Why pick Barbie or Oppenheimer when you can do both?
It began as an internet joke. Barbie and Oppenheimer were both scheduled to open on July 21st. Wouldn’t it be weird to watch both of them back-to-back?
Counter-programming is a long tradition among film distributors. Whenever there’s a big “boy” movie, like The Dark Knight, someone with a “girl” movie, like Mamma Mia!, will schedule it for release the same weekend. The theory behind “Dark Mamma” (which really happened in 2008) is that maybe girlfriends and grandmas who are not into Batman can be scraped off of a family outing by the promise of something they would actually like.
By that logic, the hot pink good cheer of Barbie is the perfect foil for the dark, brooding Oppenheimer. No one expected the audience reaction to be “Let’s do both!” Maybe that’s because the studio execs’ conception of who their audiences are and what they want is deeply flawed and out-of-date.
On the surface, the two films couldn’t be more different. But there are a lot of parallels. Both Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig are writer/directors with exceptional track records. Both got essentially free rein to do what they wanted. In Nolan’s case, it was because Universal wanted to lure him away from Warner Bros. In Gerwig’s case, the film was greenlit just before the pandemic and Warner Bros.’ takeover by Discovery. In the chaos, executives focused on rescuing The Flash, and no one cared enough about “the girl movie” to interfere with Gerwig’s vision.
Both films are, relatively speaking, mid-budget. Nolan kept the ship tight at $100 million; Gerwig ended up spending $145 million. For comparison, Marvel films can’t even roll camera for less than $200 million, and Warner Bros. will lose $200 million on The Flash alone. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny cost an eye-watering $295 million after Covid delays.
More unexpected parallels emerge on screen. Both main characters face a reckoning for what they brought into the world. In J. Robert Oppenheimer’s case, it’s the atomic bomb. In Barbie’s case, it’s unrealistic expectations of female perfection.
In her Memphis Flyer review of Barbie, Kailynn Johnson writes, “The idea of a doll visiting the real world and learning to adjust to a life that’s not so fantastic was always in the cards for Barbie — the 2000 movie Life-Size starring Tyra Banks walked so Gerwig could run with Barbie. As she is catcalled by construction workers in Venice Beach, Barbie realizes misogyny did not end with Supreme Court Barbie. She suffers an existential crisis when she realizes that her very brand is determined by an all-male team led by Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell). … Gerwig uses Barbie to explore the nuances of feminism, but the film never feels too heavy or takes itself too seriously. She carefully sandwiches some of the deeper moments with satire. It helps that Mattel isn’t afraid to laugh at itself.”
Barbie may have benefitted from low expectations from those who were unfamiliar with Gerwig’s near-perfect filmography, but expectations couldn’t have been higher for Nolan, the inheritor of Stanley Kubrick’s “Very Serious Filmmaker” mantle. Big, complex, and messy, Oppenheimer doesn’t lack for ambition. I wrote in my review, “The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientists’ queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done. … If only the whole movie were that great.”
The weekend box office results exceeded everyone’s expectations. Barbie raked in $162 million domestically — the biggest opening haul of the year, and the biggest ever by a female director. Oppenheimer did $82 million, a stunning result for a talky three-hour movie about nuclear physics. Overall, it was the fourth-largest grossing weekend in film history.
Viewers who rolled their own Barbenheimer double feature on some internet dare to experience the most intense psychic whiplash possible found two well-made movies, each with their own voice and something to say. Instead of competition, these two films have lifted each other up and inspired real conversation. The tribal question of “which one is better?” has, so far, been secondary. (It’s Barbie, FWIW.)
In Hollywood, unexpected success is more upsetting than unexpected failure. The public’s embrace of original, creative, filmmaker-driven pictures over legacy franchises systematically drained of originality by cowardly executives is now undeniable. As the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes grind on, and the studios plot to break the creatives’ will, audiences have sent a clear message about who is necessary and who is expendable.
Barbenheimer (Barbie + Oppenheimer) Now playing Multiple locations
When it was announced that a Barbie movie was in the works, it’s safe to say that one of the questions that crossed everyone’s mind was “Why?”
Barbie’s dream universe has covered everything from nutcrackers to mermaid lore, and it seemed like Barbara Millicent Roberts was past her prime. The Y2K aesthetic only made room for Bratz dolls, and the meme-ification of American Girl dolls transformed them from status symbols to internet mainstays. Meanwhile, the opinion of feminist scholars who had long criticized Barbie for the outrageous beauty standards she perpetuated had gone mainstream. Girls still love their dolls, but Barbie’s star has burned out.
My interest was piqued when I heard Greta Gerwig would be tasked with telling Barbie’s story. The plot has been kept tightly under wraps, with rumors ranging from a Wizard of Oz-esque storyline to something like The Truman Show. Those rumors were not entirely wrong, but Barbie exists as its own film.
From the beginning, it’s evident that the film is a meta-narrative, which adds to the satirical charm. Helen Mirren narrates Barbie’s zeitgeist origin story in a 2001 Space Odyssey-themed sequence, in which she explains that the Barbie doll was created for girls to aspire to something other than motherhood. Barbie is aware of her existence in the world, and aware of the impact that she has had on society as a trailblazing role model for career-minded women. As Mirren notes in her narration, Barbie has solved all the problems of feminism and equality – or at least, that’s the lore in Barbieland.
Margot Robbie stars as the Stereotypical Barbie. She lives in Barbieland with an endless array of Barbie variants, such as Doctor Barbie (Hari Nef), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp) and President Barbie (Issa Rae), who preside over this matriarchal democracy.
Many Barbies live in Barbieland. But only Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie has flat feet.
Then we meet the Kens, who are just as varied as the Barbies, only less cool. Ryan Gosling’s iteration of Barbie’s companion lists “beach” as his profession. But it’s not easy being a Ken. Mirren explains that while Barbie has a great day every day, Ken has a great day only if Barbie looks at him.
Barbie’s perpetual string of great days takes a turn for the worse when she brings one of her nightly blowout parties/soundstage musical numbers to a record-scratch halt when she blurts out, “Do you ever think about dying?” The next morning, she wakes up with bad breath, falls out of her dream house, and discovers that her feet have gone flat. Realizing that something is wrong, she pays a visit to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who explains that the only way for Barbie to restore her perfect tiptoe and avoid cellulite is to trade in her heels for Birkenstocks and take a trip to the real world. Since Ken only exists as an ornamental addition to Barbie’s iconography, he joins her on the journey to reality, where they make discoveries that pose an existential threat to Barbieland’s women-run utopia.
Good morning, Barbieland!
The idea of a doll visiting the real world and learning to adjust to a life that’s not so fantastic was always in the cards for Barbie – the 2000 movie Life Size starring Tyra Banks walked so Robbie could run with Barbie. As she is catcalled by construction workers in Venice Beach, Barbie realizes misogyny did not end with Supreme Court Barbie. She suffers an existential crisis when she realizes that her very brand is determined by an all-male team led by Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell.)
Gerwig uses Barbie to explore the nuances of feminism, but the film never feels too heavy or takes itself too seriously. It helps that Mattel isn’t afraid to laugh at itself, like the recurring joke where Midge (Emerald Fennell), a pregnant version of Barbie that was deeply unpopular with kids, is banished to Skipper’s Treehouse. Gerwig’s attention to detail and dedication to the source material not only satiates a longing for nostalgia, but also showcases her intentionality. Since no child ever made a doll take the stairs in her Dream House, these Barbies float through the air from bedroom to dream car. Gerwig makes that floaty feeling last.
In 1985, when Don DeLillo wrote his acclaimed novel White Noise, it was considered an absurdist comedy. When you’re watching Noah Baumbach’s 2022 film adaptation of White Noise, you will have moments of startling deja vu. What was considered over-the-top crazy in 1985 is now just stuff that happens in everyday life.
DeLillo’s “hero,” if you want to call him that, is Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a prominent professor of “Hitler Studies” at a Midwestern liberal arts college. Both he and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) are on their fourth marriages, so their four children live in an extremely mixed family. Luckily, the kids seem to get along well, bonded by their shared love of televised disasters. Plane crashes, floods, fires — the deadlier the better, says this household of typical viewers.
But disasters are only fun to watch at a safe remove. When they’re actually happening to you, it’s a different story. A few miles from the Gladney residence, a drunken trucker accidentally rams his tanker into a train full of chemicals. At first, Jack doesn’t believe the “airborne toxic event” is going to be a problem. Desperate evacuations to grubby refugee camps is something that happens to people in Haiti, not affluent Midwesterners. Even the frantic call from a National Guard truck to “evacuate immediately!” is an annoyance because it comes in the middle of dinner.
Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle deliver performances that hit a little too close for comfort in this absurdist comedy.
For those of us who just lived through the pandemic, the Airborne Toxic Event feels like prophecy. The authorities can’t even agree on what to call it at first, and the name they settle on is comically ambiguous. The ever-changing signs of exposure to the toxic cloud include vague things like “unexplained deja vu” — when Steffie (May Nivola) experiences tingling in her extremities, Heinrich (Sam Nivola) accuses her of experiencing “outdated symptoms.” Even the anticlimactic end of the event seems familiar. One day, everyone is just allowed back to their homes, and not much else is said about the whole affair.
For his 11th film, Baumbach has taken on an extremely high degree of difficulty in adapting a beloved, but prickly, literary masterpiece. He leans heavily on Driver, who delivers with his usual intensity. You might not think “team teaching a college class on the parallels between Hitler and Elvis” sounds like good fodder for a cinematic experience, but Driver and Don Cheadle, who plays Jack’s frenemy professor Murray, make it riveting.
Gerwig and Baumbach are a couple, and judging from Lady Bird and Little Women, she is every bit his equal as a director. (Her $100 million Barbie movie drops next summer.) Babette gets pushed aside, in favor of Jack’s comically exaggerated narcissism. During her big scene, in which she confesses her drug addiction and affair, a stunned Jack can only repeat, “This is not Babette’s purpose.” DeLillo intended Jack to be an affectionate parody of the many “white guys who teach college” protagonists of literary novelists like Raymond Carver and John Irving. But after the Trump era, his unexamined selfishness seems uglier, and less funny.
Even though Jack and Babette’s lives continue to become more surreal and more complex, the film never really matches the energy of the A.T.E. I often quote the Hitchcock adage that mediocre books make the best movies. Works of literary genius that depend on wordsmithery usually get lost in translation. (Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is the exception that proves the rule.) Baumbach’s White Noise is dense and wordy. He creates some unlikely thrilling moments. I’m not sure what it all means, or if it holds together, but I do know that I’m still thinking about it, and I want to watch it again.
The March sisters: Meg (Emma Watson), Amy (Florence Pugh), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), and Beth (Eliza Scanlen)
For Never Seen It, I convince someone interesting to catch up on a classic (or maybe not so classic) film they’ve missed, then we talk about it. This time around, I got the boss, Anna Traverse Fogle, CEO of the Flyer‘s parent company Contemporary Media, to watch director Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which was 19 on my list of the 25 Best Films of the 2010s. Our quite lengthy conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Chris McCoy: What do you know about Little Women?
Anna Traverse Fogle: Book or movie?
Chris: More like, what is your relationship with Little Women?
Anna: I remember reading the book when I was a fairly young person myself. I was one of those kids who the librarians would laugh at because I would walk up to the librarian’s desk with a foot-tall stack of books. And they’re like, “You’re not going to read all of those, little girl.” And I was like, “You watch me.” I was pretty young, which means both that it made something of an impression on me, and also that I don’t remember it all that well. I remember the characters to some extent. I remember liking the beginning, and I remember it kind of losing my interest at some point. When I was in the earlier portions of the book, I was more like, “These are characters I can relate to.” And then as they got older, I think maybe I couldn’t relate as much. I certainly remember thinking of them — this is a child’s perception — but sort of in the same way that I had a relationship with a character than, like, the Laura Ingles Wilder books. I was not thinking about them critically, but thinking more in terms of who am I the most like. Whose personality traits do I want to be? So I was thinking about it in that very inner kind of way.
Chris: I think for a lot of girls, for a long time, the question of which of the March sisters you’re like was kind of like which of the Hogwarts houses you belong to.
Anna: Or which of the Sex and the City girls you relate to. And somehow, once you have identified which archetype of young woman you are, then you will understand other pieces of information that you would like to have about yourself.
Chris: Okay. Let’s do this.
Acting!
135 minutes later…
Chris: Anna Traverse Fogle, you are now someone who has seen Little Women. What did you think?
Anna: I mean, it’s changed me as a person.
Chris: Okay! That’s great!
Anna: It brought back more of the book that I realized was still in my head. Although I don’t know enough that I could speak to the distinctions between book and film. I don’t remember that the book did any of the temporal switching, which I found … I kind of got around it over the course of things. But you know, I’m a sleep-deprived, addle-minded person today. There were a few moments in the beginning when I was like, where are we? Then I clued in. I mostly liked that, but I did find it took a little bit of getting used to for me.
Chris: I think that was the big thing [director] Greta [Gerwig] brought to it, because she was hired to write the screenplay. And when [producer Amy Pascal] read the screenplay, and then saw Lady Bird, she was like, “Yeah, you should just direct it.”
Anna: I thought it ended up working really well — and added texture. It made it something other than just, “Let’s try to do a somewhat faithful adaptation of a much-beloved book.” It made it feel more like something that made sense as a film. That’s not something I think would have worked as well in any other format. In terms of, how do we re-imagine this novel as a film, that, to me, really made it something that felt like a work of cinema, and not like, “Let’s sit around and talk about how I like the book better. Well yes, of course everybody likes the book better. This made them operate more like independent works of art.”
United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson
Chris: You’re gonna have to cut a whole lot from the book no matter what you do. I think the genius of the way she structured it is that you don’t realize what’s gone until it’s over.
Anna: Right. Because you aren’t watching it unfold from beginning to end. It turns it into this kaleidoscopic experience where it’s like, now I’m here, now I’m here, now I’m here. So you’re getting all of these elements, but you aren’t like “Oh gosh, They left out that bit I remember really well from the book,” because it’s coming at you in a different sequence.
Chris: She really handled the transitions so well. I mean, you’re a writer and editor. You know what a hard job that was.
Anna: Yeah, no kidding. And again, this is going to go back to how very long it’s been since I read the book, but I feel like there are some elements of the book that everybody probably remembers that she ended up having to decide, that’s not going to make it into the film because that’s going to take us off into some other direction that isn’t going to work. But I thought in terms of the spirit of the characters, it very much captured each one of their personas.
Chris: The casting just could not be better.
Anna: If you had some mental image of these characters in your head from when you read Little Women when you were 12, these people somehow are them. The casting job has to be really good if Meryl Streep is there, and you’re sort of like, “Oh yeah, this is Meryl Streep.”
Chris: She’s an important character, but not one that you actually see all that much of, relatively speaking.
Anna: She’s not stealing it. Nor does she want to. She’s someone who can be that character.
Chris: Aunt March is so great, and I love how Greta deploys her because this can be a saccharine or at least a very sweet story. But whenever it starts to get too sweet, you get a little bit of Aunt March. She literally one time says, “I’m so sick of this,” and rolls her eyes and walks off.
Anna: Right! If things are getting a little bit too sentimental, and isn’t it great, and they love each other so much and blah blah blah … Well, let me give you some witty rejoinder and caustic remark. And then we can return to what we’re here to do.
Chris: Her job is to take the piss out of the thing.
Meryl Streep takes no guff as Aunt March.
Chris: I personally am a Jo, even as a guy. Because she’s a writer.
Anna: I mean, she is such a writer, and I have to say, perfect for my little literary slash editor slash book junkie heart. Before I was working in media, I did a stint as an undergrad as a very, very low-level helper person at the University Press. All of these things combined to make these scenes of the book creation process so meaningful. When Jo’s locking herself in the attic, as someone who writes, I both understand what impels her to do that, and I can never imagine having a moment in my life when I can give into it. Who has that kind of time, to lock themselves in an attic for several days and write reams of pages? I liked the great shots of all of the pages she’s got lined up on on the floor. And then later when the book is being put through the printing press and assembled and stitched and the cover is being attached to it, I was like …
Chris: Oh yeah! The book-binding montage just killed me this time.
Anna: It made me wish that, instead of cooking shows, there would just be shows about, “Now I’m going to put together a book and show you how.”
Chris: I would so watch that.
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle (3)
Chris: The only casting that pulls me out of it is Bob Odenkirk as the dad. I mean, he’s great, but …
Anna: The character is a little out of place.
Chris: Nobody cares about the dad. We get to know this group of people as a self-sustaining entity, and then all of a sudden, “Oh, he’s back!”
Anna: Marmee has a husband, and they have a father, and he’s in the house. But he’s a little bit like, wandering over to the corners, like “Where do I fit here after all of this?” I guess that was actually the way it was meant to be.
Chris: Yeah, I agree with that. At one point in my note — you know, I take note, because I’m a pro-fessional — I have “0.0% male gaze” … This is a movie made by women, about women, for women.
Bob Odenkirk as Father March
Anna: You’re probably right that it’s for women. I’d be curious to look at the gender breakdown of the theatrical audiences. I have a sense that if you’re in an opposite sex relationship, probably more women were dragging their male partners to see it than vice versa. Maybe that’s just my assumption.
Chris: I think when I saw it in the theater that I was the only male there. [Laughter] I loved it, though, because it’s such a perfect movie. There’s not a wasted scene.
Anna: I had a few moments where I felt like it almost felt like the actors were clearly people in 2019 speaking the dialogue of people 150 years ago. It didn’t happen very often. For the most part, it felt very natural coming out of their mouths.
Chris: Well, the naturalism of the acting comes from mumblecore. Greta Gerwig came up from the American DIY underground. She was an actress in Joe Swanberg movies. That’s the only thing to really survive from that movement, how the dialogue overlaps. That’s very modern, very Robert Altman.
Anna: I did notice the people talking over each other. It felt very natural. Of course people who happen to be living in the 19th century wouldn’t magically have always waited their turn in line to speak, especially if they’re in a room full of their families. But I think that’s often how our film versions of novels, or just films that are set in quote unquote “the olden days.” You know, I say my nicely crafted line and then give you sufficient air space to say your nicely crafted line, and we just go back and forth. Nobody talks like that. I doubt people ever have. I love the sense that the dialogue really felt like spoken dialogue.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn
Chris: She has fun with it. So many of these classic works, I think when people approach them, they are kind of intimidated by them. They’re like, “I have to have a reverence for this work.” And it sucks the fun out of it. You see that in lit classes all the time. But all these women are having just a blast. It shows in a movie, to me, when the actors are actually having fun.
Anna: I have to think this was probably so refreshing for everyone involved. This goes back to what you were saying about the absence of the male gaze. I’m sure that translated every day they were on set. Like how are we going to put this thing together? I don’t know, but we’re gonna figure it out and we are not being subjected to anybody’s opinion but ours. We don’t have to feel the burden of that set of expectations, and let it play out in the way that feels natural.
Chris: And nobody’s gonna get naked. Timothée Chalamet, who is Laurie, he’s the babe in this movie — the man-bimbo.
Himbo Timothée Chalamet as Theodore ‘Laurie’ Laurence.
Anna: If anything, there is a little bit of the opposite of male gaze there. It’s like, “Okay, yeah here’s this guy. He’s going to be the love interest. But let’s not actually make him too interesting or too engaging.” He always feels a little bit, frankly, not quite up to par.
Chris: He’s a drunken lout for about half the movie.
Anna: Well, there is that. But like once he’s not, he still feels a little bit like he wants to be on their level, but he’s not.
Chris: Yeah, there’s a feeling that Amy settles, even though she says she’s been in love with him the whole time.
Anna: He didn’t always quite realize that. It did feel a little bit like she was thinking, “Okay, well, I guess I need to make something happen. So here’s this guy I’ve known for a long time. I guess it’s kind of in the cards, so here we go.” Jo, of course, is like, “I think I would be perfectly happy never to marry. Well, it’s not perfectly happy, but maybe that’s my destiny. I can accept that, and I can do other things. I could have interesting pursuits, and I can craft a life for myself.” I think having that level of understanding and independence and ability makes it easier for her to forge a path.
Chris: She is sort of a proto-modern woman. She’s the one that you can relate to the most from the 21st century, because she wants to have a career.
Anna: That’s not going to be an either/or proposition for her, between having a career and having love interests she pursues. I think in any scenario, she takes the career, if it becomes an either/or thing. That’s not something that was all that acceptable. We talk about the 21st century, but if it becomes an either/or thing between finding someone marriageable or having an interesting and fulfilling career … Well, it is certainly not an assumption for everybody that women are going to necessarily pick the career.
Chris: That’s the point of Amy’s speech. The actress who plays Amy is Florence Pugh, and that speech, “Marriage is an economic proposition,” she plays it to perfection.
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle (2)
Anna: That felt so finely crafted and yet quite believable that that would be coming out of her mouth exactly the way it emerged. It would have been perfect if she had delivered that in any format. It’s something that, if she prepared to send in a letter, and labored over it for hours, she could not have done better.
Chris: That was such a moment of absolute, deep-down clarity. I think she sees herself better than Jo sees herself. For all of Amy’s faults, and you could say that she’s a retrograde or reactive character, but she understands herself better than anybody else in the whole story.
Anna: I mean she seems to be someone who was like, “Okay, look I’m not I’m not at the same level that you know that Jo is, but I’ve got this going for me, and I can make these decisions, and I think I can make this work.” I think that comes along over the course of things. Part of the beauty of that speech is that you’ve seen some of it developing in her, but at that moment you’re like, “Okay. Yeah. This is exactly how she’s thinking.”
Chris: And also, that line Laurie has right before the speech, “What women are allowed into the club of geniuses?” That really rings.
Anna: But in his case, it’s an accidental truth, know what I mean?
Jo and Laurie take a walk in the New England countryside.
Chris: Would you recommend this movie to other people?
Anna: Yeah, I totally would. I had fully intended to see this movie when it came out and didn’t. I will tell you I don’t go to that many movies in the theater, so for me even to have considered the possibility of going is an indication that I was quite interested. Honestly, most of the movies we were going to see in the theater are something in the Marvel universe with my stepson. But yeah, I would absolutely recommend it to really anybody. It’s easy to say that, if you happen to fall into a similar demographic as me, or if you’re interested in feminism, blah blah blah … And yes, this is a movie for you if you just like New England and autumn! It made me really miss living in Massachusetts.
Chris: How long did you live in Massachusetts?
Anna: Only three years. I was in grad school up there, but felt very at home. I lived in the Boston metro area, but it’s so easy to drive into those little towns where the fall is the most beautiful fall you’ve ever seen. There’s just something about that you can’t duplicate anywhere else. There were a few moments where I was like, “Oh gosh yes, I need to go back to New England in the fall.”
Never Seen It: Watching Little Women with Contemporary Media CEO Anna Traverse Fogle
Who could have foreseen that, in the year 2020, I would prefer an adaptation of Little Women over the latest Star Wars movie? Five years ago, it would have sounded outlandish. And yet, here we are.
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel, has been adapted for the screen seven times, most recently in 1994 by director Gillian Armstrong. This time, it was at the hands of Greta Gerwig, who was originally hired by producer Amy Pascal to write the screenplay before her success with Lady Bird got her into the director’s chair. Gerwig turned out to be the right woman at the right time. Making a film for 21st-century audiences out of a manuscript written during the aftermath of the Civil War is a daunting high-wire walk. One false step and you fall into boring, staid, or offensive.
Eliza Scanlen, Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, and Florence Pugh as the March sisters in Little Women.
The key turns out to be Gerwig’s screenwriting. Little Women is groundbreaking in its proto-feminist, social realistic depiction of the everyday lives of girls, but its structure is conventionally linear. Gerwig’s first stroke of genius is to cut up the story and rearrange the scenes to put the themes and callbacks into sharp relief. She also added the meta-story of the writing and publishing of the book, using material from Alcott’s biography and personal letters. Far from being a florid, 19th-century slog, the dialogue is crisp and quotable, beginning with the epilogue from Alcott: “I’ve had a lot of troubles, so I wrote jolly tales.”
“I can’t afford to starve on praise” sounds like a common lament of millennial gig workers. “What women are allowed into the club of geniuses?” would fit neatly into a tweet by a feminist firebrand. And what young person can’t relate to “I want to be great, or nothing!”
What’s undeniably genius is the way Gerwig has reshuffled the deck. For this writer, watching her pull off one impossible transition after another — juxtaposing weddings and funerals, cosmopolitan Paris and small-town Connecticut, a drunken reel and a formal dance — was worth the price of admission.
For most audiences, the casting takes paramount importance. The four March sisters are the prototypical American girls, the category you identified with before you figured out which Hogwarts house you would be put into by the Sorting Hat. Speaking of which, the oldest sister, Meg, is played by Hermione Granger herself, Emma Watson.
For the role of Jo, the book’s point-of-view character and Alcott’s stand-in, previously played by the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Winona Ryder, Gerwig tapped Saoirse Ronan. If you’ve seen her as a plucky Irish immigrant in 2015’s Brooklyn, you know she’s perfect for the role of the whip-smart second sister whose most fervent wish (after becoming a famous writer) is to keep the family together.
Florence Pugh plays Amy, the third sister who becomes Jo’s rival for the affections of their neighbor Theodore “Laurie” Laurence (Timothée Chalamet, also perfectly cast). The radiant Eliza Scanlen plays the youngest sister, Beth, as a wide-eyed innocent.
Gerwig’s ensemble also includes Laura Dern as Marmee March, who gets to deliver the immortal line “I’m angry every day,” and Meryl Streep as the marvelously flinty Aunt March. The one time I was thrown out of the narrative was when the March sisters’ absent father returned from war, and I involuntarily whispered “Cool! It’s Bob Odenkirk!”
Little Women is a four-headed Bildungsroman (one of my all-time favorite words; it means “a novel dealing with a person’s formative years”). What began as a children’s book for girls has grown over the years into a Rorschach test for femininity, and each new interpreter decides what contemporary audiences would like to see emphasized. Gerwig’s inclusion of Marmee’s line, “I’m angry every day,” is at the heart of her interpretation. Alcott’s characters go through the full gamut of emotions. Gerwig starts off with joy, restaging her famous run through the streets of New York from Frances Ha with Jo. There is love — both agape and amore — and anxiety. But the anger of being second-class citizens has always lurked in the background of Alcott’s book. What elevates Gerwig’s film above other versions of the story is that these Little Women are allowed to be fully human.
When you’re a film critic, you have to watch a lot of crap. It’s right there in the job description: I watch crap so you don’t have to. But what I don’t think I was prepared for was the sheer shoddiness of some of the films I see. I’m not talking about the kind of corner-cutting you see on low-budget pictures. I’m talking about poor craftsmanship in studio blockbusters. You’d think if you’re spending $200 million on a production, you would at least care enough to make it look good on screen. It’s disheartening to see stuff like Transformers: The Last Knight, where the special effects finale included terrible composite jobs and recycled stock footage. If they don’t care about their product, why should I?
That’s one of the reasons critics like Wes Anderson. His work can be truly great, like The Royal Tennenbaums or Moonrise Kingdom; or divisive, like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or head-scratchingly misguided, like The Darjeeling Limited. But at least it’s never shoddy. Even when it doesn’t work, you can tell he and his team are paying attention to detail, making each individual shot look the best it can.
I guess what I’m saying is, in my reviews, even if you fail, you get points for honestly trying — and deductions for cynical, advertising-driven cash grabs that are directly proportional to the size of your budget. So when I see a film that is both as lovingly crafted and as emotionally resonant as Isle of Dogs, I’m gonna praise it like it was Medicare for All.
Wes Anderson celebrates his love for dogs and Japanese culture in Isle of Dogs.
This film is about two things: Anderson’s love of dogs, and his love of Japanese culture. Isle of Dogs‘ prologue is a Noh drama about “a little samurai” lovingly staged in flawless stop motion, complete with black-clad stagehands the audience is trained to ignore. Right from the beginning, Anderson uses layers and layers of artifice stacked together to reach for something higher. But his little curlicues, which have in the past threatened to overwhelm the bigger picture, are here focused on the story. The Noh bit sets up the history of the powerful, cat-loving Kobayashi family before flashing forward to the near future, where Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) rules fictional Megasaki City. The mayor uses the cover of a dog flu epidemic to banish all of the city’s dogs to Trash Island, which prompts his ward Atari (Koyu Rankin) to steal an airplane and fly to rescue his beloved pet, Spots (Liev Schreiber).
Atari’s landing skills are not great, so he quickly finds himself needing a rescue. Fortunately, he’s found by a pack of heroic dogs, voiced by Anderson regulars: Chief (Bryan Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Bill Murray), and Duke (Jeff Goldblum). They take the “Little Pilot” under their paws and help him navigate treacherous Trash Island in search of his lost dog. Meanwhile, Professor Watanabe (Akira Ito) and his assistant Yoko Ono (voiced by the actual Yoko Ono) search for a cure to dog flu, and an American exchange student named Tracy (Greta Gerwig) uses her school newspaper to unseat Mayor Kobayashi.
Anderson careens from one incredible set piece to another. Professor Watanabe’s lab comes right out of a Toho production like The Mysterians. The director uses Kobayashi’s brief visit to a sumo match as an excuse to create a fully realized arena tableau that echoes Raging Bull. The island where most of the adventure plays out provides endlessly varied environments, from orderly stacks of cubes made from compacted trash to a slimy toxic wasteland. Our canine heroes hide out in a hut made of discarded saki bottles that provide a luminous and colorful background. Unlike the finely polished (and criminally overlooked) Kubo and the Two Strings, Anderson foregrounds the stop motion process — like King Kong; the dogs’ fur is in constant motion, disturbed by the animator’s unseen fingers. But there are also some spectacular effects, such as when characters eyes well with artificial tears.
Anderson loves nothing more than making self-contained worlds that play by their own internal rules. But there’s an underlying melancholy to his work. His orderly creations are a way to provide escape from the chaos and pain of the real world, if only for a couple of hours. Isle of Dogs is twee as you would expect from Anderson making a movie about dogs, but the underlying hurt is much closer to the surface here than in an idyl like Moonrise Kingdom, and that gives it a fairy-tale vibe. This is a kids movie that knows the kids can handle the darkness better than the grown ups.
In America, it was the worst of times, but inside the multiplex, it was the best of times. Mega-blockbusters faltered, while an exceptional crop of small films excelled. There was never a week when there wasn’t something good playing on Memphis’ big screens. Here’s the Flyer‘s film awards for 2017.
Worst Picture: Transformers: The Last Knight
There was a crap-flood of big budget failures in 2017. The Mummy was horrifying in the worst way. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales sank the franchise. There was an Emoji Movie for some reason. What set Michael Bay’s nadir apart from the “competition” was its sneering contempt for the audience. I felt insulted by this movie. Everyone involved needs to take a step back and think about their lives.
Zeitgiestiest: Ingrid Goes West
In the first few years of the decade, our inner worlds were reshaped by social media. In 2017, social media reshaped the real world. No film better understood this crucial dynamic, and Aubrey Plaza’s ferociously precise performance as an Instagram stalker elevates it to true greatness.
Most Recursive: The Disaster Artist
James Franco’s passion project is a great film about an awful film. He is an actor dismissed as a lightweight doing a deep job directing a film about the worst director ever. He does a great job acting as a legendarily bad actor. We should be laughing at the whole thing, but somehow we end up crying at the end. It’s awesome.
Overlooked Gem:Blade Runner 2049
How does a long-awaited sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, directed by one of the decade’s best directors, co-starring a legendary leading man and the hottest star of the day, end up falling through the cracks? Beats me, but if you like Dennis Villaneuve, Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, smart scripts, and incredible cinematography, and you didn’t see this film, rectify your error
Best Scene: Wonder Woman in No Man’s Land
The most successful superhero movie of the year was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Midway through the picture, our hero leads a company of soldiers across a muddy World War I battlefield. Assailed on every side by machine gun fire and explosions, Wonder Woman presses on, never wavering, never doubting, showing the fighting men what real inner strength looks like. In this moment, Gal Gadot became a hero to millions of girls.
Best Memphis Movie: Good Grief
Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking’s documentary Good Grief rose above a highly competitive, seven-film Hometowner slate at Indie Memphis to sweep the feature awards. It is a delicate, touching portrait of a summer camp for children who have lost loved ones due to tragedy. Full disclosure: I’m married to one of the directors. Fuller disclosure: I didn’t have a damn thing to do with the success of this film.
MVP: Adam Driver
Anyone with eyes could see former Girls co-star Adam Driver was a great actor, but he came into his own in 2017 with a trio of perfect performances. First, he lost 50 pounds and went on a seven-day silent prayer vigil to portray a Jesuit missionary in Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Then he was Clyde Logan, the one-armed Iraq vet who helps his brother and sister rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Stephen Soderberg’s Logan Lucky. Finally, he was Kylo Ren, the conflicted villain who made Star Wars: The Last Jedi the year’s best blockbuster.
Best Editing: Baby Driver
Edgar Wright’s heist picture is equal parts Bullitt and La La Land. In setting some of the most spectacular car chases ever filmed to a mixtape of sleeper pop hits from across the decades, Wright and editor Jonathan Amos created the greatest long-form music video since “Thriller.”
Best Screenplay:The Big Sick Screenwriter Emily V. Gordon, and comedian Kumail Nanjiani turned the story of their unlikely (and almost tragic) courtship into the year’s best and most humane comedy.
Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Sylvio Bernardi, Sylvio
In this hotly contested category, 2014 winner Caesar, the ape commander of War For The Planet Of The Apes, was narrowly defeated by a simian upstart. Sylvio, co-directed by Memphian Kentucker Audley, is a low-key comedy about a mute monkey in sunglasses (played by co-director Albert Binny) who struggles to keep his dignity intact while breaking into the cutthroat world of cable access television. Sylvio speaks to every time you’ve felt like an awkward outsider.
Best Performance (Honorable Mention):Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch referred to his magnum opus as an 18-hour film, but Twin Peaks is a TV series to its core. The Return may be the crowning achievement of the current second golden age of television, but without MacLachlan’s beyond brilliant performance, Lynch’s take-no-prisoners surrealism would fly apart. I struggle to think of any precedent for MacLachlan’s achievement, playing at least four different versions of Special Agent Dale Cooper, whose identity gets fractured across dimensions as he tries to escape the clutches of the Black Lodge.
Best Performance: Francis McDormand,Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Sometimes the best film performers are the ones who do the least, and no one does nothing better than Francis McDormand. As the mother of a murdered daughter seeking the justice in the court of public opinion she was denied in the court of law, McDormand stuffs her emotions way down inside, so a clenched jaw or raised eyebrow lands harder than the most impassioned speech.
Best Director: Greta Gerwig,Lady Bird Lady Bird is destined to be a sentimental, coming-of-age classic for a generation of women. But it is not itself excessively sentimental. Greta Gerwig and star Saoirse Ronan are clear-eyed about their heroine’s failings and delusions as she navigates the treacherous psychic waters of high school senior year. Gerwig, known until now primarily as an actor, wrote and directed this remarkably insightful film that is as close to perfection as anything on the big screen in 2017.
Best Picture:Get Out — In prepping for my year-end list, I re-read my review for Get Out, which was positive but not gushing. Yet I have thought about this small, smart film from comedian Jordan Peele more than any other 2017 work. Peele took the conventions of horror films and shaped them into a deeply reasoned treatise on the insidious evil of white supremacy. Sometimes, being alive in 2017 seemed like living in The Sunken Place, and Peele’s film seems like a message from a saner time.
When Jackie was being filmed in early 2016, few could have predicted how relevant it would be in 2017. The film, starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy and helmed by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, is meant to be a portrait of Mrs. Kennedy at the most trying time of her life, the days after her husband’s assassination and his funeral. But it’s also about the second-most traumatic transition of power in American history, and as the clock runs out on the Obama presidency, Jackie takes on another level of pathos.
The frame for the story is an interview Kennedy did with Theodore White, a famed foreign correspondent whose book, The Making of the President, 1960, cemented the narrative of John F. Kennedy’s insurgent win over Richard Nixon. The week after the asassination, White was summoned to the Kennedy’s Hyannis Port compound for an emotional interview with the suddenly widowed first lady. Over vodka and cigarettes — so many cigarettes — Kennedy poured her heart out to White. His story, which appeared in Life magazine, was the origin of the Camelot mythos that sprang up around the Kennedy presidency.
Jackie jumps around in time as the first lady’s recollections roll from one moment to the next. Director Larraín’s assignment is to recreate historical moments already familiar to many viewers, while presenting them in a fresh way for younger people unfamiliar with history. The recreation of the 1962 television tour of the White House, in which Portman is digitally inserted into some existing shots while others are recreated out of whole cloth, is an incredible example of using video texture to set mood. The phantom ride as the motorcade bearing the wounded president races to Parkland Hospital and the foggy sequence in which Jackie tours Arlington cemetery, looking for a place to stake out for John’s grave, feature some particularly inspired work by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine.
Probably due to the presence of Darren Aronofsky as producer, Jackie is as tight a production as you’ll see these days. But it’s all in service to Portman’s layered performance as a woman buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. As first lady, Mrs. Kennedy saw it as her job to project an image of perfection for the women of America. As a child of Manhattan wealth and a Vassar girl, Jackie was well suited for the role. As Portman reveals, when her world crumbled around her, that quest for perfection turned into yet another unbearable burden. And yet, somehow, Jackie perservered. One of Portman’s best touches is the little bit of surprise that leaks through her mask of grief and rage each time she makes a tough decision, as if Jackie herself doesn’t know the source of her inner strength.
Ably supporting Portman is a nearly unrecognizable Greta Gerwig as Kennedy’s secretary Nancy Tuckerman. Peter Sarsgaard doesn’t look very much like Bobby Kennedy, but his onscreen presence is always welcome. Caspar Phillipson, on the other hand, makes a scarily accurate John F. Kennedy.
The most poignant moments in the film are reverse tracking shots of a shell-shocked Jackie gliding like a living ghost through the empty White House residence. Through Portman’s eyes, we gaze at the sudden end of an era of class, elegance, and hope, and the prospect of an uncertain, but inevitably darker future. This is the moment we find ourselves in now, only instead of an assassin’s bullet, it was a flurry of espionage and skullduggery that have dealt a disorienting blow to our national psyche. Portman’s wounded, flinty Jackie, dispensing orders with an eerie calm in public while frantically pounding down valium and vodka in private, resonates deeply in 2017. Let’s hope we can all match the cold steel in her voice when Jackie refuses to take off her blood-stained Chanel suit — “Let them see what they have done.”
The House of the Devil (2009; dir. Ti West)—The ‘00s were a terrific decade for horror fans because goodies arrived from every part of the world in all shapes and sizes. Visionary remakes like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, foreign monster movies like Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host, grimy Southern Gothic trash like Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects, claustrophobic ersatz regionalism like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, and classy modern ghost stories like J.A. Bayona’s The Orphanage were just a few of the films from the past decade that offered cold-blooded, skillfully-timed shocks for newbies and connoisseurs alike. Throw in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, David Lynch’s pair of psyche-strafing 21st-century dream labyrinths, and the decade’s finest horror movies look even stronger.
Jocelin Donohue
But don’t’ forget about The House of The Devil, Ti West’s slow-burning, highly effective period-piece about Satanic cults, full moons and the terrifying subtext of The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads To Another.” Devil was initially released in both DVD and VHS formats; the VHS tape came in a clamshell case that paid homage to all those cheap, long-forgotten, straight-to-video 1980s horror flicks that once lined the bottoms of countless shabby video store shelves. West’s film, about Samantha (Jocelin Donohue), a cash-strapped college girl who takes a sketchy baby-sitting job at an ominous country house, is a spare, nearly perfect attempt to convey what it might feel like for someone to discover that they’re inside a 1980s horror movie. The bloody, messy revelations of its final third matter much less than the luxurious sense of dread West cultivates like a crazed botanist who’s just discovered a strain of poisonous fungus long thought extinct.
Greta Gerwig
West’s film inhabits a grayish, stick-crackling late-autumn dryness that combines with his eye for telling, funny period details to revive universal horror imagery; when he zooms out to show Samantha alone in a mysterious upstairs room, or cuts in to show her clutching a kitchen knife in front of a heavy wooden door, it’s like he’s gone back in time to those precious moments just before Michael Myers burst onto the screen and sent everyone running for their lives. And with Greta Gerwig and Tom Noonan, West casts a pair of aggressive, twitchy, businesslike scene-stealers to play Samantha’s best friend and the guy who gets her to stay the night by quadrupling his initial offer. The double voyeurism throughout the film’s middle section goes on and on, its voluptuous dread punctuated by nonsense phrases like “Hello, fish” and the final words of the damned everywhere: “It’s OK. Everything’s fine. She’s fine.”
Mistress America is director Noah Baumbach’s second film released this year. The first, While We’re Young, was a modest hit that starred Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as filmmakers caught between the legacy of their parents’ and, as James Murphy says, “The kids coming up from behind.” Stiller finds himself invigorated when he befriends a younger documentarian, played by Adam Driver, but their friendship ultimately curdles into jealousy and mistrust as Stiller sees the more unpleasant aspects of his personality reflected in Driver’s characters’ ambitious nature.
Mistress America is the female version of While We’re Young. Tracy (Lola Kirke) is an 18-year-old college freshman who has just moved to New York to attend Barnard. But her first few weeks of school are filled with awkwardness and rejection. She’s an aspiring writer but doesn’t get accepted to the Mobius Literary Society. The guy she’s kind of into, Tony (Michael Shear), has another girl. And her mother is getting married to a guy she barely knows and asks her to meet her new stepsister-to-be, Brooke (Greta Gerwig).
Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke in Mistress America
Brooke is a whirlwind of a person who seems to know where all the cool parties are in Manhattan; a self-starter who taught herself the word “autodidact”; a spin class instructor; and a tutor whose advice to a struggling algebra student is “X doesn’t roll like that, because X can’t be pinned down.” What she really wants to be is a restauranteur. She’s planning on opening a restaurant called Mom’s that will be a community center and eatery where she’ll “keep the hearth.”
Tracy is entranced by Brooke, and the pair fall into an intense relationship. When one of Brooke’s investors pulls out of the restaurant over an ill-timed Instagram picture, Tracey convinces Tony to let them use his car to drive to Greenwich, Connecticut to convince a pair of Brooke’s friends, Dylan (Michael Chernus) and Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), to partner with Brooke. The trip descends into fiasco and puts a strain on their relationship.
The center of Mistress America is Gerwig, who came up from the indie scene after turning heads in 2007’s Hannah Takes the Stairs. Gerwig, also the film’s co-writer, has an electrifying screen presence that she and Baumbach put to good use in their first collaboration, 2012’s Frances Ha, where she was the uncertain young woman trying to fit in. But in this film, Brooke is the spirit of New York personified, always looking to the next hustle, living for the future while ignoring the more squalid aspects of her present life. Brooke seems like what Frances would have grown into, and I think it’s a missed opportunity to not make Mistress America a sequel to Frances Ha, as that would have given the character more depth.
Gerwig is her usual bright self. The big discovery in this film is Kirke. Kirke skillfully draws Tracy’s emotional arc, from intimidated college girl to confident young writer. She gives herself over to Gerwig’s deadpan dialog, nailing lines like: “That’s cool about the frozen yogurt machine. Everyone I love dies.”
The other great turn is by Lind whose character struck it rich and moved to the exurbs. Once the action moves to Connecticut, it becomes a chamber comedy for a while. Brooke and Tracy navigate an unfamiliar social world, while Mamie-Claire tries to keep her husband from blowing money on the restaurant.
Like Woody Allen in the 1970s, Baumbach’s films tend to revolve around the well-to-do in New York, shooting thick, witty dialog and gags like an art movie. Like Allen, his characters can sometimes be grating and blinkered. But Mistress America powers through the occasional rough spots on Gerwig’s determination, unlike her character, not to take it all too seriously.
