Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a massive pot roast of a movie, sliced into edible bits. Most of it is top-shelf craftsmanship, except for the back-and-forth structure. Certainly a sharper brain than mine could tell you why the film hops timelines, or goes from color to black and white. When Oliver Stone did this sort of thing in JFK, it was to convey as much information as concisely as possible (given the three-hour running time); there were so many moving parts, so many talking heads, that Stone’s illustrative, almost free-associative approach felt necessary. Here there are only talking heads and, from what we’re given here, a simple story: Once there was a very smart man who did a very bad thing, and ironically was raked over the coals for stuff he didn’t even do. Meanwhile, even more ironically, he gets medals and handshakes for the bad thing. The end.

There’s one element worthy of unreserved praise here, and that’s Robert Downey Jr.’s welcome-home performance — his comeback, if you will, from his comeback, which kidnapped him into Marvel movies for eleven years — as Admiral Lewis Strauss, the man who got J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) stripped of his security clearance on the grounds that Oppenheimer had Communist leanings. History views Strauss unkindly, but Downey makes him a smart man with understandable sore spots; he imbues Strauss with wit but not an ounce of the smug hipness that characterized, say, Tony Stark or some of his other roles. For me, the movie changed from Oppenheimer to Strauss whenever Downey showed up, his upper lip drawn down in umbrage. Downey and Nolan must have understood that a cardboard anti-commie villain wouldn’t do.

As for Cillian Murphy, I’d like to say that he shoulders this whole ungainly thing and holds it all together, but aside from an accent that sounds at times eerily like Robin Williams in serious mode, Murphy’s Oppenheimer seems purposely blank. It’s nothing that Murphy does or doesn’t do. It’s that this Oppenheimer has been hollowed out. We empathize with his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) and lover Jean (Florence Pugh), who are always chastising him for one thing or another. Oppenheimer is reduced to visual iconography — the straight-brim fedora, the dark suits, the cigarette or pipe. Early on, we see Oppenheimer spike a contemptuous professor’s apple with cyanide (the plot is a failure). He mentions it later on, but if any linkage is intended to his complicity in developing the ultimate death-dealer, it’s certainly kept quiet. Murphy recedes into himself, enacting the self-abasing emotions of a martyr, and the movie slips from his fingers into the robust hands of Downey, or Blunt or Pugh or Matt Damon.

Anyway, Oppenheimer delivers the bomb. It becomes urgent to get the bomb before the Nazis do — an army that carries the bomb before it is invincible, as old Marcus Brody might say. “Does it work?” is an existential question, since one of the possible events if it doesn’t work properly is, oh nothing bad, just the annihilation of the planet. But it works, and thereafter Hiroshima and Nagasaki are knocked off the board. “Compartmentalize,” goes a refrain from Damon’s General Groves, and Oppenheimer has to keep his science and his morals in different boxes. As Tom Lehrer sang of Wernher von Braun’s ethos, “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department.” That verse speaks more mordantly, and God knows more concisely, about the paradox of Oppenheimer than this whole solidly built but pompously designed edifice does. Does Oppenheimer care where they come down? (Does Nolan?) He says he does, but does he really care about anything other than physics, his passion for which is also given short shrift? Given the two icons in this summer’s Barbenheimer event, I know which one seems more plastic and less human.

Barbie

The much-talked-about Barbie is hot-pink fun and a big, big hit, but let’s everybody chill out, pro and con. Before it’s anything else, the movie is the latest and biggest salvo in Barbie/Mattel’s mission to separate parents from their money (over a billion dollars in 2020) since 1959. Barbie has been chastised for representing unrealistic physical goals for girls, and she has been lionized for the diverse array of dolls and the centering of female pleasure and fantasy. Greta Gerwig, who directed Barbie from a script she wrote with Noah Baumbach, tries to play both sides against the middle, razzing some aspects of Barbie and cherishing others. It may play better a second time, because some of the film’s tonal weirdnesses are confusing until we get to the end and realize what the story has been about all along.

Barbie (a glimmering Margot Robbie, whose angelic appearance is even gently lampshaded by Helen Mirren’s narration) is happy as can be in Barbieland, where all Barbies reign supreme and all Kens (Ryan Gosling goofs around amiably as the main Ken) are more or less afterthoughts. This reality, of course, is typical of Barbie play; the girls playing with their Barbies extended their consciousness into Barbie, not Ken. Ken was understood to be an accessory, no more emotionally meaningful (and perhaps less) than Barbie’s hair dryer. Ken existed to give Barbie a passenger in her pink Corvette, and she sure as shit was the one driving.

But shadows fall across the pink paradise. Barbie is suddenly having human preoccupations and physical foibles. Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), the village wise woman that a girl played with too hard, tells Barbie she needs to go to the Real World. She does, with Ken in tow, and looks for the girl who played with her. (This brings up strange questions about the movie’s world-building that I guess are irrelevant to the story Gerwig wants to tell.) The girl, now a cynical tween, got rid of her dolls long ago, but her mother Gloria (America Ferrara, who walks away with the movie) works for Mattel and has been designing Barbies with more human dimensions and frailties.

Barbie seems to operate uneasily on several layers of reality, as well as satire that gives its corporate master Mattel an occasional soft noogie but doesn’t bite the hand that feeds it. (Rhea Perlman gives a quietly powerful performance as the ghost of Ruth Handler, Barbie’s inventor and Mattel’s co-founder.) I can imagine Gerwig getting together with a bunch of like-minded friends who also grew up with Barbie, and compiling a list of all the things they love to mock (and mock to love) about Barbie. Gerwig is also a generous-hearted writer/director who knows that girls’ and women’s fraught relationship with Barbie can make for mixed feelings. Barbie isn’t the satire some may have been hoping for, fangs dripping with pink blood; it’s a classic Horatian satire, tickling its target on the tummy instead of disemboweling it. Gerwig’s aim is to tell a human story through Barbie dolls, as girls have been doing for 64 years.

When Ken learns about patriarchy, and turns Barbieland (in Barbie’s absence) into the bro-town Kendom, it’s the sort of plot path that will drive literal-minded viewers mad. It’s here that the film delves into a bit of sociopolitical lateral satire. Was the matriarchy of Barbieland fair to the Kens? Does their rebellion and pivot to patriarchy represent the inverse of what masculinists fear will happen if feminists take over? A lot of questions and meanings rattle around in Barbie, perhaps 60% of which seem intentional. But stay the course, stay the course. It’s a bumpy road for a while, but then it smooths out and lays the tracks to an ending that gives Barbie what she hadn’t known she wanted or needed. The commentators complaining that the movie promotes man-hatred are nuts, but I don’t think it’s a feminist masterpiece either — it shakes out as humanist, anyway, each gender (Barbieland is very binary) advised to seek a more authentic way of being. The final line will be celebrated, denounced, embraced, debated, and it says in six words what this pink but not so fluffy film has been about.

Asteroid City

In further evidence that our buddies calling the shots at Hollywood studios are all heart, Wes Anderson’s best film in years, Asteroid City — which almost demands to be seen on the big screen — has been trebucheted from most theaters and onto streaming after a little more than two weeks. Anderson uses his old familiar trick of boxing off painful experience, this time through layers of representation, as in his The Grand Budapest Hotel. Our view is that of an audience member watching a movie, and in that movie we see a play, and the making of that play, and its broadcast adaptation for television. It offers far more than can be taken in at one viewing, and leaves itself wide open for interpretation.

As a longtime Anderson fan (Rushmore is a lifetime top-tenner for me) I was left feeling bruised and hollow by his last effort, The French Dispatch. It came dangerously close to just being a parade of hip actors filing onscreen for their one line. Asteroid City is filled end to end with actors, too, but the melancholy that suffuses all of Anderson’s films feels anchored to something real here. Anderson returns to loss and grief over and over, dressing it up immaculately in symmetrical-bordering-on-ceremonial compositions with the actors center stage, or far off to the side, delivering their speeches softly and without much emotion. The success of his efforts depends largely on his cast and whether Anderson has left them enough air to breathe and create and possibly even argue with the aesthetic they’re in.

Here, he does. Everyone here gathers in the southwestern Asteroid City for the Junior Stargazers Convention, and there’s something about filming in the desert that moves artists like Anderson — or Jordan Peele with Nope in recent years — to think about stories and their role in our lives. Wisely, Anderson gravitates to Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson, who play actors playing characters. Sometimes we catch them as actors, most often as their characters. Augie Steenbeck, the character in the play, grieves his wife; Augie’s portrayer, Jones Hall, has his own grief, and on one occasion Jones adds a level of realism to a painful scene that jolts his scene partner — Johansson as actress Mercedes Ford playing actress Midge Campbell — out of character. 

How easily the spell of story can be broken, says Anderson, whose work features pain shut up in pretty boxes, sometimes punching holes out of those boxes. (I’ve always felt that the box-punching was at its most gratifying and loud in Anderson’s first three films, the only ones he wrote with Owen Wilson.) Asteroid City is whimsical on the surface — it features an alien that’s sometimes stop-motion and sometimes a latex suit filled by an actor whose presence is too good a joke to spoil — but the uncanny color scheme draws us in, invites us to look deeper. Eventually the movie states its case plain, in a repeated mantra that may repel some on-the-fencers in the audience: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” which could mean any number of things. 

It’s clear by now, after almost 30 years, that Anderson can’t make movies any other way. He’s never going to make an emotionally sloppy Sidney Lumet urban drama. You dig the cut of his jib or you don’t, and if you don’t, nothing in his films is going to win you over. I’m on Team Wes, but I don’t blame you if you’re not. There’s just too much stuff, even if I like it, that can elicit understandable exasperation. But there aren’t so many American filmmakers with such an immediately recognizable style that we can afford to pooh-pooh one. I’d say he’s earned respect even if he leaves you cold. Asteroid City, though, is a return to the populous but warmer climes of Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s one-two punch from the early-to-mid-‘10s. Whether you like it or not, Anderson isn’t lost in Wesville yet; he still has stories to tell and emotions to work out through them (though not in them). 

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Margaret Simon, the 11-year-old protagonist of Judy Blume’s lovely 1970 YA novel Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, would be 64 now. Just thought you should sit with that for a bit. For all her flailing and misery and drama — indeed, because of all that — Margaret has been an icon to millions of pre-teen girls (and not a few pre-teen boys; I read it as a kid when I was deep into Blume, hooked on her by Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing) for over half a century. The warm and generous movie version, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (Edge of Seventeen), didn’t do very well in theaters, but I hope it’ll make up for it at home. It deserves all the love, belated or otherwise, it can get.

Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) is obsessed with growing up. She wants her bra to fill out and she wants her period. She will get these things, but the agony is that no one can tell her when. Partly her preoccupation is due to her circle of friends, in a “secret club” called the Pre-Teen Sensations. The girls are all waiting for the same thing, and one of them, Nancy Wheeler (Elle Graham), is possibly not to be believed when she confides how far along the path she is. We’ve all met Nancys — not a mean girl, exactly, but insecure and desperate to get big and womanly and sophisticated, not awkward and gauche like kids are at that age. Mainly the desire is to impress boys, who are their own kinds of awkward idiot. 

Margaret wants those life milestones, but doesn’t seem to know why she wants them. Because she’s supposed to want them, I think. Near the end — spoilers, I suppose, for those who never read the book — Margaret finds herself poised at a new beginning, and her mother (Rachel McAdams) recognizes it’s also the end of something, and they both cry and laugh for different reasons. Kelly Fremon Craig has a light, good-hearted touch; she doesn’t push anything too hard, knowing that the level of drama in Margaret’s life — which arguably hits its peak when her Jewish grandma on her dad’s side (Kathy Bates) faces off with her maternal grandparents, who are fundamentalist Christians — doesn’t need amplifying. Craig doesn’t chuckle at it all condescendingly, either. She knows that while none of this is the end of the world, it very much feels that way to an 11-year-old girl. Craig gets emotionally transparent, lived-in performances from everyone, though Benny Safdie as Margaret’s Jewish dad sometimes feels distant from the 1970 era, mainly the way he inflects phrases like “Really? Wow,” which sounds like how a millennial from today would say it.

We spend most of our time with Abby Ryder Fortson, who brings us effortlessly into Margaret’s conflicting feelings. Blume’s episodic structure leaves room for Margaret to have any number of awakenings, including one where she resolves her jealousy of a taller, more developed classmate, who turns out to be a lonely girl sick of being gossiped about. In this way Blume, who also wrote an early anti-bullying book Blubber, encouraged compassion towards anyone whose story we didn’t yet know. The movie follows her lead with an easy and graceful step. Are You There, God isn’t trying to be anything overwhelming or major, and it isn’t, but there used to be a place at the table for small charmers like this. I hope there still is.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

You can’t go home again, as Thomas Wolfe had it, but you can make a new one. The revved-up, perfectly acceptable Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny seems to mistrust nostalgia while trading heavily on it. Characters keep wanting to turn back the clock, and the movie figuratively and digitally turns it back, giving us a 1944-era Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) on one of his prologue adventures. The lengthy preamble this time has Indy and associate Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) trying to keep Archimedes’ dial, which is thought to have time-travel capabilities, out of the hands of the Nazis, represented by goose-stepping physicist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen).

It’s something of an Indiana Jones tradition for Indy to become embroiled in the hunt for an artifact that a father figure is or was obsessed with. But Indy is too old to have any father figures left (if fan consensus is to be believed, he was born in 1899; the main narrative of Dial of Destiny unfolds in 1969, making him 70), so the plot introduces Basil’s daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who is also Indy’s goddaughter, and who takes up her father’s absorption in the Dial. Helena is a bit of a mercenary, threatening to become what Indy’s long-ago nemesis Belloq was, or what Indy himself could have become. The movie very lightly tweaks Indy’s shadowy rep as a “grave robber” whose refrain “It belongs in a museum” carries the silent subtext “preferably one that pays well for it.” 

Dial of Destiny gives Indy a certain sad gravitas, and Ford seems grateful for it, willing to take his legacy characters — Han Solo, Rick Deckard, and now Indy — down a road of loss and pain. That doesn’t mean Ford’s performance is a downer; his Indy retains his mordant wit, particularly when he has the cool cucumber Mikkelsen or the vibrant, cheerfully corrupt Waller-Bridge to bounce his grumpiness off of. As the younger Indy his voice isn’t quite where it needs to be, but visually, with the help of AI, he suggests the Indy we remember. Some of us wouldn’t mind revisiting the years of Ford’s and Indy’s prime, and the movie satisfies that desire at the beginning but spends the rest of its time thinking about how it might not be such a good idea if you could do it. Voller, for example, wants to go back thirty years so he can make sure Nazi Germany wins this time. 

Steven Spielberg isn’t in the driver’s seat this time; the wheel has been handed to James Mangold, who contributes a sharp and energetic entry that still feels unsettlingly like a really good fan film. There’s not much here that’s overtly disappointing; it just never hits the giddy heights of the Spielberg films — yes, even the unfairly slimed Crystal Skull. Say what you will about the infamous nuke-the-fridge scene, but it was out there, and Spielberg went for it. Mangold doesn’t quite dare anything that the fans will hate, though the plot (which he cowrote) lands in an unusual place that very explicitly reiterates the movie’s theme about not getting stuck in the past. Mangold can be a terrific director, and his handling of the many chase scenes is crisp and smooth. But, again, nothing all that funny, the way Spielberg’s great action has little curlicues of slapstick. 

Still, I can think of many worse directors for the job, so why berate Mangold for being himself? Dial of Destiny does accomplish something for the general franchise beyond itself — it may make Crystal Skull more palatable to its detractors, since it no longer bears the weight of being the last Indy film. Dial carries that weight rather well, because the story, as opposed to the forward-propelled plot, acknowledges the appeal as well as the problems of nostalgia. Some may find the post-climactic between-scenes shift from past to present a bit abrupt, but we didn’t need to see how Indy and Marion got back to the States in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s touching, though, how both this film and its predecessor work to satisfy our desire to leave Indy exactly the way we want to leave him and remember him. Dial sticks the landing. Now, please, let there be no more. Indy wants to retire. Let him.