oppenheimer (w&d nolan, w. kai bird, martin sherwin) / barbie (w&d gerwig, w. baumbach)

Along with my co-writer, we did a double bill of Barbie and Oppenheimer at the Picturehouse. The audience for Oppenheimer was serious. The audience for Barbie was clearly there for a good night out. There was fancy dress and bottles of bubbly being taken in. Whoops and cheers, not such a British thing, greeted the opening titles. From the audience demographic it would have looked like these films had nothing in common. However….

Talking with my co-author’s partner after Oppenheimer, we came up with the term ‘intellectual popcorn’. Nolan has long been a prime purveyor of this, alongside, perhaps, Tarantino, Fincher, etc. Whilst the term sounds sniffy, it’s not meant to be. Cinema is a pretentious art. A  film has two, in this case three, hours to compress its intellectual discourse, whereas a book can play out over much more time, permitting a more nuanced exploration of the themes the author wants to tackle. Nolan is something of a master of the exploration of time, and he has explored this with a certain verve, investigating the aesthetics and physics of time in a way that is entertaining, luring a paying audience in to not only sit back, but also to think. The theme of physics is of course central to Oppenheimer, and the ambition of Nolan’s film can only be applauded. Who else is managing to make big budget films about dead physicists?

Gerwig has been criticised for selling out, as Barbie is a film about a toy manufacturer’s product, which is also financed by said manufacturer. On paper this sounds awful, and when said manufacturer’s logo appears in the titles, it’s even more disconcerting. However, Gerwig and screenwriter, Baumbach, are more than smart enough to be aware of the feminist discourse around Barbie, and dolls in general. They turn this into the meat and drink of the film itself, which is a softcore intellectual thesis on contemporary feminism, the patriarchy and also, slyly, the crisis of masculinity in the late patriarchal age.

As such, both films feel a bit like being given a lecture on their respective topics by a trendy professor. Gerwig’s effort is far more aware of this, and therefor more playful and ultimately, to this viewer, effective. Both seek to drown the discourse in aesthetics. In Nolan’s case, the key drivers are the frenetic edit and the relentless score, along with the use of slightly mannered cameos from the likes of Oldman and Affleck, C. In Gerwig’s case, the key driver is art design: the cheesecake tones of the Barbie aesthetic which is then contrasted with the washed out tones of ‘the real world’. (Is California really the real world?) Both employ a device at the start of the movie which they soon drop: Oppenheimer using abstract visuals to represent the complexities of the physicist’s brain; Gerwig using the acid tones of Mirren as a narrator, who soon largely disappears, save for one acerbic and on-point zinger, a zinger that perhaps highlights the weaknesses of Gerwig’s neo-feminist standpoint, when Mirren pops up to comment on the fact that Margot Robbie’s almost artificial beauty is in no way representative of the ‘normal’ female.

Neither film is particularly good at what might be described as emotional intelligence. Gerwig introduces some ‘normal’ people to seek to root her story in a more mundane reality, which half-works, half-doesn’t. (The cheesy husband cameo being the best example of this). These aren’t real people, they are ciphers in an intellectual argument, who are there to do exactly this, as both mother and daughter articulate with great clarity the apparent feminist thesis of the film, hitting nail effectively, if heavily, on head. Nolan’s Oppenheimer remains an aloof presence. Supposedly a bon viveur and a loose cannon, attributes which lead him to flirt with communism and therefore become his Achilles heel in the McCarthy era, he becomes ever more sphinx like as the film progresses, almost drifting into the background of his own story. Robert Downey Jr, as his supposed antagonist, starts to take over, despite having been a secondary character in the first two acts. (Act 1, Oppenheimer’s development as scientist; Act 2, Los Alamos; Act 3, post-war vilification.) The intriguing story of Oppenheimer’s relationship with a suicidal Communist party member feels like a contrived attempt to humanise the distant scientist, and her character, played by Pugh, is brushed off lightly. More than anything, one comes away with the sense of a film trying to bite off more than it can chew, with the manic edit supposed to be a propulsive force but ending up giving the film the feel of a never-ending montage sequence, punctuated by one little Atomic bomb.

On balance it felt as though Gerwig’s intellectual popcorn exercise was more effective than Nolan’s. In a way both films are just as laudably pretentious, but Gerwig shows more self-awareness, wearing her discourse on her sleeve, and this permits her film to feel less heavy-handed. Nolan’s film feels as though it is striving to achieve a transcendence which it will never attain, and the underlying issues of the film, the heavy shit which audiences don’t want to share with their popcorn, (nuclear war, the arms race, the possibility of mass destruction) are roller-skated over. In spite of myself I couldn’t help but think about Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, another film which addresses the horror of nuclear war in a roundabout way, which one suspects Nolan watched and borrowed from, but one which achieves an altogether more harrowing and emotional bond with its public, even if that public is unlikely to be watching the film whilst munching popcorn. In a similar way, for all the ingenuity of Gerwig and Baumbach’s film, one doesn’t come away feeling as though the patriarchal order has been shaken by its roots. One comes away thinking that this is a nice enough film which little girls will enjoy as much as the adults and will help to sell merchandise which is the prime reason for the financiers to have sought out Gerwig to direct a film about their product. This is where high-end Hollywood is at: making films which seek to find a way to infiltrate mainstream society with some kind of intellectual discourse, but, recognising this is a Sisyphean task, veer towards smart, sassy or bombastic filmmaking that they hope will please the crowd, as both of these films clearly have done.

the other side of hope (w&d aki kaurismäki)

Kaurismäki’s latest film addresses Europe’s most topical subject. Khaled is an Afghani refugee who has stowed away on a boat shipping coal to Helsinki. After various misadventures he finally finds a home for himself working in the restaurant of Wilkstrom, a lugubrious but well-intentioned man. The restaurant is a haven for Khaled, where common humanity is the only thing that matters. There are several appearances at different moments of ageing rockabillies playing their tunes. These moments chime with a vision of the world which is determined by a down-to-earth humanism. (If you wanted to pursue the roots of this music, you would probably go via Presley to Chuck Berry or Muddy Waters and then back to slave music that arrived in the US, thereby meaning it belongs to a consciousness where nationalism is an irretrievably nostalgic concept, where regionalism is nothing more than a memory; meaning the players have been left with no option but to adopt a more universal perspective.) Kaurismäki, as is well known, uses this music and its Finnish aficionados as a kind of touchstone for his warm, fuzzy vision, something which complements his dry humour. Deadpan humour, from Beckett to Tati, is one of the world’s most universally understood codes. This helps to lend his films their appeal, making Kaurismäki one of those rare filmmakers (and the only Finnish one) to have generated a worldwide following. 

All of which means that The Other Side of Hope, marrying the filmmaker’s deadpan, cross-border appeal with an up-to-the-minute themed narrative, sounds like a surefire winner. However, whilst there are many affecting and entertaining moments in the film, and the two leads Sherwan Haji & Sakari Kuosmanen give notable performances, the lack of any real narrative development means that it feels as though it never really gets out of second gear. There’s a B-story involving the fate of Khaled’s sister, but this is resolved so easily that one wonders what all the fuss was about. A narrative about this issue has to tread a delicate line between resisting an urge to preach, whilst at the same time never over-simplifying things. There’s a moment when Khaled explains why he had to leave Afghanistan, which has real power in its simplicity, but thereafter the film feels as though it doesn’t really do Khaled’s story justice. For all its good intentions, The Other Side of Hope ends up feeling like a slightly uneasy foray into social realism from a director whose forte is creating a heightened world which teeters on the brink of credibility. 

certain women [w&d kelly reichardt]

Reichardt’s movie has that neat trick of putting high wattage stars in low wattage roles. Dern, Stewart and Williams play underwhelming, small-town figures in three very loosely connected vignettes. Their stories are whimsical and ephemeral. There’s no great drama, indeed in the Williams strand there’s barely any drama at all. The film is more concerned with the process of observation. A precise study of a few women in a particular moment of their lives. Of the three stories the film consists of, the third is by far the most compelling. This the Stewart strand. Perhaps this benefits from the fact that Stewart herself isn’t the predominant character. Rather it’s Lily Gladstone, playing a ranchhand who looks after horses and develops a crush on Stewart’s lawyer. In contrast to the other two stories, this one has a sense of development and pathos. Reichardt’s pacing is deliberately slow, and this rhythm comes into its own in the shots of Gladstone going about her work as she looks after the horses. We understand the tedium and loneliness of her life and engage completely with her sudden passion for Stewart. It’s a lovely performance and the advantages of letting the camera linger, and letting the narrative breathe, helping to accentuate the performance, come through. It feels as though, in the other two strands, Reichardt is reaching for this level of transcendence, without quite achieving it. Certain Women is only a frustrating film in so far as it hints at the possibility of something more profound than the film it eventually became.