to a real-world Barbie doll whose owner badly mistreated her, for help, Barbie sets out on a mission to the real world to find the little girl she's connected to, with Ken coming along for the ride.
The film doesn't linger for very long on the mechanics of how all of this operates beyond "it's magic", and frankly, it doesn't need to, dropping enough hints that most viewers could probably figure it out on their own. The Mattel corporation is fully involved, but while Will Ferrell's vaguely villainous CEO has shown up in the marketing for this, he and the company as a whole are chiefly two things: the butt of many of the film's jokes, and more importantly, red herrings. The actual villain is telegraphed pretty early once Barbie and Ken enter the real world, and their identity is rather important to the film's central themes, but I will hold off on spoiling it because it's just such a fun moment that I don't wanna give away. Rest assured, though, this is not a film that rests on its laurels and just throws a torrent of classic Barbie iconography at you to distract from a threadbare story.
And it all starts with the casting. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken may just be the most perfect casting I can imagine, two actors who both embody the kind of mid-century Hollywood beauty standards that Barbie and Ken were based on and are also two of the most gifted actors of their generation (side note: Gosling's been around for so long that I was surprised to see that he's only eight-and-a-half years older than Robbie), meaning that they don't just look the part, they fill it with personas that I imagine will color how people view the dolls for a very long time. Robbie grabbed me from the moment we get an early dance sequence set to a Dua Lipa disco banger in which, after voicing her thoughts about death, she's tries to go back to putting on a happy-go-lucky party girl face -- but every so often, for just a split second, we see the look of worry creep in. Her comic timing, one of her strongest yet most underappeciated assets, is also on full display here, setting up some of the most hilarious scenes in the film. Throughout, Robbie delivers the kind of performance that would vanquish any doubts as to whether or not she's just a flash in the pan, running the full gamut of emotions as she has to learn about the real world and all its messy stuff. She would've easily walked away as the film's MVP if it weren't for Gosling, who matches her beat-for-beat as Ken learning about his own place in the world and what it really means to be a man. He gets a pair of great musical numbers that both land incredibly well even if he doesn't have the best pipes, and does an amazing job making Ken not just a partner to Barbie, but a mirror to her in some key ways.
Among the characters in the real world, meanwhile, it's America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt as the mother Gloria and her teenage daughter Sasha who both give this film its human soul and rest at the heart of its message. We meet Sasha first, and she's representative of young people who see Barbie as a symbol of the older generations' broken promises to girls and young women, the unattainable ideal that they could never live up to and which was all too often used to belittle them. Gloria, meanwhile, is a mom approaching middle age and working an unglamorous office job who sees Barbie quite differently, as the figure who showed her that she didn't have to choose between a career and a family, and remains attached to the ideal of Barbie even if she knows her life isn't perfect. Together, Gloria and Sasha are the ones who force Barbie to confront what she symbolizes, especially as her own life increasingly flies off the rails and she needs to figure out who she really is if she wants to... well, again, spoilers.
It was perhaps to be expected that Greta Gerwig made this a character-focused film above all else given her background, but the real surprises came in the production design. The trailers already showed off Barbieland quite vividly, and the film spends a surprising amount of time there to show it off even further, a landscape saturated in bright pink and primary colors that would feel like it came out of a Y2K-throwback hyperpop music video if it were played for even the slightest bit of irony. The other assorted Barbies and Kens (and forgotten oddities in the Barbie back catalogue like Midge, Skipper, and Allan) are played by a who's who of actors, musicians, models, and other celebrities who feel like they all signed onto this film just to have the opportunity to say that they were in the Barbie movie, and each of them felt like they were having a blast hanging out on set, the exact kind of non-stop-party energy that Barbieland needed. Speaking of hyperpop, the soundtrack too is absolutely stuffed with top-notch quality, a murderer's row of pop and R&B superstars, cult favorites, and up-and-comers that I think is likely to inspire a lot of musicians in its own right, especially with how it often plays in the context of the movie itself.
If I had one real problem with the film, it's that the bits with Mattel often felt superficial and extraneous, especially compared to the deeper commentary of the film's main satirical thrust. Will Ferrell was funny as he often is, but he felt like he was only in this to act like an oblivious jerk, he and his corporate minions barely figuring into the plot except to serve as an obstacle. There are ways I think this movie could've approached the Mattel subplot better, and which it seemed to be leaning into, presenting them not as a soulless corporate behemoth but as a company whose leadership seems to genuinely think they're doing right by the world in general and girls in particular, but is critically failing them and leaving many of them bitter like Sasha. It's a subplot that could've been fleshed out a bit more with maybe five or ten minutes of extra scenes; I'd love to see what the deleted scenes look like when this hits home video.
The Bottom Line
Barbie wasn't just a wonderful palate cleanser after the gloom of Oppenheimer, it's a legitimately great movie in its own right, as both a big, high-concept comedy of a sort we don't normally get these days and a cutting yet affectionate satire of its main subject. If anybody tells you this movie's "only" for women and girls, don't listen to them. Go see it anyway.
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