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      ‘My Sailor, My Love’ Review: When Romance Comes Ashore

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      A grumpy man warms to a good-natured housekeeper in this film directed by Klaus Haro.Howard (James Cosmo), the Irish widower and retired sea captain of Klaus Haro’s bittersweet drama “My Sailor, My Love,” is furious that his daughter has hired a good-natured housekeeper named Annie (Brid Brennan), to disturb his seclusion. At first, the grump does his best to scare off the invader. “Never darken my door again!” he thunders old-fashionedly, as though he’s subconsciously aware that the writers Kirsi Vikman and Jimmy Karlsson are drawing on centuries of love stories about savage men and civilizing women. The production designer John Hand has even worked in a nod to the rose from “Beauty and the Beast.”The curveball is that after rushing the romance (the brute is tamed in a week!), Haro shifts his attention back to the daughter, Grace (Catherine Walker), who is unfairly, but understandably, aggrieved. Her father’s always treated her cruelly — how dare he be kind to someone else?! Grace’s resentment is an astute twist. Imagine Disney’s singing teapot enrolling in primal scream therapy, except when Grace attends a support group for women who’ve given too much, she can’t let out her steam.Life, and the film’s costume design, haven’t been fair to Walker’s self-sacrificing miserablist. (When can we stop dressing this kind of character in wan beige and headache-inducing braids?) Every one of her scenes is an indignity overemphasized by a strings and piano score that needs to ease up. The painful dynamic is credible; the dialogue not so much. Still, the actors are in full command of our empathy, especially Brennan’s gray-haired caretaker who, when she cracks open her heart, seems to glow from within.My Sailor, My LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Cassandro’ Review: Gael García Bernal as the Luchador Saúl Armendáriz

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      Gael García Bernal plays a flamboyant figure taking the world of Mexican professional wrestling by storm in this underdog drama directed by Roger Ross Williams.When Barton Fink, the neurotic screenwriter cooked up by the Coen brothers, scrambles to write a wrestling picture, his peers prescribe the basics. Tell us the man’s ambitions. Entangle him in a romance. You know the drill. Not even in Barton’s most delirious dreams could he have envisioned “Cassandro,” about a flamboyant, sequin-clad luchador who takes his ring name from a telenovela. But I bet Barton could have drafted the film’s outline, which uses the same squelchy gym bag of tricks as many underdog sports dramas.Based on a real star of Mexican professional wrestling, or lucha libre, Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal) is a profoundly unusual athlete wedged into a biopic that sometimes feels like passable stage fighting: elegantly executed but drained of danger.Directed by Roger Ross Williams (“Life, Animated”), the movie depicts the decisive, late-1980s period when Saúl ascended out of obscurity and into the big time, braving countless training montages and a few private miseries on his way to the top.We meet the striver in Texas in early adulthood, when he is assisting his mother, Yocasta (Perla De La Rosa), with her laundry business and wrestling at a nearby club. Using the name El Topo (The Mole), he tumbles into the ring masked and petite, a pipsqueak doomed to act as a punching bag opposite giants. “Let me guess. You’re always cast as the runt?” challenges Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), a local lucha hotshot and trainer. She spies potential in Saúl, and offers to coach him pro bono.Colindrez, like many of the actors in this movie, is a superlative performer. Her character is granted little interiority — she serves by turns as Saúl’s fierce advocate and his shoulder to cry on — but alongside Bernal she radiates a cool glow fit for a film less shackled by the ebbs and flows of established convention. In conversations with Sabrina, Saúl toggles between English and Spanish, reserving the latter for colloquialisms or teasing, and the mixture gives their dialogue an organic rhythm. He uses the same blend of languages with his lover, Gerardo (Raúl Castillo), a married luchador with kids whom Saúl sees in secret.Saúl’s sexuality is at once a major plot point and somewhat underexplored. With gentle nudging from Sabrina, Saúl, who came out as a teen and is supported by his mother, soon reinvents his ring persona as the campy Cassandro, an “exótico,” or luchador who plays with femininity. The character initially attracts slurs and heckling, but quickly (and perhaps too effortlessly) starts winning matches and becomes a fan favorite. This is an era when H.I.V. and AIDS panic was at its shrillest, and although the real-life Cassandro was sometimes rebuffed by homophobic opponents, the movie never mentions the epidemic. (Williams wrote the screenplay with David Teague.)“Cassandro” is at its strongest when it zeros in on the relationship between Saúl and Gerardo, who share a physical intimacy that both echoes their fighting careers and acts as an escape from them. Alone, safe from onlookers, the pair tussle in bed. “Don’t you think he’s sexy?” Saúl says, referring to Cassandro as if he were a third person who might join them.Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.CassandroRated R for drugs and slugs. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘Paul Robeson’ Review: A Tribute to an Entertainment Titan

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      The film’s subtitle is drawn from one of the performer’s quotes in his autobiography “Here I Stand”: “I’m a Negro. I’m an American.”The opening of “Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’” offers an unintentional caveat about the 1989 documentary directed by the East German filmmaker Kurt Tetzlaff. Paul Robeson’s rich baritone undergirds archival footage of Black children playing in a dusty open space, smokestacks in the background. The use by the director of a Negro spiritual, however beautiful, swaps whatever joy these kids might have been experiencing (they are at play after all) for a questionable sentimentality around Black life and suffering.But then much of Tetzlaff’s documentary, recently restored and receiving its first theatrical run in New York, casts an aura — admiring and melancholy — around Robeson to the detriment of a more shaded portrait. The athlete-performer-activist’s achievements are well known (gridiron great, Columbia University Law graduate, first Black Othello on Broadway), but in this film, their roots and meaning go mostly unexplored.The documentary shows glimmers of promise when featuring interviewees who had an intimate grasp of the America that shaped but also tore down Robeson. Harry Belafonte turns teary talking about Robeson’s grace. The singer Pete Seeger’s account of white rioters attacking attendees at a Peekskill, N.Y., concert in support of workers in 1949 remains chilling. Tetzlaff aims to dive into Robeson’s mistreatment by the United States government for his activism, as well as his expressed admiration of the Soviet Union and its people — but the movie sticks to the shallow end.Hinted at, but never fully realized here, is a more compelling film about the tantalizing promise Black progressives like Robeson held for Eastern Bloc citizens, like the director.Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’Not rated. In English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Robert Klane, Writer of ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,’ Dies at 81

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      He also adapted his best-known novel, “Where’s Poppa?,” into the script for a raw Carl Reiner comedy and directed the disco movie “Thank God It’s Friday.”Robert Klane, a comic novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker with a taste for gleeful vulgarity who wrote the screenplay for “Weekend at Bernie’s,” the 1989 cult film about two young insurance company employees who create the illusion that their murdered boss is still alive, died on Aug. 29 at his home in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 81.His son Jon said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Klane wrote “Weekend at Bernie’s” more than two decades into a career that began with the publication of two humorous novels: “The Horse Is Dead: A Tasteless Novel” (1968) and “Where’s Poppa?” (1970). He adapted “Where’s Poppa?” into the screenplay for a twisted comedy about a single lawyer (played by George Segal) who dreams of scaring to death or institutionalizing his aged, maddening mother (Ruth Gordon).Ted Kotcheff, who directed “Weekend at Bernie’s,” wrote in his 2017 memoir, “Director’s Cut: My Life in Film,” that Mr. Klane had been inspired to write it by his time as an advertising copywriter in the 1960s, when the top executives at one of the agencies where he worked invited employees to their beach houses on Long Island.Mr. Klane with Donna Summer on the set of the 1978 disco film “Thank God It’s Friday,” which he directed. Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“But he always wondered what would happen if the underlings got a house all to themselves — inmates taking over the asylum,” Mr. Kotcheff wrote.In “Bernie’s,” the young workers (Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) discover a $2 million fraud but don’t know that their boss, Bernie (Terry Kiser), is the culprit. Bernie invites them to his beach house, ostensibly as a reward, and asks his mobster partner to kill them. But the mobster tells the hit man to kill Bernie instead for sleeping with his girlfriend.The employees — fearful that they might be next on the hit list — frantically make Bernie seem alive by, among other ruses, putting sunglasses on him, rolling him out to his sun deck and rigging a device that raises his arm so he appears to be waving to people.The film, which grossed a modest $30 million (a little less than $75 million in today’s money), gained fans long after its release through home video and cable-TV viewing. People magazine wrote in 2014 that the movie “has managed to age into something close to respectability.”Mr. Klane believed that the Bernie character was too dead to revive cinematically. But a sequel was made — because Victor Drai, one of the original film’s producers, raised the money from its Italian distributor, Mr. Drai recalled in a phone interview.Mr. Klane was the director as well as the writer of “Weekend at Bernie’s II” (1993), which involves the discovery of Bernie’s offshore bank account, containing the embezzled money, and a voodoo ceremony to try reanimating him.The reviews were roundly negative.“If ever there was a career-ending movie,” the Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez wrote, “‘Weekend at Bernie’s II’ is it.”But for Mr. Klane, it wasn’t. He kept working.Robert Klane was born on Oct. 17, 1941, in Port Jefferson, N.Y., on Long Island, and grew up in nearby Patchogue and Bayport. His father, Edward, was a physician. His mother, Adele (Blum) Klane, was a homemaker.After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Mr. Klane returned to New York and found work in advertising.Over the next few years he was a commercial copywriter at two agencies, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (now BBDO) and McCann Erickson (now McCann). In 1967 he went to work at Filmex, a production house, where he directed commercials.In his spare time he wrote “The Horse Is Dead,” about a camp counselor who hates his campers. The book was labeled “filth and smut simply for the sake of smut” by a self-appointed decent literature committee that wanted it removed from a library in Bel Air, Md., in 1968. But commissioners in Harford County, Md., refused to ban it.On the other hand, Jack Benny sent Mr. Klane a fan letter telling him that it was the funniest book he had ever read.Two years later, Mr. Klane published “Where’s Poppa?,” and that same year Carl Reiner directed the film version, with a script by Mr. Klane. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film did not have “much more on its mind than a desperate desire to provoke shock and laughter” — which, he said, it did successfully.Jon Klane recalled going to a theater to see the film with his father, who stayed in the lobby. “I came out to get candy, and he was watching a matronly woman demand a refund,” he said by phone. “I went up to him, and he said, ‘This is exactly the kind of person I want to offend.’”Over the next three decades, Mr. Klane stayed busy in television and film. He wrote six episodes of the sitcom “M*A*S*H”; the 1985 film “National Lampoon’s European Vacation,” with John Hughes; “The Man With One Red Shoe,” a 1985 remake of the French comedy “The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe,” which starred Tom Hanks; and, in 1997, 11 episodes of Tracey Ullman’s sketch comedy series “Tracey Takes On …,” for which he and several others received an Emmy Award for outstanding variety, music or comedy series.His directing work included “Thank God It’s Friday” (1978), set entirely in a disco, which won the Academy Award for best original song, “Last Dance,” sung by the disco diva Donna Summer, one of its stars; and “The Odd Couple: Together Again,” a 1993 TV movie that reunited Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, the stars of that 1970s sitcom.In addition to his son Jon, Mr. Klane is survived by his wife, J.C. Scott; a daughter, Caitlin Klane; another son, David; a brother, Larry; and five grandchildren. Another daughter, Tracy Klane, died in 2011. His marriages to Linda Tesh and the actress Anjanette Comer ended in divorce.About 20 years ago, Mr. Klane worked with his son Jon on a script, set in a ski resort, that would have rebooted the “Bernie’s” franchise. It did not sell.“We wore out the carpet coming up with gags,” Jon Klane said. “It was my best memory of him. He would say, ‘It has to be a laugh a page, Jonny.’” More

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      ‘Fear and Desire’: Kubrick’s First War

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      Stanley Kubrick’s called his first feature, which is getting a new run at Metrograph, “boring and pretentious.” Instead, it is a revelation.Seen in retrospect, a first feature by a major filmmaker can be a revelation particularly if, as with Stanley Kubrick’s low-budget war movie “Fear and Desire,” it concerns a career-long preoccupation — and even more so if the filmmaker has attempted to suppress it.An independent production which, although fictional, premiered in the documentary section of the 1952 Venice Film Festival, “Fear and Desire” is getting a weeklong run at Metrograph, 70 years after its release in the United States.Kubrick, 23, had left his job as a staff photographer for Look magazine when he undertook the project, crediting himself as director, photographer and editor, as well as producer. The means were modest; the story, written by a high-school buddy, Howard Sackler, was epic. A portentous voice-over locates the action “outside history.” Four universal — albeit obviously American — soldiers, trapped six miles behind enemy lines, battle their respective demons in an attempted return to base.In addition to its allegorical framework, the film partakes in then fashionable existentialism. The same actor (Kenneth Harp) is cast as both the squad’s loquaciously philosophical lieutenant and an equally introspective enemy general. The soundtrack is heavy with the men’s internal musings. The new digital restoration includes nine minutes, mostly post-dubbed dialogue, cut after Venice when the film’s title was changed from “The Shape of Fear” by the distributor Joseph Burstyn, the pre-eminent U.S. importer of Italian neorealist films who also released the independent classic “Little Fugitive” in 1953.However arty, “Fear and Desire” is squarely in the American B-movie tradition. The situation — a cutoff platoon — and the pragmatic use of close-ups suggest Samuel Fuller’s Korean War quickie “The Steel Helmet,” which opened in 1951. Instantly notorious for depicting an American war crime, it is a movie Kubrick might well have seen.In Fuller’s film, an enraged soldier shoots an unarmed North Korean prisoner of war. In Kubrick’s, an unbalanced recruit (the future director Paul Mazursky) abuses and ultimately kills a local woman (Virginia Leith) who, having stumbled upon the four soldiers, is bound to a tree, and left in his charge. The sequence which juxtaposes Mazursky’s babbling with the woman’s petrified silence is the movie’s heart of darkness. Although Leith has virtually no dialogue, her image was featured in the movie’s ads.“Fear and Desire” is clumsily dubbed but strikingly photographed. A.H. Weiler’s New York Times review was both sympathetic and supportive, crediting Kubrick and Sackler with “a moody, often visually powerful study” of men under stress. The movie was not, however, a success. Nor was it a fond memory for its maker.When “Fear and Desire” was revived at Film Forum in 1994, Kubrick had a Warner Bros. publicist bombard local critics with letters expressing Kubrick’s feeling that the movie was nothing more than a “bumbling amateur film exercise,” written by a failed poet (an unkind reference to Sackler, who some 25 years after “Fear and Desire” was awarded a Pulitzer for his play “The Great White Hope”).Kubrick characterized “Fear and Desire” as “a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.” While undeniably pretentious, the movie is neither inept nor boring. Its oddity lies in its being both a prelude and footnote to Kubrick’s remarkable career.Fear and DesireSept. 22-29, Metrograph in Manhattan, metrograph.com. More

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      What James Cameron Wants to Bring Up From the Titanic

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      Preservationists such as Robert D. Ballard have long clashed with salvors such as Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who died in June on the Titan submersible. Is a third way possible?Ocean experts have long clashed over whether artifacts from the world’s most famous shipwreck should be retrieved for exhibits that could help people better understand the Titanic tragedy or whether they should be left untouched in the sea’s depths as a monument to the more than 1,500 people who lost their lives. James Cameron, known for his 1997 movie “Titanic,” sees himself as negotiating a middle path through this complicated and often emotional dispute.Mr. Cameron dove 33 times to the shipwreck from 1995 through 2005, giving him a window on its condition and likely fate. His perspective is timely because the United States government recently sought to exert control over the wreck, raising questions about whether a company that has recovered more than 5,500 artifacts will be allowed to gather more.Mr. Cameron’s views are also deeply personal. He often debated the retrievals with Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French submariner who died in June while descending to the shipwreck in the Titan submersible. Mr. Nargeolet also directed underwater research for RMS Titanic Inc., the company that holds the exclusive salvage rights to the ship and its artifacts.Mr. Cameron recently answered questions by email from The New York Times about his recovery views, the Titanic’s future and the Titan submersible. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.Did you see signs of natural decay during your 10 years of Titanic dives?We’ve seen significant deterioration to thin-walled structures such as the deckhouse (the uppermost deck above the boat deck) and the forward mast. It was intact (in its fallen position) in 2001 but partially collapsed in 2005. New imaging by the Magellan company in 2022 shows that it has completely collapsed and broken open.However, we’ve not seen any significant deterioration to the vast majority of the wreck, such as the hull plates. Their steel is one and a half inches thick. I believe the plates will still be standing for another two centuries at least.How about damage by visitors? Anything obvious?Based on my experience maneuvering around the wreck, and landing on top of it, the submersibles do nothing of significance. Up top, a submersible weighs several tons but down there, in order to fly around, it must be neutrally buoyant, which means it touches down with only a few pounds of force. Besides, anything humans do is trivial compared to the relentless deterioration caused by biological activity, which goes on year after year. The Titanic is being eaten by living colonies of bacteria. They love it when humans drop giant piles of steel into the deep ocean, which we do with some regularity, especially in wars. It’s a feast for them.A still from the 2003 documentary, “Ghosts of the Abyss,” directed by Mr. Cameron, during a visit to the Titanic wreckage.Walt Disney Pictures/AJ Pics, via AlamyOn the Titanic’s artifacts, you describe yourself as a centrist between preservationists such as Robert D. Ballard and salvors such as Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who died in June on the Titan submersible. How so?On one hand, I think it’s good to recover artifacts from the debris field. When Titanic broke in two at the surface, it became like two great piñatas. Over square miles, we see plates and wine bottles, suitcases, shoes — things people carried with them, touched and wore.That humanizes the story and reminds us that the tragedy has a human face. So many artifacts have been recovered that poignantly connect us to this history — like the bell from the crow’s nest which was rung three times by lookout Frederick Fleet when he first spotted the iceberg. Now, millions of museumgoers can see it with their own eyes. I’ve even rung it myself. And there are so many examples of Titanic’s elegance — fine china, beaded chandeliers, the cherub statue from the Grand Staircase. It’s the ongoing public interest in these things that keeps the history alive, now, 111 years after the sinking. A gray area that leaves me torn is whether we should recover artifacts from inside the bow and stern sections. One case I find compelling is recovery of the Marconi set. This wireless system sent the SOS signal that brought the rescue ship Carpathia to Titanic’s exact coordinates, and arguably saved the lives of over 700 people.The Titanic’s wireless set was unique, very different from others in its day. I’ve flown my tiny remotely operated vehicles inside to survey the Marconi rooms, so we know where everything is and have done computer reconstructions.But to actually put that instrument on public display would be very moving for millions of museumgoers. If it could be recovered without any harm done to the outer appearance of the wreck, I’d be in favor, because that area of the ship is deteriorating fast and within a few years the Marconi set will be buried deep inside the ruins, unrecoverable.So anything goes?Where I personally draw the line is changing the look of the wreck — such as raising its iconic bow (where Jack and Rose stood in the movie) or removing the mighty anchors or taking the bronze telemotor from the bridge where Quartermaster Hitchens desperately spun the ship’s wheel trying to avoid the iceberg. All these recoveries have been discussed by somebody at some point over the last quarter century. I think we shouldn’t take anything from the bow and stern sections that would disfigure them. They should stand as monuments to the tragedy.Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the French submariner who died in June while descending to the Titanic shipwreck in a submersible, at a Titanic exhibition in Paris in 2013.Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYou knew Mr. Nargeolet quite well. Did you have any disagreements with him and his company’s approach to artifact recovery?He was a legendary sub pilot and explorer, and we spent many exciting hours going over our Titanic videos and comparing notes. He recovered many of the artifacts, such as the crow’s nest bell, that I find so moving in the various exhibits around the world.That said, I disagreed with him about some of his plans to recover such things as the bow anchors, though it was always a friendly discussion. I’m glad some of those plans never came to fruition.Around 2017, you joined with Dr. Ballard and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, in an unsuccessful attempt to buy the collection of Titanic artifacts and move them to Belfast, where the ship was built. Why? And would you try again if RMS Titanic once again declared bankruptcy?Our concern at the time was that the collection could have been bought by a rich private collector and disappear from the public’s view. These artifacts belong to the world, as part of our shared cultural heritage — our collective history — and the artifacts help keep that history alive and the tragedy palpable. But only if they can be seen, and emotionally felt, through public access. If the collection is put at risk again, down the line, I would hope to have a voice in keeping it publicly accessible.What do you make of the federal government’s recent effort to exert control over the Titanic?The Titanic lies in international waters. I’m sure this tussle will go on indefinitely.Do you think the Titan disaster will have an impact on Titanic visitors?Do I believe it will stop people from wanting to witness Titanic in person? Absolutely not. Human curiosity is a powerful force, and the urge to go and bear witness with one’s own eyes is very strong for some people, myself included.But citizen explorers must be more discerning about who they dive with. Is the sub fully certified by a recognized bureau? What is the safe operating record of the submersible company? These are the kinds of questions they need to ask.Would you dive again?I would get in a sub tomorrow — if it was certified, like Woods Hole Oceanographic’s storied Alvin sub, or the subs built by Triton submersibles. But there’s no rush to do anything. That familiar image of the bow will still be there, as it is, for another half century at least. More

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      ‘The Saint of Second Chances’ Review: Baseball Inferno

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      This documentary from Morgan Neville and Jeff Malmberg reconsiders the troubled career of Mike Veeck, a son of the M.L.B. impresario Bill Veeck.Bill Veeck, a scrappy, showmanship-savvy Major League Baseball impresario who survived grave injuries as a Marine during World War II, would make a hard act for any child to follow. But you can’t say that one of his sons hasn’t tried. That would be Mike Veeck, the subject of the peppy new documentary “The Saint of Second Chances.”Now in his seventies, Mike is an engaging onscreen presence in this story, whether appearing as himself or as played in re-enactments by Charlie Day (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”). The movie was directed by Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) and Jeff Malmberg (“Marwencol”), and is a tad more fanciful than their prior work.But fancy is a good fit for the Veecks, it turns out. We see that Bill believed that “the most delightful way to spend an afternoon or evening” was at the ballpark. In the 1970s, reigning over Chicago’s Comiskey Park with the town’s second-banana MLB team, the White Sox, he was a ramshackle marketing innovator. Mike tried to match him: A disastrous 1979 gathering at Comiskey called Disco Demolition Night, where a record-burning stunt turned into a riot that resulted in dozens of arrests, was Mike’s idea. The fiasco got deserved blowback, which sent the younger Veeck into a long tailspin.This movie’s feel-good narrative essentially hinges on whether you buy Mike’s assertion that he wouldn’t have done the event if he “thought it would hurt anyone.” Once Mike got back in the game years later — through the Independent League ball organization — he brought the fun in eccentric ways, including a ball-carrying pig. Darryl Strawberry testifies here that Mike helped him love the game again. And the story of a personal tragedy in Mike’s family life is affecting.The Saint of Second ChancesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      The Girlies Know: ‘Oppenheimer’ Was Actually About Us

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      Yes, it’s a film about a famous middle-aged scientist. But it also captures the primal dissonance of being a young woman.R.I.P. to the “girlbosses” and “ladies” who dominated the internet of the 2010s. Now taking their place in the canon is the “girlie” — the tongue-in-cheek sobriquet used by so many young women chronicling their lives online. The summer that just blazed by belonged unequivocally to the girls and girlies, cultural archetypes who embodied, in their despondency and their delight, the incongruities of being young and female in America. Unlike the always-hustling girlboss, the girlies do not dream of labor. They pick at “girl dinners,” go on “hot-girl walks” or rot in bed with Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh paperbacks. On TikTok, the incubator from which new varieties of “girl” emerge daily, they sort themselves into “city girls” (who know that romance is a game and make their peace with its cruelty) or “lover girls” (who are destined for eternal heartache but won’t let that deter them from searching for love). Their shared vision of tortured femininity and undefinable malaise is not constrained by age. You can be in your 20s or 30s and still very much one of the “girls.”Given that I myself am an extremely online woman in my 30s and thus the target audience for all forms of girl-discourse, it was predictable enough that I would find myself deeply moved by the most girl-coded movie I watched this summer. But that film was not “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s cinematic testament to the conundrums of womanhood. It was the other blockbuster released on the same July day: “Oppenheimer,” the three-hour Glum Nerd in Suspenders Destroying the World film that has been criticized for, supposedly, glorifying an oblivious white man who talks too much about the superiority of science and his intellect while building a weapon meant to cause mass death.This feeling of betrayal at the hands of the same system that once adulated you is not solely the domain of men.I have now been to the theater four times to watch J. Robert Oppenheimer manufacture and then wallow in his own unhappiness, and at some point along the way, I came to realize that this film is, as they say, “for the girlies.” At first, this was simply a private joke I enjoyed making to myself, counting up all the parallels between this midcentury scientist and the types of young women who treat Instagram stories like a literary medium. He is nicknamed Oppie. He reads metaphysical poetry. He wears impeccably tailored pants with fancy belt buckles and flirts with the unshakable confidence of a city girl who has never known rejection. (Misquoting Marx, being corrected and then smirk-shrugging, “Sorry, I read it in the original German” is, I’m afraid, peak hot-girl behavior.) Played by a cadaverous Cillian Murphy — who supposedly girl-dinnered on something like one almond each night to achieve optimum hollow-cheekboned haggardness — Oppenheimer first appears as he’s being mildly disciplined by a physics professor at Cambridge, to which he retaliates by trying to poison his professor’s apple with cyanide. Movie-Oppenheimer’s great malaise, we’re shown — between shots of him lying listlessly in his dormitory bed — is the burden of his own brilliance, lessened only as he coasts through the halls of great universities to finally find, in quantum physics, the challenge that all-consuming brilliance so desperately craves. His hero’s journey will eventually lead him to the building of the atomic bomb in New Mexico and the cover of Time magazine, though he will also find time to cheat on his wife and conduct a rather calisthenic sex life. From afar, the film has all the makings of a Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age form that depicts a passage from callow youth into maturity. But in Oppenheimer’s case, age arrived long before wisdom. A story by Murray Kempton in the December 1983 issue of Esquire describes how the real Oppenheimer was, as a precocious young man, so blessedly sheltered from the demands of real life — “protected from the routine troubles, discontents and worries that instruct even while they are cankering ordinary persons” — that he was “transported to his glittering summit innocent of all the traps that every other man of affairs has grown used to well before he is 42 years old.” It is only when Oppenheimer is already middle-aged, a man whose faith has only ever been in his own intelligence, that he gets his first reality check, at the hands of a once-adoring government bureaucrat named Lewis Strauss. This is an experience any self-identifying girlie will recognize: a profound betrayal from a friend-turned-frenemy.Here the girlhood parallels move beyond the facetious to acquire a darker quality, as shame begins to erode Oppenheimer’s sense of self. As he’s accused of being a Communist sympathizer and publicly ridiculed in a kangaroo trial, the once-venerated scientist finds each of his beliefs collapsing. The great Oppenheimer realizes that no amount of personal brilliance can counter the force of the state. He finally sees that he has devoted his intellect to a system that was rigged against him, one that took advantage of his brilliance and then punished him for it. The same man who once earnestly referred to himself as a prophet is now paralyzed by his inability to either have or act on any firm conviction; the veneer of his certainty in his own power has been stripped away. Near the film’s end, Oppenheimer silently reckons with visions of what his brilliance has wrought: unimaginable suffering and fire as the invention he fathered wipes out civilization itself. Even on my fourth viewing, the sight of Murphy’s frosty blue stare elicited in me a deep familiarity, making me recall a line from Annie Ernaux’s “A Girl’s Story”: “To have received the key to understanding shame does not give the power to erase it.” In theory, I have little in common with this man. But shame — living with it, drowning in reminders of it, never being free from your own inadequacy and failure — is a great equalizer. Being plagued by the squandering of your abilities, condemned to a lifetime of uncertainty, forever wondering where you went wrong or whether you were always set up to go wrong. This is the precondition of girlhood that “Barbie” tried to portray — the dual shock and dissonance of navigating a world that seems to vilify your existence, imbuing it with persistent and haunting shame while also demanding that you put on a show for the hecklers. But it was while watching a helpless Oppenheimer, stunned at being forced to participate in his own public degradation by the U.S. government, that I averted my eyes in dread and recognition. For a Great Man like him, it took the twin shames of the bomb’s destruction and public disgrace to have this life-altering yet basic realization about his own powerlessness. But this feeling of betrayal at the hands of the same system that once adulated you is not solely the domain of men who reach a certain age and come to the uncomfortable realization that after a lifetime of revolving around them, the world is now moving on, indifferent or even hostile to their existence. This is a rule and a warning that life has drilled into girls from age 13, if not sooner. The same powers that have displayed you like a trophy will not hesitate to spit you out the moment you have ceased to be useful.Oppie needed greatness to understand that. But the girlies? We have always known.Iva Dixit is a staff editor for the magazine. She last wrote a profile of the Jamaican dancehall star Sean Paul. Source photographs for illustration above: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures; Universal Pictures; Aidon/Getty Images; Joe Raedle/Getty Images; CoffeeAndMilk/Getty Images. More