July Movies Part 3: Barbie & Oppenheimer

I did not subject myself to the full-on Barbenheimer experience where you watch both films in a day, but I have now watched both films (Barbie first, natch) and lived to tell the tale. Let's get into it.

Barbie: It's official, writer-director Greta Gerwig is one of our greatest living filmmakers. This movie is a wondrous feminist confection, bringing together an incredible ensemble to give us the story of...Barbie and Ken. Yes, this is ultimately a ploy by the corporate overlords at Mattel to sell more Barbie dolls, but my God, Gerwig has taken this doll and created a masterful commentary on the patriarchy, sexism, and the burden of being a woman through the decades. And given her ability to find the absolute perfect song to deploy in any scene (I will still never get over the use of Crash Into Me in Lady Bird), you will be pleased to hear that this film is practically a musical, with some incredible music throughout, and a particularly excellent deployment of Matchbox Twenty's Push that I have not been able to stop humming for days.

The production design is incredible, perfectly capturing the plastic and pink Barbie aesthetic, and the outfits are spectacular. But of course, the highlight is Margot Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie, a beautiful doll who is content with how every day in Barbieland is absolutely perfect until she is suddenly visited by "irrepressible thoughts of death." And cellulite. Seeking help from Weird Barbie (the glorious Kate McKinnon), she discovers she must go to the Real World to fix her ennui. She grudgingly heads out, but Ken (who is played to "pretty but dumb, oh wait no, just pretty dumb" perfection by Ryan Gosling) stows away in her car, so he also gets a taste of the Real World. Turns out Ken was pretty miserable in Barbieland where his entire existence was only to serve as Barbie's boyfriend, but in the Real World, he learns about the patriarchy. Chaos ensues. Meanwhile Barbie finds Gloria (America Ferrera), a Mattel employee who took to playing with her daughter's old Barbie doll, and unwittingly unleashed this existential crisis on Barbie. When the CEO of Mattel (played as a glorious dimwit by Will Ferrell) starts chasing Barbie down, it's time for Gloria and her daughter to visit Barbieland.

I know this is all very high concept and bizarre, but believe me, it is told magnificently, with so much heart and humor. There are a myriad mansplaining jokes, and it's wonderful to see the interplay between the different Kens (stalwarts like Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir), Barbies (folks like Issa Rae and Nicola Coughlin) and...Allan (Ken's best friend played by a hapless Michael Cera) and Midge (a pregnant Barbie played by Emerald Fennell and mostly treated like a horror element throughout the film). Every cast member is having a raucous good time, but Robbie in particular is a shining beacon, able to convey the drop-dead gorgeous womanhood of a stereotypical Barbie doll, but then infuse all that seeming perfection with vulnerability and pathos to give you a human woman who is suffering when she discovers that in the Real World, a construction site isn't filled with supportive women and there has never been a female President. This film is a joy from start to finish and I might need to watch it again to fully revel in its glory.

Oppenheimer: Well this is a good movie but it certainly isn't a joy from start to finish, more of a crescendo of ceaseless horror. The best thing about this film is probably its sound design that propulsively beats in your ears as the film nears its climax. And the central performance from Cillian Murphy is magnificent. Christopher Nolan is of course a consummate writer and filmmaker, so the script also does this magical job of weaving back and forth in time, with Nolan's trademark love for non-linear narrative. But yeah. The whole time I was impressed by all these technical elements, but did this film resonate with me emotionally and make me feel invested in this tale of man's ultimate hubris? Not really.

Perhaps the problem wouldn't be as noticeable if you weren't pairing this movie with Barbie but man, this film is about as patriarchal as it gets. It's a bunch of genius men standing around playing God, and the only major female roles in the film are played by Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's alcoholic and decidedly uninterested in mothering wife, Kitty, and Florence Pugh as the woman Oppenheimer periodically has an affair with, so she spends most of her screen time naked. Which is obviously my least favorite use of an actor in a movie that already has a dearth of female representation. Also, the parade of cameos from famous male actors got a bit silly. They would pop in to say a few lines and pretend to be some famous scientist/politician and then disappear again. I would spend the whole time being so surprised to see that famous face that I wouldn't pay any attention to what they had to say, so I don't know that this helped the plot any.

I was quite impressed at how Nolan kept the pace of this film brisk - the first two hours genuinely flew by and as we get to that inevitable test at Los Alamos when they first detonate the atomic bomb, you will be on the edge of your seat. But this film certainly has some third act problems when it tries to get you re-invested in Oppenheimer's show trial for alleged Communist sympathies and his damaged legacy. This is a movie that is all about how no one ever knew how he really felt about his involvement in creating a weapon that murdered hundreds of thousands of people, but the movie makes it clear that he was pained by it and spent his life trying to get governments to reign back the horror that he and his scientists had wrought. But I was expecting so much more. I would have rather had a shorter movie that was a true character study, than this three-hour hagiography with a somewhat inevitable conclusion that mankind is doomed. 

Look at the news, we're all well aware that we are perpetually on the brink of nuclear annihilation. I was hoping Oppenheimer had something more profound to say, but that's about the gist of it. Men suck, and the apocalypse is nigh. I'm gonna go watch the Barbie movie again.