What do the films Barbie and Oppenheimer have in common? Yes, they were both released in the summer of 2023 and did blockbuster business. The joke at the time was that the two movies were huge cultural events despite being totally different. Barbie explores the meaning of a doll. Oppenheimer reveals the mind and soul of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who developed the atomic bomb.
And yet both Barbie and Oppenheimer have one important thing in common: neither film is underwritten. Characters are fleshed out, history examined, probing philosophical questions given the time to flower.
There have been a lot of discussions in the entertainment press and on social media about how to fix Hollywood’s lackluster 2024 box office. People are not going to the movies. Critics are blaming everything from cellphones to noisy and dirty theaters.
My solution is simple: let great writers write challenging, complicated scripts that are wordy, digressive, and deep. It worked for Barbie and Oppenheimer. And the only film that has made real money in 2024 is Dune, which is based on the 1965 novel and is overflowing with ideas.
I’m a lifelong movie fan, having worked in a restored art deco theater in Maryland while in college. I love comedy, drama, action, and horror, but also the genre that is increasingly absent as literacy wanes: a movie that is brilliantly written.
One of the best books on film criticism I’ve read in years is the recently published Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter. It examines Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the powerhouse 1966 movie starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
The story, based on the 1962 award-winning play, dramatizes a married couple who have grown bitter and exhausted with each other. No CGI explosions or superhero time travel has engaged me as much as these two characters, George and Martha, bickering, backbiting, verbally torturing each other, then ultimately understanding that for all they have suffered, they still love each other.
According to Gefter, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is “an entertaining alchemy of talent, vision, tension, drama, ego, rigor, and drama that brought [the 1962 play] to the big screen.” He goes on: “No matter how tempered, decorous, or respectful the daily comportment of any couple, their underlying feelings of attachment dwell in a private, unpredictable universe subject to its own solar flares of displeasure, shooting meteors of pain, and exploding stars of rage.” The film “remains today an existential provocation that serves up a range of fundamental truths about marital attachments … necessarily lurking, safely hidden, beneath the rituals of everyday life.”
Gefter also notes that Sidney Lumet’s film version of Long Day’s Journey into Night opened the same week Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway. The play was written by Edward Albee, who was educated in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. He said of his experience: “Being there completed my education. I saw all the abstract expressionist painters; I heard contemporary music; I got to see off-off Broadway plays – Beckett, Brecht, Pirandello. The paperback book market was around, so I read a lot.”
Until recently, there was a level of literacy in comedies and action movies. Woody Allen’s films in the 1970s were funny, but also had long stretches of characters having philosophical conversations. Jaws, the 1970s smash that ushered in the blockbuster era, is based on a novel and has long, wonderful scenes that are nothing but dialogue. George Lucas famously mashed up literature, mythology, and psychology to create Star Wars. Whit Stillman’s great films from the 1990s, such as Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, feature young people trying to navigate their social worlds. The characters have read books. They are verbal and able to explore their interior lives with compelling perspicacity.
I still remember the comment my brother, an award-winning actor, made after seeing 1982’s action masterpiece Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: “That was Homeric.” Yes, The Road Warrior is about postapocalyptic car chases in the Australian desert. Yet there is a poetic voice-over throughout the entire film that holds it together and gives it depth. The film is well-written.
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And more than 40 years later, Furiosa, a sequel to The Road Warrior, has been released. Like most movies these days, it is underwritten. Unsurprisingly, it has flamed out at the box office.
These days a film as literate and verbally rich as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is unthinkable. Yet I think audiences crave it. We want some intelligent payoff for our money.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.