Movie review: Barbenheimer

Yes, I'm jumping on the bandwagon, fuck you it's my blog I'll do what I want

Credit: Sean Longmore.

Sorry for the radio silence the past few months, I’ve been up to my eyes with my day job and other creative projects. I had no particular interest in seeing either of these movies prior to release, but ended up seeing both of them anyway as social outings. I posted my reviews of both as social media comments, and thought I’d expand on those reviews here just for a little cheap content in between more in-depth posts. I’ll post my reviews in the order in which I saw the two films.

Barbie

As I mentioned above, I had no particular interest in seeing this film before it came out. Not having seen any Greta Gerwig films prior to this (but knowing that Amy Schumer had been involved at one point in the film’s development), I was expecting it to be more or less plotless, frothy and filled with attempted jokes which would fall flat (something a bit like, say, Mamma Mia!). Late in the day I’d heard it accused of being a preachy, man-hating feminist movie, which I was surprised by. Primed as such, I expected that, were I to see the film, I would be rolling my eyes for most of the runtime, either at the lame jokes or at the film’s politics. Whatever interest I did have in seeing it derived from the fact that it co-starred Ryan Gosling, which turned out to be deeply prescient of me.

In the end my girlfriend dragged me along to see it and, to my surprise, I enjoyed it far more than I was expecting to. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a comedy film in the cinema, but I was laughing harder and more consistently than at any film I’ve seen in the cinema in years (my girlfriend’s friend who accompanied us said I was laughing more loudly than anyone else in the cinema). It’s not just broad comedy either (although there are certainly plenty of sight gags, physical comedy and visual humour): the dialogue has a wit and specificity that invites a shock of recognition. This approach probably means it won’t age terribly well (no one will get the Justice League joke ten years from now), but who cares about posterity? Just make a movie that makes us laugh a lot right now and we’ll take it from there.

It's painfully ironic that, despite being touted as this great #girlboss feminist movie, Ryan Gosling and Will Ferrell stole every scene they're in, and are arguably the only reasons to see the movie. I mean seriously, Gosling was getting bigger laughs with an eyebrow wiggle than entire paragraphs of dialogue from Kate McKinnon. Even the secondary Kens like Simu Liu were getting bigger laughs than most of the female cast.

It's nowhere near as preachy as the discourse had led me to believe, but the few moments of preachiness were jarring, fell flat on their faces and took me out of the experience. There’s a literal fourth-wall breaking joke during the film which I found less disruptive to my immersion than any of these preachy moments. I found it impossible to believe that it was America Ferrara's in-universe character, Gloria, delivering her lengthy monologue: this was the movie's "John Galt speech" moment. It’s not even that I disagreed with the content of said monologue: it’s just that it didn’t feel like a believable thing that would happen within the universe of the film.

The single most obnoxious moment of the film came when Barbie confronts the Mattel staff in their office, and a male Mattel employee meekly asks her: "I'm a man who has no power, does that make me a woman?" The poison of woke identity politics is that it sees identity markers as deterministic, such that Greta Gerwig can airily assert that, as a woman, she has no power (presumably because homeless men yell obscenities at her sometimes). Greta Gerwig is, I’ll remind you, a multi-Oscar-nominated multimillionare Hollywood writer-director, routinely celebrated as one of the best directors of her generation, and literally named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2018. The idea that such a person “has no power” purely by virtue of her genitals (excuse me, by virtue of her “gender identity”) is too preposterous to be worth refuting. By including this line, Gerwig has unabashedly outed herself as a member of the Hillary Clinton school of neoliberal #girlboss feminism, as much as she might protest to the contrary.

It’s been like seven years and I’m still annoyed at this.

Separate from the preachy moments in the film, there are two or three moments in this silly comedy that attempted to tug at the heartstrings. One of these I found surprisingly effective (the flashback with America Ferrara's character and her daughter), to the point that, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, I was tearing up a little bit in the cinema. The other two? Not so much. I’ve also heard people commending the film for its affecting and fraught portrayal of existential crisis and becoming aware of one’s mortality, and I have to say: it’s a good film, but let’s not overstate the case. It’s a comedy film - not that comedy films can’t wrestle with serious themes, but this is a knowingly silly comedy film. It’s an impressive achievement in filmmaking, but let’s not claim it can be all things to all people.

But for all that, the film is a comedy first and foremost, and I estimate that these preachy moments and heartstring-tugging moments combined add up to significantly less than 10% of the movie’s runtime.

The narrative structure of the movie is all over the place. The Mattel characters, led by Will Ferrell, are introduced in a lengthy sequence, have one silly chase scene, and then have no further impact on the plot whatsoever (granted, having a group of comic relief characters in a comedy film is no vice, but I got the distinct impression they'd have more of an active role in the story). Barbie is the nominal protagonist of the film, but she's what TV Tropes calls a pinball protagonist: it's Ken, Gloria and maybe Weird Barbie driving the plot forward, and Barbie is just along for the ride. Even in her own movie, the female protagonist has hardly any agency and just does what everyone else tells her to, which is again ironic in light of how the film was marketed and touted. Numerous ideas (the impact of Barbie's arriving in the real world on the real world; the clash between Gloria and her bratty teenage daughter) are introduced and then dropped just as quickly, or resolved in seconds.

But “a comedy film in which the narrative structure is all over the place” describes Monty Python and the Holy Grail just as accurately as it does Barbie, and no one holds that against it. For all my criticisms above, I laughed a lot and didn't regret going, although I have no intention of seeing it again. If you want to see a legitimately hilarious comedy film which doesn’t take itself too seriously and is almost exclusively aiming for actual laughter rather than “clapter” (and which incidentally features some of the most impressive production and costume design of any film this decade), check it out.

Oppenheimer

I have deeply mixed feelings about Christopher Nolan. On the one hand, as a child I often said that his second film Memento was my favourite film (it’s nowhere near that high in my book nowadays, but remains an impressive, engaging and thought-provoking psychological thriller, especially for such a young writer-director). I’m a fairly recent convert to the idea that films shot on actual physical film almost always look better than films shot digitally, and I can’t help but respect him for continuing to use his clout with studios to use celluloid far past the point that shooting digitally has become the industry standard, even if it grossly inflates the budgets of his films. (Prior to seeing Oppenheimer I’d read a few critics describing it as his best-looking film, an opinion I would certainly share.) By the same token, I absolutely agree with him that modern films are far too reliant on CGI, transforming ostensibly “live-action films” into weird ugly mishmashes of live-action and 3D animation without a shred of weight or tactility¹, and I respect him for trying to keep CGI to a minimum and using practical effects wherever possible. I will grudgingly allow that his films tend not to insult the audience’s intelligence the way many comparable films in their respective genres might.

So that’s what I like about him. What do I not like? Pretty much everything else. Point 1:

How the fuck u make a movie about the invention of the atomic bomb and it has the most underwhelming depiction of an atomic explosion ever committed to film.

I was not going into Oppenheimer expecting to like it, and unlike Barbie I was not pleasantly surprised. The underlying problem with Oppenheimer, the poisonous tree from which all the rotten fruit fall, is a mismatch between content and style. Nolan is attempting to migrate into the world of big-boy prestige grownup filmmaking, using one of the most hackneyed Oscar bait tropes (a portentous long-winded biopic involving the Second World War about an influential twentieth-century figure with personal problems) to get there. And yet, he keeps falling back on the cinematic instincts he’s honed from nearly two decades of making action and sci-fi films, applying them in a context in which they are wildly inappropriate, even embarrassing.

Nolan has almost no confidence in his own dialogue and his actors’ performances to hold the audience’s attention in their own right, and uses music as a crutch. In a typical drama film, understated music is used sparingly to accentuate the emotions and actions onscreen. Most of the actors who appear in Oppenheimer express few if any emotions (even though all of them have shown an ability to do so in other, better films), so Nolan instead relies on a relentless bullying score to emphasise everything. If everything is emphasised, nothing is. I cannot stress enough how omnipresent, overbearing and exhausting this musical score is. There's a scene in which Oppenheimer and the military brass are debating which Japanese cities to bomb, and it occurred to me that it was the first time in the movie that Nolan had allowed the onscreen action to speak for itself for more than thirty seconds. This scene takes place well over halfway into the movie. That’s how long you have to wait just to hear the actors delivering their lines without the score instructing you on the intended emotional reaction. This relentless musical score, in service of admittedly stylish cinematography, disaffected performances and clichéd dialogue, produces an effect not unlike watching a really expensive music video (or perhaps trailer) that goes on for three hours.²

And yet, in spite of this obvious lack of confidence in his writing abilities, the screenplay is peppered with lines that sound like they're intended to be witty or clever. Maybe one or two them produced the intended effect in a trailer. In a movie of this length, no one in the cinema so much as chuckled. Posts like the one below have envisioned how the film’s dialogue might have sounded had the screenplay been written in the style of one of Joss Whedon’s Marvel movies - but really, Oppenheimer’s “quippy”, “clever”, movie-trailer dialogue is no less artificial and stylised (and, more importantly, no more entertaining) than anything in the Marvel canon.

I suspect Nolan may be autistic. He doesn't seem to understand or like his characters at all, a fatal flaw when directing an R-rated drama for grownups about real people who really existed. The early sequences where it's just Opp's character drama drag; you get the impression of Nolan ticking off a biopic checklist. The pace of the film notably picks up when they get to Los Alamos and the movie can get down and dirty into Boys' Own detonators and isotopes - then declines again after the end of the war. None of the characters seem like people - they're robots reciting words. Jean Tatlock breaks up with Oppenheimer, and it sounds like she's a little ticked off at him for forgetting to collect her dry cleaning for her. It’s somehow impossible for me to imagine Oppenheimer and Jean having sex with each other even when that is explicitly depicted onscreen, tits out and all.

There are certain situations in which such an approach can work. I don’t mind characters who don’t seem like real people in a sci-fi film (like Nolan’s earlier Inception) when the film is really about abstract concepts, and the characters are just there to move the plot forward.³ I also don’t mind it in a superhero film, where the characters are generally meant to be larger-than-life archetypes more than “characters” as such (although that being said, Nolan’s Batman films were heavily marketed as taking a more grounded, realistic approach to the superhero genre in specific contrast to the approaches taken by Richard Donner or Tim Burton). But it’s very strange to direct a self-serious, grounded biopic almost entirely populated by real people who actually existed, and which aspires to greater historical accuracy than typical Hollywood films in this genre⁴ - and yet in which none of the characters therein actually seem like real people who could actually exist outside of a film. It feels meaningless to discuss the “performances” in a film like this, when all of the characters end up feeling like robots rather than real people, and were clearly directed specifically to act in such a way as to bring that effect about.

Nolan fanboys love to pat themselves on the back about how intellectual they are for enjoying Nolan’s films⁵ (mass-market Hollywood entertainments, none of which has made less than $100m at the box office in two decades). You know what’s painfully lacking from Oppenheimer? Any discussion - any at all - of the mechanics that go into splitting atoms or building nuclear bombs. The film is being widely lauded for its “brainteasing” anachronic narrative structure, and yet it doesn’t even attempt to explain to the audience how a nuclear bomb works, or why building one is so complex and intellectually demanding. There’s a scene in which Oppenheimer learns that a physicist in Europe has successfully split the atom, and says something to the effect of “that’s impossible! The math says it can’t be done!” No attempt to demonstrate the theoretical foundation for Oppenheimer’s belief that it couldn’t be done, or why he was mistaken. They just tell you that he thought it couldn’t be done, then someone did it. It’s one step removed from “Oh no. He was fine. Now he’s poorly from too much electric.”

Ron Howard’s 2001 film A Beautiful Mind was never lauded as a “thinking man’s movie” the way Nolan’s films (for some reason) routinely are. Like Oppenheimer, it’s a biopic about a twentieth-century American genius who is generally unlikeable and has deep-seated personal issues (in this case the mathematician John Forbes Nash). Unlike Oppenheimer, the creators made no secret of taking extensive poetic license with the details of their subject’s life. And yet in spite of that, the film did at least try to explain what a Nash equilibrium is, and did so in a way which came off like an organic part of the narrative by virtue of being the payoff for an earlier scene. It may not have been a mathematically accurate explanation, it may have been grossly simplified for the audience’s benefit - but the attempt was there, at least they tried. I consider it a pretty big red flag if you’re making a movie about a real-life scientific genius, and you can’t even reach the lofty heights of Ron fucking Howard in trying to make the audience understand why said genius was so important in scientific history.

The scene where Opp is speaking and imagines the people in front of him bursting into flames was cool (and then they spoiled it by using the same effect again at the end of Opp's appeal, a context in which it made no sense). The short sequence with Casey Affleck was great. The build-up to the Trinity test was genuinely exciting and gripping - but then the test actually happens and it's the most colossal cinematic cocktease of the year. My friend and I looked at each other like “Really? Is that it?” As I said above, I respect Nolan for endeavouring to only use practical effects wherever possible. Depicting a nuclear bomb exploding is not one of those times. Terminator 2 featured a more impressive (and terrifying) depiction of a nuclear bomb exploding, and that movie came out thirty years ago. Even look at this clip from Barefoot Gen, or this dumb fucking TV movie starring Rob Lowe, and tell me they’re less impactful than the little piddle of flame we got with Oppenheimer. It was painfully obvious that, for significant portions of the Trinity test, we were looking at footage of a big petrol fire. I mean, seriously, if you’ve seen the film, look at this historical footage of the actual Trinity test, and ask yourself if Oppenheimer produced so much as a fraction of the power, awe and terror it invokes.

Fans of the film might defend Nolan by saying that the only way to properly replicate the impact of a nuclear explosion with practical effects is a real nuclear explosion. If that’s the case, either don’t show the explosion (obviously a non-starter in a movie about the invention of the atomic bomb) or use CGI. There’s no conflict between believing that CGI is overused in modern cinema, and also that there are certain specific situations in which it’s appropriate to use it.

For the last hour or so of the movie, I got the distinct impression that nobody in the cinema really cared what happened to Oppenheimer or Strauss. The strenuous efforts to maintain cinematic intensity during the end of Oppenheimer's appeal seemed, frankly, laughable. The pyrotechnics, quick cuts and omnipresent score might work for a sci-fi thriller or action film - they definitely do not work for what by now has become a legal drama. Nolan is ostensibly making a movie for grownups, but can't resist his natural instinct to try to get the attention of the teenagers making out in the back seats. Steven Spielberg, by contrast, always knows what mode he's operating in and never gets them muddled.

Not as bad as Interstellar. Probably marginally worse than Dunkirk, which at least had the self-awareness to recognise that Nolan is hopeless at

• writing believable or punchy dialogue, and

• getting the audience to care about his characters

and hence generally didn't really try to do either. Miles and miles below the still-wonderful Memento, which I'm increasingly confident will, years down the line, come to be seen as his only film really worth discussing. At least there was essentially no nauseatingly shaky handheld camerawork. I was also pleasantly surprised, given Nolan's reputation, to find the dialogue consistently intelligible; I think there were only one or two lines that slipped past me (and it wasn't because the music drowned them out).

Who wins?

I'm surprised to be saying this, but I'm Team Barbie 100%, and it's not even close. Better screenplay, better performances, better production design, better cinematography, better makeup (seriously, that aged-up makeup in the appeal scenes, who do they think they're kidding?), at least some characters I could care about at least a little bit - and, most importantly, it didn't outstay its welcome.

Nolan fanboys will say that it’s an outrage that people (myself included) are saying that Barbie is better than Oppenheimer. Barbie is a silly popcorn movie, they’ll say, while Oppenheimer grapples with serious weighty themes. Agreed on both counts. The difference is that Barbie is a successful silly popcorn movie, whereas Oppenheimer’s style and approach are so tiresome, grating and inappropriate to its subject that it makes any discussion of the themes of the film irrelevant. Or as the granddaddy might say:

1. The recent trend of Disney “live-action remakes” is usually a misnomer. Most of these remakes aren’t live-action at all: they’re just remaking animated films using a different kind of animation (3D models rather than 2D cels), some of which use live-action actors filmed before a green screen.

2. Martin Scorsese said that he intended Goodfellas to be a “two-hour trailer”. And yet that movie is full of quiet and tense moments (like the famous “You’re a funny guy” scene), its musical choices never come off as manipulative or overbearing, and its lengthy runtime (146 minutes to Oppenheimer’s 180) breezes by while Oppenheimer drags.

3. That being said, some of my favourite films are sci-fi films which managed to get the balance right: where the plot is about abstract concepts, but it’s populated by believable and compelling characters e.g. Minority Report, Primer, Predestination.

4. Nolan has asserted that, when writing the screenplay, he went to great lengths to avoid merging characters for the audience’s benefit, which is probably a significant contributing factor to the film’s runtime.

5. Christopher Nolan is possessed of the dubious virtue of having probably the most annoying fanbase of any living director. There is no artistic decision he can make that is so questionable that they can’t come up with some contrived rationalisation about how ackshually it totally fits the theme of the film and Nolan’s operating on another level from you and you just don’t get it, man.

Christopher Nolan fans in a nutshell.

It’s very irritating when you go to a film (Inception) which you understood perfectly but didn’t particularly enjoy, only to be told that the only people who didn’t enjoy it were people who were too stupid to understand it.