Oscarheimer: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

You’re going to hear a lot about Barbie and Oppenheimer when Hollywood gathers for the 96th Academy Awards next week, but unlike last summer when they found themselves sharing an unlikely alliance as fans took up the challenge of seeing both blockbusters on the same day, they’ll be in competition this time, as there can be only one winner at the Oscars. Whatever one thinks of that ubiquitous Barbenheimer meme, it probably encouraged a lot of otherwise disinterested moviegoers to give one of these films a shot. But it also threatens to overshadow the other eight films nominated for best picture this year, and that’s where I come in. For the sixth year in a row I have dutifully watched all 10 nominees, and the opinions below are offered as a public service, capped by my annual prediction of the winners.

Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer might not be director Christopher Nolan’s best movie — his filmography is simply too great — but it’s probably his most formally impressive, and that’s saying a lot. Nolan accomplished the near impossible: He made a gripping 3-hour drama whose subject matter is essentially a closed-door government hearing — and one with pretty low stakes at that. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s massive 2005 biography American Prometheus, Nolan finds a fresh approach to the well-worn story of the Manhattan Project, but not before laying the groundwork by showing us how J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), a brilliant scientist but also a bit of a diva, assembled a team of top minds and egos in a race to develop the world’s first nuclear weapon and constructed an entire town almost overnight in the desert, where the scientists’ families were housed in presumed ignorance of what was happening a few miles away.

Killers of the Flower Moon
Two notable things happened to Martin Scorsese on his way to octogenarian status: He accrued all the accolades befitting a national treasure, and his films got a lot longer. The Wolf of Wall Street clocked in at an even three hours, Silence at 2:40, and The Irishman a hefty 3:29. His latest epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, runs for 3 hours, 42 minutes — one could almost read the book it’s based on it that time. Not that the subject matter isn’t worth our time: Like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, the mass killing of the Osage in a naked scheme to steal their oil rights is a picture-perfect illustration of the greed and racism that run like a vein through the American body politic. The film opens in 1919 as World War I veteran Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) seeks a job from his uncle, Oklahoma cattle rancher and reserve deputy sheriff William “King” Hale (Robert De Niro), who enjoys a mysterious hold over the town’s native people. Ernest gets work as a chauffeur for an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and develops a crush on her. Hale encourages him to propose, explaining that if she dies (which he’ll attempt to cause with considerable help from Ernest and a cadre of lackeys), her family’s oil rights will be transferred to Ernest. Soon it becomes clear that Hale has been orchestrating a meticulous campaign to acquire all the Osage oil rights via this same sickening parlay of marriage and murder.

Barbie
I realize I’m not exactly the target audience for this film, and the women of the world spoke loud and clear at the box office, but someone has to call bullshit on this tired feminist tripe. Writer/director Greta Gerwig’s plastic, DayGlo Barbieland has the vibe of a high school pep rally held on an American Idol set — a world where the colors beat you senseless and the powers that be brook nothing short of fascistic adherence to blithe joy. Barbies rule here, with Kens reduced to mere window dressing when they’re not catering to the Barbies’ every whim. That’s already some problematic messaging, but Gerwig would really prefer that you not pull on the thread of why Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” —  the skinny white one — is the only one of hundreds of variations of the titular dolls we’re asked to care about. Move along folks, there’s nothing to see here … until Robbie begins to experience strange feelings of human doubt and anxiety, that is, and must journey to the real world to discover their cause. Here’s where the film really goes off the rails. Gerwig thinks it’s still 1955, when women are locked out of Congress, the Supreme Court and corporate boardrooms, and men slap their asses with impunity in public. The “real world” depicted here is more of a fantasy than the film’s imaginary world of dolls and dream houses. If you took a shot of liquor every time this movie utters the word “patriarchy” you’d be dead by the third act.

Only the considerable talents of Robbie and Ryan Gosling save this thing from being a complete bore. Gosling in particular is very funny, and Ken’s journey is the closest thing the film has to a heart. His frustration over unrequited love for Barbie is genuinely sad, and his goofball jubilation when he’s deposited into a world where men have agency for a change provides the only actual levity in a film that otherwise sags under the weight of its confused grievances. Of course (spoiler alert) our heroine figures out what caused her to feel weird and all is set right in her self-centered world, but not before we’re made to sit through Will Ferrell’s forced, unfunny hijinks as Mattel’s CEO (Mattel’s actual board of directors is pretty evenly split by gender, a far cry from the all-male version shown here), a boring subplot involving America Ferrera as a whiny single mom who literally thinks the world is out to get her, and an utterly pointless climax involving Gosling’s attempt to seize power for Kens at the ballot box, long after the main conflict of the plot has been settled. Honestly, this thing is just atrocious. I would’ve had more fun watching a movie about Klaus Barbie.

The film ends with great irony, as Billy Eilish’s radio hit What Was I Made For? plays over the closing credits. Eilish sings with heartbreaking emotion about learning that she isn’t real, just “something you paid for.” Living in that song is the kernel of a different film, one with much greater depth and pathos. That movie would’ve never sniffed the rarefied air of a billion dollars in worldwide box office, but in 20 years it might be remembered fondly, instead of quickly forgotten in the tidal wave of IP dreck like Gerwig’s film is destined to be.

Poor Things
Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ weird and wonderful gothic/steampunk fairy tale has some serious things to say about nonconformity and personal integrity, but it never loses its sense of humor. Based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things is a Frankenstein story of sorts, in which a brilliant surgeon named Godwin Baxter (a fantastic Willem Dafoe) re-animates Bella (Emma Stone), a young woman who’s committed suicide, by swapping her brain for that of her unborn fetus. The film’s early scenes show us Bella awakening to the pleasures, pain and contradictions of life, as her brain matures at an accelerated pace in her adult body. Then she’s romantically pursued by a preening lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo, and for a while Bella and the film are both preoccupied by sex (“Why don’t people just do this all the time?” she asks him in a post-coital glow). Their relationship soon sours in pretty hilarious fashion, right about the time Bella develops a conscience after discovering the twin bummers of poverty and human suffering. Eventually her unknown past catches up with her, ushering in the third act. Lanthimos’ startling visual imagination is executed brilliantly by cinematographer Robbie Ryan and production designers James Price and Shona Heath, as the film jumps from a meticulous black and white in its first act to color schemes bold enough to wake the dead. It’s like if Wes Anderson knew how to make a good film. Best of all is the cast, as Stone, Ruffalo and Dafoe all turn in performances that stand with their best work, which is really saying something. The supporting actors too are well-chosen, a sprightly and eclectic group that includes Ramy Youssef, Kathryn Hunter, Hanna Schygulla and Jerrod Carmichael. Everyone buys in fully to the film’s unique energy and point of view. This is inspired filmmaking that stays with you in the best ways.

Maestro
Speaking of mad science, having Bradley Cooper, who recently wrested the title of Hollywood’s most pretentious actor from Sean Penn, play famed conductor and noted windbag Leonard Bernstein is the kind of chemistry experiment that would give even Godwin Baxter or J. Robert Oppenheimer pause. Even worse, they let him direct the damn thing. Maestro is less of a biopic than a dreary marriage drama. About 80% of its running time concerns Bernstein’s marriage to actress Felicia Montealegre and the effects of his closeted homosexuality. It skims over the maestro’s massive musical accomplishments with the attention span of a dime store medley. Missing completely are any mention of Bernstein’s 1960s political activism, including the famed Black Panther party that would seem a natural for dramatization. Instead, we get a tour de force from Carrie Mulligan as the frustrated Felicia. Mulligan’s left me cold in the past, but there’s no denying her magnificence here. She has multiple show-stopping scenes grappling with her husband’s philandering and her premature death from cancer. Good stuff for sure, but not the film we’re promised in the title. Lenny was as legendary for his outsized opinion of Lenny as he was for his music, and at least Maestro doesn’t skimp on showing the man’s obsessive need to dominate every interaction in his life. But Cooper’s portrayal is all prosthetics and surface theatrics; he doesn’t hear the music behind the madness, and the film is too busy wowing us with production design to find the right story notes. This is Hollywood dress-up at its most shallow and self-serving.

The Holdovers
Paul Giamatti reunites with Alexander Payne, the director who made him an A-list star with 2004’s Sideways, for this New England period piece that goes down as easy as a warm bowl of chowder on a cold winter night. The Holdovers is a throwback in a couple ways: Its setting in the last days of 1970 gives it a comfy sheen of nostalgia, and it also belongs to a long line of inspiring teacher dramas like Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mr. Holland’s Opus and Dead Poets Society. Giamatti’s Paul Hunham is a classics professor at a boarding school forced to stay behind during the Christmas break to watch the handful of students who aren’t going home for the holidays. Plot machinations soon reduce this initial group of five to just Hunham and Angus Tully, his brightest and most rebellious student, along with Mary Lamb, the school cook who’s grieving the death of her son in Vietnam. That subplot is thrown in to keep the film from being so light that it floats away, but it’s well-handled and appropriate given the time period. Tully is Hunham’s brightest student, but of course he has a trouble-making streak and a penchant for challenging the teacher’s methods. If you’re familiar with Payne’s work, you know there’s also a road trip in which our principal characters bond over alcohol-related hijinks. Hunham and Tully are birds of a feather — they’re offended by snobbish authority figures and ignorant teenagers alike. They should be allies, and we know the movie will get them there eventually. The student will get the teacher to lighten up, and the teacher will stoke the student’s fragile self-esteem and help him achieve his full potential. Payne is such a strictly formulaic director, your enjoyment of The Holdovers will pretty much depend on your fondness for Giamatti. I found the grouchy neurotic he played in Sideways awfully hard to take, but he’s far more sympathetic here. I probably enjoyed The Holdovers a bit more than I should have, and you probably will too. It’s like a well-meaning but one-dimensional term paper: Your brain tells you it’s C material all the way, but your hand insists on writing down a B.

American Fiction
Jeffrey Wright has been toiling in supporting roles so song it’s easy to forget he played the lead role in 1996’s excellent Basquiat. He finally has another juicy lead role in American Fiction, writer/director Cord Jefferson’s take on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. Wright is Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a novelist whose books aren’t selling when he decides to give the public what it wants — a ginned up slice of stereotypical “black” life replete with guns, gangsters and bad grammar. Monk sweetens the pot by presenting himself as a fugitive ex-con with a pseudonym and is horrified when the ruse succeeds and his bestseller attracts a film deal, but he needs the money to put his mother in a nursing home and pay the family’s bills. Complicating things, the book is up for a literary award voted on by a panel that includes Monk and another black writer whose own best-selling novel inspired his cynical plot.

I don’t relish pointing this out, but Jefferson’s film has an undeniable Alexander Payne vibe. The irascible protagonist, dysfunctional family dynamic, salty characters who bond for a day or so without really working through their issues. It’s not a bad formula, but this film seems to be in almost constant conflict with itself. It has a fresh message about racial assumptions that applies to both the black and the white community, but a conventional family drama keeps intruding. The perpetually underrated Sterling K. Brown plays Monk’s brother and it’s always great to see Brown, but his storyline as a gay man prone to irresponsible partying whose father never knew about his lifestyle seems like it belongs in a different movie. Worse is Erika Alexander as a badly underwritten neighbor who seems shoehorned into a film that already has a lot going on because someone decided Monk needed a love interest. Also, Monk’s reflexive shame at any mention of his book’s success doesn’t ring true to me. I get that he despises the racial stereotype and dumbing down of the culture in general, but as a frustrated writer, surely he’d at least be a little pleased that something he wrote was catching on in such a big way.

American Fiction is effective at times, but it doesn’t elicit particularly strong feelings. It’s funny, but not as funny as you want it to be. It’s sad, but not heartbreakingly so, and its insights aren’t the kind that leave you feeling empowered. It does do a great job of sticking the landing, though, cleverly nodding to the Hollywood ending we can all see coming without fully buying in. In those final 10 minutes, American Fiction finally achieves the delicate balance it’s pursued for nearly two hours with mixed results.

Zone of Interest

In early 1940s Poland, Rudolf Hoss and his wife Hedwig are living a dream life with their five children, enjoying a comfortable home in the countryside with multiple servants, where Hedwig tends to her expansive garden. And Rudolf works right next door — what could be better? Well, for one thing there’s a bit of a noise problem: The family must endure screams day and night, a constant low rumbling sound, and the occasional gunshot. The home, you see, is tucked a mere 10 feet or so from the walls of Auschwitz, where Rudolf works as the commandant. The absurdity of raising children in such a place doesn’t bother Hedwig one bit: Sandra Huller is dynamically diabolical as Hoss’ cold-hearted wife. She revels in her unofficial title as “The Queen of Auschwitz,” getting first pick of the clothing stolen from Jewish prisoners and hosting dinners and coffee klatches with the other SS spouses. Her husband (played by Christian Friedel), by contrast, is a bit passive for a top-level Nazi. He doesn’t wear the pants at home, and he’s so indoctrinated to the Reich’s antisemitism that when remains from the crematorium float into the river where his children are swimming, he rushes them home in a panic and forces them to scrub every inch of their bodies, even their eyes, lest they be “poisoned” by Jewish DNA. The film ends abruptly with no sense of resolution, and I’m not sure I felt any differently or knew any more about the Holocaust than I did when it started.  Director Jonathan Glazer adapted his screenplay from a novel by the late Martin Amis, who was a gifted writer. I haven’t read it, but one assumes it contains a lot more backstory about the lives of the Hoss family than we get here. Watching Zone of Interest is a frustrating experience. We get the film’s conceit in the first 15 minutes: Everything after that just kind of hits us over the head — and to what end? Oscar nomination, I guess.

 

Anatomy of a Fall

In the French Alps, a boy goes into the woods to walk his dog and returns to find his father lying dead in the snow, the victim of a fall from his chalet’s balcony. Was it an accident, a suicide, or was he pushed by his wife? That’s the simple basis for director and co-writer Justine Triet’s film. German actress Sandra Huller, pulling off the rare feat of starring in two best-picture nominees in the same year, is excellent as the victim’s widow, who’s put on trial for his murder thanks to some blood spatters that don’t add up. Largely structured as a courtroom drama, this film is tailor-made for viewers conditioned to lap up ambiguous true-crime fare in the age of podcasts and streaming platforms, and its strong resemblance to The Staircase, in particular, seems more than coincidental. The courtroom action and the trial prep between Huller and her lawyer make for compelling stuff, then Triet ups the stakes with a flashback showing the couple’s final, brutal argument the day before his death, when we go from Anatomy of a Murder to Scenes from a Marriage. Huller and Samuel Theis as the husband are outstanding here: It’s one of those extended scenes where you’re impressed that the actors can even remember so much dialogue, let alone deliver it with such naked ferocity. This film does many things well, although the contrast between Triet’s studied, clinical approach and the vagaries of the French court system, where lawyers are apparently permitted a lot more leeway to badger witnesses and offer wild speculation, is a bit jarring. Still, this is an engrossing film, even when it’s keeping you at a distance.

 

Past Lives

Making her feature debut, writer/director Celine Song offers a deeply personal story about childhood sweethearts in Korea who go their separate ways at age 12 when the girl, Na Young, moves to North America with her parents. She eventually ends up in New York to pursue life as a playwright and marries a fellow writer, while the boy, Hae Sung, stays in Seoul and settles into a rather bland life as an engineer. He’s never able to get over a crush/love/obsession for his onetime schoolmate, though. He tracks her down on Facebook in their early 20s, but they drift apart again until he finally flies to New York to see her in person, 24 years after their initial separation. If that premise sounds a bit thin to support a feature film, you’re not alone: There were times when I was thinking this thing could use a few zombies, or an evil twin. Something. On the plus side, the story is heartfelt and very well-written, and the actors are excellent. Greta Lee is pitch perfect as a woman who bears the burden of loving two men at the same time but understands at an early age that life is about making hard choices, while Teo Yoo in particular is heartbreaking as poor lovesick Hae Sung. His broken English and quiet, determined dignity will leave you rooting for the happy ending he deserves, even if Song’s film is too firmly rooted in reality for such a corny notion.

And the winner is…

This one’s easy: Oppenheimer. There was a brief moment when people tried to hype Killers of the Flower Moon as a serious threat, but that idea faded quickly. Oppenheimer is headed for one of those Ben Hur or Titanic-style hauls, with Nolan a lock for best director and Murphy and Downey Jr. likely to win best actor and supporting actor among the film’s 13 nominations. The only suspense in the Dolby Theatre on March 10 will be just how insufferable Nolan is when delivering his acceptance speech. This man takes himself and his films awfully seriously, and an armful of golden statues isn’t going to help. We could have another James Cameron situation on our hands here.