OTTplay Reviews: Bawaal, Barbie & Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer: The Murky Magnificence Of Nolan's Biopic

This is #CineFile, where our critic Rahul Desai goes beyond the obvious takes, to dissect movies and shows that are in the news.

Dir: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Cillian Murphy

Playing in: Theatres

“WHY won’t you fight?” asks an anguished woman. Her husband does not respond, or more accurately, he is unable to. She cannot fathom the muteness of a man whose genius has been deafeningly loud. His work has pummeled a war into submission — it is silence wearing the sound of violence; peace posing as the pinnacle of physics; triumph camouflaged as blinding tragedy; a physical explosion in the cloak of cultural implosion. But now, in the face of a political witch hunt, the father of the atom bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, is reduced to a vessel of passive molecules. The most famous person on the planet is paraded like a shadow of infamous roots. He is not resisting this array of attacks on his legacy. For some reason, he is letting them — led by a narcissistic ex-ally — drag his reputation through the mud. He is being investigated for a very human past. And he is being soiled for not singing to the choir of nuclear music. So it’s only fair for his long-suffering wife, Kitty, to question his sudden reticence. It’s only natural for her to probe his dip in combatant charm. She cannot understand his strange surrender to the vagaries of power. Nobody can.

Also Read | Oppenheimer: How The Manhattan Project Personnel Lived At Los Alamos

Except, perhaps, the man himself. In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy plays the blue-eyed theoretical physicist like an intellectual at odds with the emotional chronology of greatness. He seems to be feeling his way through life — and his fraught relationship with a nation that nurtures him with hate and dismantles him with love — in reverse. His grasp of science kills his youth. He is cursed with the mortal antiquity of genius: across his student days in Europe, his professor years in California, and finally, as the maverick director of The Manhattan Project, a top-secret military program where his team scrambles to make a bomb in the nothingness of New Mexico. In his eyes, he is building death — and becoming death — to ensure the future of life. As a Jewish scientist, he believes he is splitting evils, not merging them.

The Empty & Entertaining Glow Of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie

It’s Movie Barbie’s world, we’re just Ken-ning in it.

Dir: Greta Gerwig

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling

Playing in: Theatres

I have a sneaky feeling that Barbie – the iconic plastic doll of perfect pinkness and curated agency – was the last addition to Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s latest film about curated pinkness and perfect agency. I suspect the toy came into the picture at the very end, when the film-makers found themselves wondering how to spell out (a subset of “sell out”) a social comedy while sounding self-aware about it. What’s the coolest way to human-splain feminism, wokeness, consumerism and patriarchy-bashing while turning the film’s didactic tone into a pretty in-joke? By setting it in that fantasy-plastic world, of course, where conversing in poker-faced subtext and blatant commentary defines the film’s live-action gimmick.

The creative (or un-creative) license is on the platter when pre-designed dolls talk in pre-designed observations and pre-dated gags. That way, nobody can blame the literal messaging; if anything, it’s supposed to be smart. Nobody can blame the emotional fakeness; if anything, it’s supposed to be audacious. What’s more, toy corporates Mattel will be lauded for being a good sport, playing the fool and critiquing their most popular product…and possibly mega-marketing this critique into a multi-million dollar movie franchise? Now that’s brand consciousness. Win-win-win.

— RAHUL DESAI

Bawaal: An Absurd Enterprise Not Even Varun Dhawan Can Save

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows.

Dir: Nitesh Tiwari

Cast: Varun Dhawan, Janhvi K

Stream on: Prime Video

VARUN DHAWAN, 18 films old, has a type. The actor has forever leaned towards characters who journey from self-importance to self-realisation. In other words, he essays men who are cushioned by the entitlement of masculinity only to register its fragility. Granted this is a recurring theme (even) in the social-message outings headlined by Ayushmann Khurrana but Dhawan’s portrayals feel radical because they culminate in the characters recognising what their gender enfolds without distancing themselves from it. They remain conservative but temper it with understanding and empathy. The actor’s career (Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, Badrinath Ki Dulhania, Sui Dhaaga) can be defined by his enactment of men who are unified in their want to be a better man. His latest work, Bawaal is a reiteration of this but the film goes about this arc in the most implausible, tone-deaf and immature of ways, underlining the filmmaker’s stilted politics, if not his (de)merit.

Nitesh Tiwari’s Bawaal is what happens when a director is briefed by a moneyed studio to make something no one has ever seen and he, in turn, takes it as a leeway to make something no one should ever see. It is what happens when someone studies history using SparkNotes all his life and then, using that bulletin-knowledge, aspires to make a film on World War II. It is also what happens when the maker’s research involves listening to that one podcast where the host, a YouTuber with millions of followers on social media, asked the most absurd question of the century: “Hitler was evil, but who isn’t?”

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