Cookie's Fortune (1999)

  In this undervalued 1999 comedy Robert Altman once again uses a social microcosm to anatomize contemporary America.  The Easter weekend setting in Holly Springs casts a Christian framework around the seedy Mississippi small town setting.  

That birth/death issue also drives the three central characters. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close)— blending Garbo and the Mason Line— is the classical Southern Belle pretending to purity. The director of community theatre tries to hide the fact that her Aunt Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) has committed suicide. Camille is so assured of her privilege that she runs roughshod over the police crime-scene tapes and assumes she will inherit her aunt’s estate. She even claims co-credit with Oscar Wilde for her production of Salome. Camille falls from inherited privilege to madness. Selecting that play -- however modified -- for an Easter church presentation reveals the white leader's compromised moral sense and authority. Her personal doom reflects the self-destruction and failure of the racist project.

As a result of Camille’s vain machinations, the suspicion of murder befalls Cookie’s closest friend and help, Willis Richland (Charles Dutton). Willis personifies the complexity and delusions of American white supremacism. We’re led to be suspicious of his every action, only to be disabused by his virtue. His night invasion of the mansion is to keep his promise to clean Cookie’s guns. If he steals a mickey of bourbon at night he replaces it the next day. His knowledge completes Cookie's crossword. 

Indeed Willis refutes the myth of America’s racial abyss. His white grandfather sired a huge keyboard of children and grandchildren, a spectrum of whites and blacks. Willis’s surname anticipates Camille’s bequest of her estate to the most legitimate heir, this black man. He was to that manor born.

As Willis refutes the cliche of the shiftless inferior black, Ned Beatty provides an affable humane alternative to the Rod Steiger redneck stereotype sheriff. Beatty’s Lester Boyle immediately knows Willis is innocent by his homespun wisdom. In fishing veritas.  

The third central character is the most ambiguous. Emma Duvall (Liv Taylor) is a vagabond with an instinctive bond with Willis and an equally compelling antagonism both to her supposed aunt Camille and to her putative mother Cora (Julianne Moore). That bloodline proves as fallacious as the assumptions of Willis’s essential difference.

Throughout, human instincts run athwart social expectations. Though Emma is an outlaw, of suspect character and security, her compulsive affair with rookie cop Jason (Chris O’Donnell)  provides a romantic energy and bracing spirit otherwise lacking after Cookie’s suicide. 

Indeed if Camille was counting on getting the fortune cookie she assumed her due, that fortune is as ersatz as Cookie’s fake necklace. The true fortune is the border-crossing relationships that dissolve the vicious faultlines we usually see in Mississippi dramas. On this Easter the humane America is reborn — not least because a child saw and reported the gun hidden among the Easter eggs.  

Lorna's Silence (2008)

  Damn, the Dardenne brothers make fine films. Lorna’s Silence is a placid recording of a woman’s power — but mainly its restriction — with roiling turmoil beneath its surface. It’s challenging to watch because no character invites — or even allows — our emotional identification. Even at the end.

Our obvious impulse is to side with Lorna. The Albanian woman paid the Belgian Claudy to marry her so she could gain Belgian citizenship. That established, she can now get a bank loan so she and her lover Sokol can open their own snack bar. 

Still, they need the $10,000 a Russian will pay to marry Lorna to win Belgian citizenship himself. To rid herself of Claudy Lorna offers him $5,000 for a divorce and fakes his assaulting her as grounds. Despite the obvious tensions in their homelife she tries to help him break his serious drug habit. In one desperate intervention she gets him through withdrawal by having sex.

These citizenship finaglings are orchestrated by the wannabe gang bass Fabio. With his taxi driver front, we are not surprised to find him taking Lorna for a ride. While she only wants Claudy divorced, Favio rigs Claudy’s murder as an overdose. The run of coarse love never does smooth true. 

For all her power in marital citizenship Lorna is radically helpless. Not entirely unlike reality, here men wield the authority and compel the woman’s silence. Fabio runs the show. Even her financial gains are illusory. Fabio retracts his payments when Lorna breaks the Russian deal. Worse, Sokol proves a false lover when he takes back his investment in their project and unconvincingly pledges to meet her in Albania.  

For all her sympathetic efforts to dump Claudy by legal means, she feels guilty at his death. She declines to dispel the cops’ assumption of suicide. Her silence has been an immoral compliance. Powerless in reality, she finds a moral peace in imagining she is carrying Claudy’s child. That possibility shivers the Russian deal and breaks Fabio’s support. 

At the end his henchman is clearly driving her to death. When she flees him she ends up powerless, helpless, doomed — with not even her purse. She hides in an abandoned shack in the forest.  Her fantasy of carrying Claudy’s child is her only sustenance — and an expression of her will and moral responsibility that had been silenced too long. This final delusion allows her a cleansing her reality denied.

Indeed cleansing may be the film’s underpinning metaphor. Lorna works in a dry cleaning business. The staff’s uniforms are nurse-like white. Lorna uses the hospital setting to back up her domestic violence suit against Claudy. She buries her dirty money, then tries to cleanse it by giving it to Claudy’s alienated family. Even the film’s palette serves the metaphor, with its bright patches — whether the blue in the opening shot or Lorna’s wardrobe reds — an arresting relief against the dark background. The colour feels bracing, like a mouthwash.

Indeed, isn’t all that business about getting citizenship through marriage a political form of cleansing, a superficial legitimizing? Only in her final and fatal isolation, with that delusion of continuing Claudy through their imaginary child, can she feel finally “clean.” That’s her tacit scream against her lifelong silence..

Married Life (2005)

  Two decisions determine this film’s perspective on the duplicities and compromises that characterize modern American marriage.

Director Ira Sachs sets the film in the suburban and executive posh of 1949. That’s the golden age of naive illusions about marriage. Peyton Place had yet to puncture the pretence to suburban innocence. The buoyant voice of Doris Day sets off the cheer, promising she can’t give us anything but love, baby. Here the lovers dish out as much duplicity as love.

Hence the gloss and brightness in every domestic scene and the affluence of the business and club settings. Indeed the film evokes the bright style of the master of ‘50s melodrama, Douglas Sirk, attended by his detachment and satiric bite. Of course the historic setting still implicates contemporary marriage as well. Marriage is marriage.

Sachs’ second decision is to cast as narrator the slickest and most dishonourable character,  Richard (the ever-suave Pierce Brosnan). That’s like Iago getting the direct addresses to his audience, which immediately poisons the viewer’s perspective upon the saintly Othello. 

Initially Richard confirms his opposition to marriage. He ends up marrying the chirpy Kay (Rachel MacAdams) himself. To get there he has to betray his prosaic best friend Harry (Chris Cooper), who’s planning to kill his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) so he can marry Kay. Richard also helps Pat conceal her illicit affair. Of course Richard serves mainly his own end, to win Kay for himself. Richard initiates the repeated bromide: “I'm not at all certain that one can build happiness upon the unhappiness of someone else”  — especially not someone with our moral sense! 

Despite being a war widow, Kay seems childlike in her wide eyes, glowing hair and smile, and her principal principle: “A woman needs to be loved, and that's true. But it's not the whole truth. She also needs somebody to love.” That’s the ‘50s sense of “the woman’s place.” She’s as ripe for Richard’s seduction as she was to salvage the lachrymose Harry.

The film ends on the neighbourhood’s happy couples playing charades — an apt metaphor for the reduction of love and marriage to shallow performances. After all, as Richard confidently assumes: “Whoever in this room who knows what goes on in the mind of the person who sleeps next to you... please, raise your hand... I know you can't, not honestly.” But if the characters act love enough they may eventually feel it. 

        Finally, Pat and Harry move silently together cleaning up after the guests. Their harmony is as deep as ever, now built upon their respective abandoned passions. That shot — from outside, through the living room window  — echoes the first: Harry’s insubstantial reflection on his high office window, while his duplicitous best friend Richard introduces him and his tale.

Passages

  With Passages Ira Sachs moves to the forefront of current American directors. (Memo to self: Go find his earlier films. Now.)

The narrative frame anatomizes Tomas Freiburg (Franz Rogowski), a German bisexual directing films in Paris. In the first scene he rudely directs a scene, especially nit-picking on a young actor who’s not descending the stars as the director wants. The film chronicles the director’s troubled descent off-(his)camera.

It ends on a full-screen profile of Freiburg bicycling furiously through the Paris streets. He has found he cannot control people in his love-life the way he directs them on film. As he cycles he’s incongruously wearing the tux and bowtie he donned to prepare to take his film to Venice. All dressed up but now nowhere to go. He’s furious because he has just been finally rejected both by the beautiful Agathe (Adele Exarchopoulos) and by his husband Tim (Ben Wilshaw).,

The closing music is a cacophonous amplification of La Marseillaise. That cultural nationalism places the pug-faced hero in the grand tradition of French romantic film stars: Gabin, Belmondo, Depardieu. These unhandsome men had a romantic force that transcends our ordinary schmucks’ moral responsibility.   

The passages of the title refer to the growth of the lovers who come to reject Freiburg. As Tim notes, Tomas tends to fall into an affair upon completing a film. Now he’s hurt by Tomas insisting on describing his Agathe passion to him. Tomas leaves Tim, impregnates Agathje, then turns jealous at Tim’s new affair with a black stud novelist Tomas persuades Tim and Agathe to attempt to manage a trois. Feeling marginalized, Agathe asserts her independence with an abortion.  When Tim orders Tomas never to see him again the Venice honour pales before the director’s isolation.

The cyclist’s resolve and rage show he hasn’t learned a thing. He still tries to bend his lovers to his will, as if he ruled the set offstage as on. He storms into Agathe’s primary school classroom futilely to beg her to return, then extravagantly promises escapes of his desire not hers. He betrays both lovers by not telling Tim of Agathe’s abortion, to exploit Tim’s desire to raise a child. 

His two love-objects are considerable characters in their own right. Tim is a very successful designer, running a large company. If the woman is, as usual, cast in a lower register, Agathe is still an obviously effective primary school teacher. Either could carry their own film so Tomas’s dismissive treatment defines him not them.

Despite his role in the French screen tradition, Tomas is very much a modern lover. He is fully non-binary. There is contagious fervour in his bouts with Agathe. In his post-phallocentricity he gives her a manual orgasm. (Or in today’s parlance is it Digital?). His intercourse with Tim is the most graphic I’ve ever seen on screen. 

And that is the film’s point: Even in this most modern sexually enlightened male there remain a selfishness and drive for power that precludes his genuinely loving. Indeed it’s all in his name. The director has the voyeurism of the Peeping Tom but in his need for selfless submission in love he’s the Doubting Tomas. That costs him the frei (freedom) in Freiburg. That last cycle through France is his solitary confinement.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2004)

  A Mike Hodges noir tends to be blacker and more cerebral than even the artsier end of the norm. Here he anatomizes the male ego in two respects: a man’s compulsion to make one’s mark and his sexual identity. 

The former is expressed in hero Will's meditation that frames the narrative: “Most thoughts are memories. And memories deceive. The walk. The way he smoked a cigarette. Laughed. The dead are dead. He's gone. What's left to ever say he was here at all? Not much.”

Clearly Will is a man of will. Fed up with his criminal life he suffers a breakdown, then disappears into the forest for a basic, solitary existence. Three years later his social life is reawakened when he finds a gang-beaten man in the forest. He takes him to the  victim’s address then returns to his monkish isolation. His brother Davey’s surprising suicide returns him to his abandoned world. For Davey’s apparently wasted life compounds Will’s grief at having wasted his own. 

Davey was a handsome, likeable, happy-go-lucky chap who dabbled in drug sales. Being “webbed up with all the beautiful people” brought him easy success. His wastefulness we read from the party scene where he locks himself in a bedroom with a rich beautiful girl — only to sell her drugs. He’s too manly to indulge himself. Even money he dismisses as “a cunt’s drug” — but he keeps a healthy stash. Will has no doubt about his brother’s heterosexual bent. 

But Davey’s confidence, self-respect and will are destroyed when he’s raped by Boad, a crime boss who covers his wealth by his front as a luxury car dealer. The macho Boad has a beautiful wife and estate and a macho swagger.

In explaining the rape to Will, Boad reveals a shivered masculinity. He describes following Davey through his nocturnal adventures. Boad’s language is so full of disgust that he seems to be casting a moral righteousness upon his attack on the boy. But Boad is rather expressing his lustful attraction to him. His suppressed homosexuality compels him to destroy the spur and victim of his love. At the same time, Davey may have felt his own sexual identity undercut by his violation.    

When Will banished himself to the wilds he turned away from his devoted lover, Helen. He tries to recover that relationship when he asks her to pack her back and run off with them. After despatching Boad Will speeds to get her. As his car rounds the bend in the last shot we know what’s awaiting him. Helen is a gunpoint captive of an imported gunself Boad had hired to kill Will.

In this tangle as in the web of masculine sexuality there is no escape. Just the deceptive and fugitive memories. 

Robert Altman's Kansas City (1996)

  Robert Altman’s Kansas City (1996) is effectively a twin of his Nashville (1975). Both use their titular cities to anatomize their respective music and political cultures. Both respond pointedly to their time.

In Nashville the Country and Music scene catches the tension between America’s traditional political values — ostensibly democratic — and the confrontational spirit that grew out of the new individualism, personal and sexual liberty and protests against the Vietnam War. Michael Murphy plays a political go-between (aka hack) who dangles support for a governorship to win an influential musician’s (Henry Gibson) presidential support. The only Black character represents Charlie Pride, the first African American success in American country. Our guide through the narrative is the callow Shelley Duvall flower child, rootless, passive and gormless. 

In Kansas City there is a greater weight on the city’s blues/jazz tradition, with correspondingly more attention to the tension between the white and black societies. Against the contemporary setting of Nashville, Kansas City revives the 1930s, recalling the roots of America’s urban racial division.

As our guide through the plot Blondie O’Hara (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is Duvall’s antithesis: a fevered, complex, impulsive, violent woman who stoops to kidnapping in hope of recovering her husband Johnny (Dermot Mulroney) from the clutches of the Black criminal gang headed by Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte). Blondie is one of those "crazy little women" promised in the Leiber-Stoller ode to the city.  

Michael Murphy is again Altman’s slick politician (as in his Tanner series, as well). His Henry Stilton is a big cheese in his state because he’s an official advisor to President Roosevelt. Blondie  kidnaps his wife Carolyn (Miranda Richardson) to compel Stilton to rescue her Johnny. The ostensibly legitimate White authority enlists the governor’s deployment of thugs to intervene — too late.

Nothing of Blondie’s passion for her Johnny appears in the Stiltons. Despite the white couple’s erotic pet names — Heinie and Pussy — there is no ardor between them. Stilton does what he has to in order to save his wife — and prevent a scandal — but he declines to speak to her.

Indeed the White world is defined by this government’s — shall we say? — pragmatism.  Steve Buscemi, as Blondie’s sister’s husband (also, because these characters live in ruts, a Johnny), embodies the criminal abuse of democracy with his deployment of imported and multiple voters and his violence toward the uncooperative. However more stylish, there is also a telling bigotry in the ostensibly well-meaning but offensively condescending, naive, supercilious, colonialism that Carolyn bestows upon the black women in her continuous drugged stupor. 

Blondie’s loser husband is a parody of the White understanding the Black. He dons blackface to steal the money-belt of a black high-roller. In a twist on sexual stereotyping, victim Sheepshan is a huge, expansive Black enriched by his contract to plant telephone poles! Caught and facing death, Johnny preserves his dignity by facing up to Seldom Seen. To save his life he offers to become Seldom’s slave, a historic reversal that appeals to Seldom’s humour. “You have guts,” Seldom smiles, respectfully. “Now they’re your guts,” vows Johnny. So Seldom carves them out.    

The Black leader’s very name asserts the film’s rare presentation of a Black voice, perspective and moral structure. Such authority is indeed seldom seen. And even more rarely heard. As the gang leader, Belafonte is brilliant, a total opposite to his usual mellow voice and gentleness. Here he rasps his orders and his own firm and self-respecting principles. As he explains his commitment to Johnny’s theft victim: “You have to understand Sheepshan. He's a loser. And losers've got to be respected. They're the backbone of my business. They're my customers, and I take good care of my customers.” Such respect and responsibility are seldom seen in the film’s white community. Despite having Blondie carried kicking and screaming from his club, Seldom respects at least one woman’s authority: “If my mother was alive, she'd cut your balls off. Woman went right to the point. She never, ever missed a beat.” (Further to his — and Altman’s —credit, Belafonte wrote his own dialogue.)

The film’s moral center may arguably lie in the frequent and extensive musical scenes at The Hey Hey Club. Without the explicitness of the Nashville lyrics, the jazz scenes provide the film’s most powerful emotional address and affirmation of the Black spirit — and especially the harmony that lies in freeing the individual voice. To this end there are two extended scenes of dual jazz lead performers. 

The first is postered as a “Battle” between two star soloists, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins. Their duel in alternating solos, of increasing inventiveness and strength, concludes with a handshake of mutual regard. There is a harmony even in this energetic rivalry. The film closes on another rich but gentler number that foregrounds two bassists — instrumentalists who are more commonly supports in the background.

All the musical numbers expressing the Black world emphasize harmony and the freeing of the individual voice. That integrity contrasts to the false hegemony and effects of  America’s racist power structure in 1996 as in 1935 — and, alas, even more so in 2023.  

That Painting in Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941)

  In Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) when the police question Lina McLaidlaw about her husband’s friend’s suspicious death in Paris, the younger cop twice stands riveted by a painting on the wall. Given Hitchcock’s fervid attention to detail, the logical question is: What’s the point of that painting?

It’s a 1931 Picasso — Cubist — image of a tabletop with a pitcher and fruit on a stand. It’s the modernity that puzzles the cop, who may find there another mystery to be solved. Like Lina’s father, the cops are figures of traditional style and values disturbed by the apparently looser and less grounded modernity, in art as in life. 

That painting is the only modern work in an array of traditional images. Conventional landscapes slip by in the other interior backgrounds. Its main antithesis is the stern large painting of Lina’s  military father that looms over her engagement to Johnny, shadows the couple when it’s his disappointing bequest to them and reappears behind her when she learns of Johnny’s apparent involvement in their friend Beaky’s (convenient) death.  

More modern than that record in oil are the newspaper images and scenes of Johnny’s high society life. The mousey spinster Lina is against her will drawn to his exuberant public life among the horsey set, first in a society photo then when we watch him shot again. The fast set recorded by the galloping press is an affront to the traditional oils.

That Cubist still-life is an even more modern break from tradition. It’s an image of shattered forms and norms, reflecting a looser, faster, more dangerous life — like Johnny’s two threatening car-rides, his scandalous love and business lives and his prodigal wastes of money. 

There’s a curious human equivalent to the  modern painting at the crime novelist’s dinner party. A woman with a tight-bunned Germanic face wears a man’s formal suit and a black bow-tie. We learn nothing more about her than that image. But in her gender ambiguity she tacitly challenges the societal norms as the Cubist painting does traditional art. 

In that scene Johnny apparently is excited by the possibility of a detection-free poison, that at least feeds Lina’s paranoia if not his financial daydream. The non-binary woman personifies that freedom from norms. 

In fact, that Cubist painting feels especially intrusive and disturbing given the film’s markedly British tone, setting and feel. It’s the most un-British element in the film. The opening credits appear against a drawing of a standard British countryside. Lina’s parents, friends and society smack of the British, with her novelist friend Isabel clearly an Agatha Christie surrogate.

    This radical Britishness seems apt because Hitchcock made Suspicion one year — and two features — after his departure to America for Rebecca. It has the feel of a homecoming, a retreat from the brash America — where Cubism and other forms of artistic and cultural relativism were in full flower. That radically modern painting seems a quiet personal touch from an outsider — perhaps another form of his cameo appearance. 

Hitch actually appears mailing a letter from a village post office. As he was ensconced in America by then, the film was a kind of letter home — steeped in the home vernacular — from the outside world of America and the new European art.

Barbie

  In Greta Gerwig’’s brilliant Barbie Rhea Perlman appears as the doll’s inventor (and as it happens Mattel’s founder) Ruth Handler. She’s a historical figure, as are of course the panoply of Barbies and Kens. Handler has the additional heft of having actually enjoyed a flesh-and-blood existence, beyond the others’ plastic. But that doesn’t mean she can’t mean something.

Indeed, as soon as a real character (or prop or event) steps into a fiction it is no longer simply itself. It becomes as open to resonance and interpretation as any of the other, the invented, elements. The real in a work is as capable of becoming metaphor as the invented are. The tree in your garden is just a tree. The tree that is the sole prop in Waiting for Godot is necessarily much more. Even if you moved your tree onstage.

So what as a metaphor does this “real” Ruth Handler mean? First, casting Rhea Perlman mobilizes the character’s Jewish persona. That connects her to the Mattel CEO Will Ferrell’s desperate cliche, “Some of my best friends are Jewish!” That proves little more assuring than the gender equality he claims proved by the company’s two historic woman directors (none, of course, current). That character, a patriarchal authority, constantly blurts out a pretence to virtue or assurance that is immediately undermined.

The inventor’s name is even more meaningful. “Ruth” is the Biblical outsider emblematic of faithfulness and dedication. “Whither thou goest….” etc. “Thy people” — however flesh or plastic — “shall be my people.” More pointedly, the “Handler” is someone who refuses to be handled, who insists on taking control of her life and assert agency herself. 

Hence the Barbie revolution that the opening parody of 2001 dramatizes. Giant monolith Barbie jolts mankind — i.e., little girls playing mummy with their toy babies — into a higher awareness. They reject their reduction to motherhood in favour of the panoply of roles and careers that the army of Barbies will come to represent. 

In his experience of the real world, Ken’s seduction by the patriarchy confirms the old reduction of woman to being handled. Before, he wanted to stay the night with Barbie “because we're girflriend and boyfriend.” “To do what?” “I'm actually not sure.” As Barbie points out, they lack penes and vaginas. The characters have no capacity for action or their own wills -- they are only their role.

Later, when the socially “advanced” Ken and his new posse lope in on imaginary horses he re-enacts the cowboy game little boys played while Sis tended their toy infant. The film’s happy ending derives from both genders accepting woman's power and responsibility, with due awareness of the traditional reality beyond the oppressive societal norms.

Furthermore, the Jewish context makes the film effectively an epilogue to the classic Neil Gabler study, The Jews Who Invented Hollywood. Gabler demonstrated how the Jewish merchants who shaped America’s dream factory defined the national ideal -- a secure, honourable job, a happy home with a garden and white picket fence, a beautiful blonde (e.g., gentile) wife with clean happy kids (one of each). The people's historic persecution has been left behind in Europe, with that Hollywood fantasy their new future. Gerwig’s dramatization of the Barbie world Handler invented is that very fantasy, ballooned. 

Of course the Jews invented the idea of a perfect world long before their Hollywood manifestation. It starts in the Eden that mankind flunked out of, by indulging in that notorious non-kosher nosh. Then there’s “the Promised Land,” the vision that has inspired Jews from Abraham and Moses on to modern Israel. That dream is as old as the antisemitism that continues to threaten to eliminate the state and its people.

        So Ruth Handler has the Jew's eye on a progressive future: "We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they've come." That echoes the Jewish "ledor vedor," the progressive succession of generations, with a nod to the heroic matriarchs. 

        So too her "Humans have only one ending. Ideas live for ever." The perfect world around Barbie draws on the Jewish concept of heaven, a spiritual realm beyond our material reality -- the attainment of which requires our responsible humanity in this material world.  Indeed, if the immediate political heart of the film lies in Gloria's passionate speech --"It is literally impossible to be a woman." -- the mythic context is established by the Jewish moral framework embodied in Ruth Handler. Her criminal sideline is acknowledged but not stressed.

        In American painting this impulse took two antithetical forms. Abstractionists like Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, reached for a spiritual presence beyond our forms of material existence. Even without identifying as Jewish artists they embodied Jewish spirituality. 

On the other hand, the realists like the Ashcan School, Charles Burchfield, Raphael Soyer, Adolph Gottlieb, Ivan Albright, richly detailed their subjects' materiality in a restrictive urban reality. Their physical tension expressed the (often socialist) urge to improve the people’s lives on earth (or rather: on concrete). That is the Jewish dedication to serving mankind, tikun. By meeting our responsibility in the physical world we approach the spiritual. If the devil is in the details, so are the angels. The British Kitchen Sink painter John Bratby found his realist style so close to theirs that he wondered if he were perhaps Jewish himself. That was the blood compliment.

Both schools resonate in this Barbie. The pervasive pink abstraction — which Anthony Lane likens to “being water-boarded with Pepto-Bismol” — projects the monochrome of the abstractionists. It's a naive purity. Barbie’s and Ken’s encounter with the “real” world outside and the danger of Ken importing the vain folly and inhumanity of the (i.e., our) patriarchy summon the spirit of the Jewish realist painters. The schools intersect when the sheltered Barbie reaffirms her newly formed idealistic spirit in the face of our reality: death, fascism, commercialism, vulnerability, cellulite, etc. Paradoxically, the truly mature, unified Barbie is the Kate McKinnon one -- "Weird Barbie," defined by her "splits."

            

Finally, an observation on the lumping together of Barbie and Openheimer as a (double admission, of course) “double feature.” That is an insult to both films. Each is worth — indeed requires — its own absorption and intensive consideration on its own. Both are profound, rich experiences not to be reduced to a modish matinee marathon,