‘Barbie’ vs The A-Bomb
Barbie & Co. take on ‘Oppenheimer’ at the box office
This weekend pits a doll turned improbable movie star opposite an epic three-hour deadly serious biography of the scientist who created the atom bomb. With little in common, both pictures — “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — are expected to be hits.
Both features boast all-star casts. But for “Oppenheimer,” despite having A-listers like Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Robert Downey, Jr., the biggest “star” is its British writer-director Christopher Nolan who remains most famous for his Batman trilogy with Christian Bale and another Oscar-nominated historical piece “Dunkirk.”
Nolan’s well-known passion for telling this complex story accurately and in such detail easily marks “Oppenheimer” — played with an uncanny resemblance by Ireland’s Cillian Murphy — as this summer’s most serious moviegoing alternative.
That it arrives as a global release from Universal Pictures is a story in itself: Nolan had always been supported through his Hollywood career by Warner Bros. Until the pandemic arrived, when Hollywood freaked and a new regime at the venerable studio came to power and announced, in a move that alienated the entire industry, that all of its movies would only briefly be in theaters before streaming.
This was done without warning, much less without consulting any of the talent who had spent, literally, years on these movies. Nolan’s “Tenet” scored as a polarizing picture and, worse, a box-office dud. The irate filmmaker decamped for Universal.
“Barbie,” interestingly, is from WB. It takes the cultural cachet of a toy doll from the early Sixties and enshrines the Mattel product in a movie that is equally serious in its reverence for its subject as an iconic feminist.
Co-written and directed by
Greta Gerwig whose 2017 directing debut, the teen comedy “Lady Bird,” received raves and a Best Picture nomination (as did her 2019 adaptation of the 19th century feminist classic “Little Women”), “Barbie” is among those seemingly enchanted pictures that from the start are showered with keen curiosity and anticipation.
Part of that is the subject, a beloved toy that’s a key part of childhood for generations of little girls. And partly it’s due to today’s battered and shattered cultural landscape where there is little agreement on any cultural totems, including Disney and beer.
Casting Margot Robbie, who has an uncanny resemblance to the doll, insures that the fantasy film’s tone can be easily sustained with intelligence and wit. Gerwig, who turns 40 on Aug. 4, wrote the film with her longtime partner Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story” and the unfortunate “White Noise”).
Its celebrity cameos, Barbieinspired production design and costumes make for the sweetest of summer swizzles.