I saw Greta Gerwig's Barbie on the last Saturday of July. I went with some friends whose nine year-old girl went wearing a pink dress. I looked like the single uncle they invited out of pity. I liked the film, but I wasn’t gushing with praise when I came out. I gave it a six out of ten. Maybe a seven at a stretch. But what I did love was what it’ll do for Greta Gerwig and female film directors as a whole. It’s a certified billion dollar movie. The film has grossed $1.3 billion so far, and it’s still doing good business.
The film that is now inextricably linked with it is Oppenheimer, the Christopher Nolan film about the creation of the atomic bomb. The publicity that the “Barbenheimer” pairing created was extraordinary. I don’t know whether the studios pedalled the idea from the outset or whether it was simply a fan-made viral sensation. Either way, it worked. Who could have predicted that two completely different films would spur each other on to such great box office heights? The only thing they had in common was a release date. Oppenheimer’s worldwide box office takings currently stands at $853 million. These are insane numbers for an intense three-hour biopic. I hope that one day Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig meet for dinner in New York or LA and someone records the moment they have to decide who gets the bill.
It was through this Barbenheimer phenomenon
that led me to see it this afternoon. My first film at my unofficial writing resident: The Living Room Cinema in Chipping Norton! This sabbatical is turning into an adventure in film and the Barbenheimer movement
has guilt-tripped me into thinking I can’t have one without the other. Barbie is Barbie and Oppenheimer is
Oppenheimer, but Barbenheimer is Barbenheimer, man! It’s bigger than us. Maybe it’s more than the sum of its parts. But maybe it’s just two films squished
together into a forced marriage for the benefit of box office returns. Oh Tom, how cynical of you! But at least now
I can look my future grandkids in the eye and say ‘I went through Brexit, I
went through Covid, I went through Barbenheimer.’ They’ll be proud and tell their teachers what
a hero their granddad was.
I need a bit of time to digest
Oppenheimer. It’s wordy, it’s intense,
it’s all the things I expected actually.
It dragged less than I feared it might, but I will still aware of the time
the whole way through. There were five
other people in the 3:30pm screening and I recognise one of my fellow cinemagoers
in Sainsbury’s afterwards.
‘What did you think of
Oppenheimer?’
‘It was very well-acted, wasn’t
it?’
I think that says it all, really. It was very well-acted. It was very well-directed and it was very well-everything else. But when you watch an all-time nailed-on classic and you ask someone what they thought of it, they’ll say ‘I absolutely bloody loved it’ or ‘I cried so hard I got snot all over my jumper’ or ‘I laughed so hard I wet my pants’. ‘It was very well-acted, wasn’t it?’ would probably be the last thing they’d say. You’re after a response that comes from the heart rather than the head. When you come out of the cinema at 6:50pm, having sat and watched something in a darkened room for three hours on a hot and sunny afternoon, you want that film to be so great that when you leave you want the world around you to seem slightly different for days and maybe weeks afterwards. That’s the sign of movie greatness.
I’m looking forward to seeing
Past Lives tomorrow. This might be the classic I've been yearning for. They played a
trailer for it before Oppenheimer and there’s a point towards the end where the
couple look at each other with a mixture of love and longing and regret. They must be at the fair because there’s a
merry-go-round behind them and that moment was so quiet and so charged with emotion that it almost made me cry.
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