Why Bar­bie and Oppen­heimer will make the per­fect cin­e­ma dou­ble bill

On July 21^st 2023, cin­e­ma will see its most unlike­ly box office bat­tle yet: Christo­pher Nolan’s Oppen­heimer ver­sus Gre­ta Gerwig’s Bar­bie. The idea of walk­ing out of the bright­ly coloured world of Mattel’s icon­ic doll and straight into the mono­chrome study of the atom­ic bomb’s father is a strong con­trast, but there’s a case to be made that Nolan and Gerwig’s lat­est projects could fit right along­side one another.

On a broad­er lev­el, Nolan and Ger­wig occu­py a rare lev­el of crit­i­cal acclaim and com­mer­cial pop­u­lar­i­ty for film­mak­ers in our cur­rent IP dri­ven movie hellscape. They both began their direc­to­r­i­al careers with an orig­i­nal, per­son­al work from a self-penned screen­play, before mov­ing onto adapt­ing clas­sic works of fic­tion (Lit­tle Women and Bat­man obviously).

When both film­mak­ers received their first nom­i­na­tion for the Best Direc­tor Oscar in 2018 – Nolan for Dunkirk and Ger­wig for Lady Bird – a pan­el at the San­ta Bar­bara Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val fea­tured all the nom­i­nees, and they were asked to name an aspect of each other’s films that impressed them.

When com­pli­ment­ing Dunkirk, Ger­wig high­light­ed the emo­tion­al heft of Mark Rylance and Tom Glyn-Car­ney spar­ing Cil­lian Murphy’s sol­dier from real­is­ing he acci­den­tal­ly killed a civil­ian in his shell-shocked state of pan­ic, and the way it evokes the con­fu­sion of war from its open­ing sec­onds. Mean­while, Nolan praised the immer­sive famil­iar­i­ty of Lady Bird, the pre­ci­sion and com­plete­ness of its sto­ry­telling, and its por­tray­al of a kind of moth­er-daugh­ter rela­tion­ship you rarely see on screen, per­haps one that remind­ed him of the father-daugh­ter dynam­ic in Interstellar.

How­ev­er, the biggest link between the two came when Paul Thomas Ander­son shared his admi­ra­tion for both movies. He described the unique plea­sure of watch­ing the scale of Dunkirk and won­der­ing ​“how the f*ck did he do that?”. But then Ander­son turned to Lady Bird, describ­ing the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing Ger­wig turn Saoirse Ronan into a teenage girl from Sacra­men­to and won­der­ing ​“well how did she do that?”.

Ander­son said: ​“That’s the best feel­ing, when you feel a mag­ic trick in front of you because all the things you know about being a direc­tor sort of go away.” For all the analy­sis you can bring to Ger­wig and Nolan’s oeu­vres, their aes­thet­ics work to cre­ate these ful­ly immer­sive, acces­si­ble movies that func­tion as stel­lar enter­tain­ment as well as unique­ly per­son­al visions.

But the con­nec­tions go beyond sim­ply say­ing ​“Ger­wig and Nolan met once”. In com­ple­ment­ing each other’s work, they high­light­ed their tal­ents for evok­ing a spe­cif­ic time and place with their film­mak­ing. In Lady Bird, Ger­wig acute­ly ren­ders the envi­ron­ment around its tit­u­lar char­ac­ter and how it affects her devel­op­ment. A ver­sion of Lady Bird that does not famil­iarise you with Sacra­men­to is a ver­sion where the end­ing of the film isn’t as pow­er­ful. Both Lady Bird’s depar­ture and her small recon­nec­tion with her home are root­ed in an assured famil­iar­i­ty we’ve built up over the last 90 minutes.

The beach­es of Dunkirk are quite a long way away from Sacra­men­to, but Nolan’s evo­ca­tion of envi­ron­ment is equal­ly essen­tial to his 2017 film. Image after image of those con­fused sol­diers lost with­in the vast vac­u­um of a seem­ing­ly nev­er end­ing beach, trapped against an ocean that stretch­es on for­ev­er, is a pow­er­ful source of ten­sion. The claus­tro­pho­bia Nolan con­jures from such a wide expanse is what makes the res­cue of those sol­diers seem more mirac­u­lous. Two very dif­fer­ent sto­ries, but each of them ulti­mate­ly works because they are deft­ly aware of the space those sto­ries take place within.

After her debut Ger­wig wast­ed no time in upping her sto­ry­telling ambi­tion, using a non-lin­ear struc­ture to adapt Louisa May Alcott’s sem­i­nal lit­er­ary work. Nolan is also fond of play­ing with the struc­ture of his sto­ries, and no, the con­nec­tion here isn’t sim­ply to say they both tell things out of order. Ger­wig and Nolan both employ non-lin­ear nar­ra­tives to com­ment on the broad­er mes­sag­ing of their work. Ger­wig uses the con­trast­ing struc­ture to tell a faith­ful adap­ta­tion of Alcott’s nov­el while also com­ment­ing on the pub­lish­ing sys­tem that forced the author to mar­ry off her lead char­ac­ter. It’s the sto­ry of Alcott’s nov­el that tran­scends the bound­aries of that nar­ra­tive to become the sto­ry of Alcott.

Mean­while in Memen­to, Nolan’s screen­play is struc­tural­ly com­plex not just for the sake of fool­ing the audi­ence, but for cri­tiquing the very nature of unre­li­able nar­ra­tors. Leonard’s fatal flaw is that he is too trust­ing of the per­son sup­ply­ing him with infor­ma­tion on his own frac­tured mem­o­ry and dis­tort­ed nar­ra­tive, and the order in which Nolan pro­vides that rev­e­la­tion makes that flaw more trag­i­cal­ly obvious.

Lit­tle Women also deploys its non-lin­ear nar­ra­tive as an explo­ration of mem­o­ry. The film’s struc­ture sug­gests all the ear­ly chap­ters of the book are Jo’s stream of con­scious­ness nos­tal­gia evoked by her jour­ney back home. Nolan’s films have no short­age of men trapped in the ves­tiges of their own haunt­ed past as a refuge from their hor­ri­ble present, from Inception’s Cobb to Interstellar’s Cooper.

Par­ent­hood has played a part in both film­mak­ers careers as well, such as the par­ent-daugh­ter dynam­ic that dri­ves Lady Bird and Inter­stel­lar. For Nolan there is also the motif of Cobb’s chil­dren and his desire to be reunit­ed with them in Incep­tion, and while the four March sis­ters are the focus of Lit­tle Women, Ger­wig nev­er los­es sight of Lau­ra Dern’s Marmee. So many impor­tant parts of the March sis­ters sto­ry are fil­tered through their rela­tion to their moth­er, whether it’s her attempts to heal the rift between Jo and Amy after the book burn­ing or reveal­ing Beth’s death in the form of read­ing the expres­sion on Lau­ra Dern’s face.

Nolan frames his themes of par­ent­hood from the eyes of fathers forced to leave their chil­dren behind, using Cobb and Cooper’s desire to see their chil­dren again as a dri­ving force for both pro­tag­o­nists. Gerwig’s mus­ings on par­ent­hood are framed through sto­ries of daugh­ters see­ing their par­ents as peo­ple for the first time. You see this in Lady Bird gain­ing a new per­spec­tive on her fathers bat­tles with men­tal health, or the March sis­ters grad­u­al­ly leav­ing their own child­hoods behind.

Look­ing ahead, Oppen­heimer and Bar­bie both see their film­mak­ers tack­ling com­plex fig­ures, albeit very dif­fer­ent ones. Since her cre­ation in 1959, Bar­bie has proven empow­er­ing to young girls but also restric­tive in Mattel’s appli­ca­tion of spe­cif­ic body types and beau­ty stan­dards. Robert Oppenheimer’s work was a sci­en­tif­ic break­through that also unleashed unfore­seen destruc­tion upon human­i­ty. Despite being rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent, they offer each film­mak­er a rich frame­work to devel­op their exist­ing pat­terns of telling sto­ries of mul­ti­fac­eted char­ac­ters, from Lady Bird to Bruce Wayne.

As dra­mat­ic as this con­trast seems, what we have here are two accom­plished film­mak­ers releas­ing their new projects. They’ve both explored the per­son­al and the uni­ver­sal sides of sto­ry­telling, play­ing with struc­ture and nar­ra­tive while demon­strat­ing a dis­tinct direc­to­r­i­al vision. Bar­bie and Oppen­heimer may appear to tar­get dif­fer­ent demo­graph­ics, but I’ll be in line for both come July 21^st.