Barbenheimer Is Upon Us

Come Again? It’s no big secret that the box office has been hurting in the last few years, and the disruptions aren’t just due to COVID. Even this year, formerly beloved properties were taking a pounding in both box office revenue and critical reviews. Enter “Barbenheimer”, an internet moniker for the very ironic doubleheader of both Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, two of the year’s most anticipated films that premiered the same weekend. I’m a believer of the theory that Warner Brothers chose to premier Barbie on the same weekend as Oppenheimer because Nolan quite publicly left W.B. for Universal over the former’s policy to only hold films in theaters a short time before debuting them on the app that was formerly known as HBO Max. In classic 2020’s fashion, what started as an online joke – I mean seriously, could you imagine two more different movies to see together? – turned into a real-life phenomenon.

The results have been sensational. Both films received very strong reviews from critics, and while a family-accessible movie about a beloved toy was always going to outgross a 3-hour, R-rated, very talky drama about creating the nuclear bomb, the combined box office from the weekend (including Thursday night previews) is already north of $500 million worldwide. If you take this proof of anything, it’s that audiences will show up for genuine art when it features known faces and is crafted by known and trusted voices. I won’t spoil anything major about either film, but I will be discussing a little of how they each work in relating what I thought about them, how they might unironically work as a double feature, and what other movies I could pair with each.

How Was Oppenheimer? In a word? Magnificent. Christopher Nolan, ever one of my favorites, has created his most self-reflective work since The Prestige with all the spectacle-making tools he honed between now and then. Like his best film Dunkirk, he deploys his craft of time-jumping and cross-cutting to both pragmatically engage his blockbuster audience in a talky and procedural narrative as well as advance his themes. One timeline is what you’ve seen in the trailers – a brief recreation of Oppenheimer’s education, romances, and ultimately his leadership of the Manhattan Project; the second is a retelling of his time after the war when the government began to cast him aside and the third is related through the point of view of Levi Strauss played exquisitely by Robert Downey Jr. This third timeline seems like the most superfluous but is quite vital in allowing the audience to step outside of Oppenheimer’s point of view and regard him with some distance. All three timelines are presented to us simultaneously, which creates an effect of instant hindsight to the events that we see occur in real time. Cillian Murphy gives the performance of his career as the enigmatic yet misunderstood Oppenheimer, and he turns this towering figure into both a relatable human and a bit of a canvas for the audience to project their likely mixed feelings onto. It also helps that the stacked cast crushes their assignments in detail, reminding the doubters that Nolan isn’t just a visual master, and that there’s a reason why Hollywood is always climbing over itself to work with him. That said, the visuals that Nolan delivers, including a masterful nuclear testing scene late in the film’s second hour, are remarkable.

How Was Barbie? A triumph of design and conception built from the ground up, Barbie is about as charming as they come. Greta Gerwig’s third major feature is a delightfully fizzy-pop comedic trip through two realities, gender politics, and the very nature of life itself. Gerwig doesn’t fully connect on every swing, but each idea is sharply observed if not always smoothly woven in. The movie’s (great) comedy breeds some distance between the audience and what Gerwig is saying, and the movie’s efforts to mock its own iconography are quite funny but block meaningful resolution. The film is at its most effective when the visual delivery of the ideas evinces a knowing chuckle from the viewer, as opposed to when the characters openly discuss them – you hear the word “patriarchy” quite often as a source of humor, but far funnier when the film lampoons it in its brilliantly witty visual style. Even if the movie doesn’t feel as cohesive as Oppenheimer in its viewpoint, it’s impossible to deny that it’s the result of a unique voice with a lot on her mind. All the actors are aligned with Gerwig’s singular vision, with Margot Robbie stepping into the role she was perhaps born to play, Ryan Gosling setting out to remind everyone how great and hilarious in both physicality and line delivery he is, and America Ferrera supplies a vital beating heart in her supporting role as a mother longing for meaning and connection.

Are They a Good Double-Feature? I think there’s a lot that connects these two movies besides their release date! Nolan’s 12th and Gerwig’s 4th (11th major and 3rd major, respectively) feature films see each writer-director-producer take an American icon that clearly had an impact on them and open a window onto themselves. There’s certainly a reading to be had of Oppenheimer as a representation of Nolan devoting his singular artistic blockbuster vision to Warner Bros, and potentially destroying non-franchise cinema in the pursuit of spectacle, only to fall out with them very publicly and see other imitators try and replace him. Greta Gerwig has had far shorter of a career as a filmmaker than Nolan and therefore doesn’t feel like she’s looking backwards and considering her impact on the artform, but her film’s recognition of how impossible it can feel to be a woman in the world also feels like her vocalizing expectations that she feels as one of the few female writer-directors of her profile. The buffoonish Mattel executive suite of Barbie and the oppressive hearing boards (yes there are multiple) of Oppenheimer might represent how each filmmaker views the studios they have had to deal with over the years, and in neither case is the picture pretty. Both films contain artifice that’s meant to increase perspective, whether it’s a Barbie doll leaving the idyllic hot pink world of Barbieland to provide perspective on our world in a fish-out-of-water sequence, or multiple layers of story and interrogation in Oppenheimer that reveal complexity and paranoia underscoring people’s motivations. To top it off, both films contain a reliance on old-school production design and practical visual effects that cut against the tendencies of big-budget Hollywood, resulting in both films getting every dollar onscreen in ways that are exciting, fresh, and unique to their creator.

Alternative Double-Features. For Oppenheimer, an easy choice is another Nolan film, and I’ve selected two. I think The Prestige was the last time Nolan took stock of his career like this, and that film is also quite dialogue driven. The other Nolan film would be Dunkirk, which is another WWII period piece from him that involves three colliding plot and timelines, but in stark contrast to Oppenheimer the dialogue is as sparse as possible. In terms of older films, you could do worse than to pair this film with other character-centric epics like Lawrence of Arabia (though I think that film is far superior), or maybe Patton given the WWII setting. As a portrayal of a genius, occasionally framed through another character’s experience, Amadeus is an excellent film that might go quite with this one, and The Theory of Everything is an example of a film that just wishes it were Oppenheimer. For more recent films from Nolan’s contemporaries, the cross-cutting between hearings and reconstructed events from a figure we’re meant to have mixed feelings about evokes David Fincher’s The Social Network, and early scenes in the undeveloped Los Alamos site evokes Daniel Plainview exploring Little Boston in There Will Be Blood – Ludwig Goransson even throws in creaky violins that sound like Johnny Greenwood’s score for that excellent film.

For Barbie, the obvious place to start is Gerwig’s limited filmography, and though Lady Bird’s comedic bent fits Barbie’s quite well, I think Little Women is probably the better match given its self-aware adaptation of existing material with a modern lens and the fact that the two share a similar ending. In terms of older films, I think that this would pair very well with Golden Age comedies that also have something on their minds – to name two of the best, His Girl Friday and Some Like It Hot. Gerwig also explicitly named The Truman Show as one of her influences, and what that film does for its entire runtime is like what the first 20-30 minutes of this film do. Of course, we can’t forget that this is ultimately an exploration and celebration of the legacy of a beloved toy, and much of the early scenes in “Barbieland” evoke the wit in the conceit and animation of The Lego Movie. For the emotional relationship between child and plaything you can’t do better than the Toy Story movies – Barbie and Ken both make an appearance in 3.

It'll be quite some time before we see another box office weekend that doesn’t feature a sequel like this one, or even like this one full stop. I’m worried that the studios will take the wrong lesson from this, and all recent headlines point towards Mattel wanting to make as many movies as possible as fast as possible, but for now Barbenheimer reigns supreme.