Friday July 28, 2023; 5:35 PM EDT
- Folks will disagree. I thought the Barbie movie was loosely structured and the plot was at times "We're heading over here now" or "We're heading back." Lots of funny and inventive things, but it felt long at two hours or so. The Oppenheimer movie was tightly structured, driving forward with things at stake all the way through. I thought it earned the full three hours and used it well. Years ago Pauline Kael, I think, pointed out that in movies like "Home Alone" the adults were all idiots or cartoonish bad guys. This, she said, serves to flatter an audience of young people. "Oppenheimer" almost entirely avoided that kind of flaw, I think. "Barbie" is pretty much a cartoon, so the less-than-admirable characters are cartoonish from beginning to end, aren't they? To the degree that they successfully satirize recognizable human types, they serve a purpose for the film and the audience. #
- Both new films have trouble ending. One ends in a long conversation that theorizes about humanity, and the other ends by flatly demonizing a character who already had in place motivations that were interesting enough to deserve our attention, if only the ending had paid attention to them. It's hard to portray a human being on the screen without resorting to one reductive shorthand or another. In King Lear, Shakespeare asks what would happen to a person with little self-understanding and little self-control once he no longer has political power to shield him from the consequences of his actions and impulses. The play holds onto that question to the end. For a while the Barbie movie asks, "How crazy is Barbie world?" and then it asks what happens if Barbie world and the human world collide and then it asks what it means to be human. The Oppenheimer film asks what it means, what does it take, to be responsible for the practical and moral possibilities of atomic theory, and it sticks with that question for three hours.#
- Seeing those two films as a double feature seems crazy to me.#