With Barbie, Greta Gerwig renders a feature-length toy commercial about as cheeky, subversive and interrogative as it can be. The movie is still rife with product placement — including, oddly, for brands outside of Mattel’s portfolio, like Birkenstock — and its sets are plasticky recreations of the doll’s accessories and environments. But Gerwig, who co-wrote the script with Noah Baumbach and directed, clearly approached the project by writing all of her ambivalence and cultural associations about Barbie, both positive and (mostly) derogatory, into the text, and voicing them in the central conflicts of the story. This makes for a Barbie so self-reflexive that her self-consciousness comes up in a one-liner, and we’re frequently reminded that she is an idea, rather than a person.
If this all sounds heady, it kind of is. The film seems more aimed at grad school-educated millennials than it does children; there are references to cognitive dissonance, feminism and Proust. But it’s just superficially silly and frothy enough to masquerade as something more palatable. After the amusing 2001 parody that appeared in the first trailer, the film proper begins in Barbie Land, a neon and pastel-hued world we learn is something of a matriarchal utopia, though one caught in an unnerving stasis: every day is as wonderful as the last and the next, with absolutely no strife except for Ken (Ryan Gosling, sporting his bleached Place Beyond the Pines look), who’s somewhat unrequietedly hung up on Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie). Widespread harmony persists until the latter incarnation of Barbie — as there are many, including President Barbie (Issa Rae) and a Doctor Barbie and a pregnant Barbie — starts to be consumed by existential dread. Then it’s off to the Real World to contact her owner and try and return to her state of blissful plateau.
The journey she travels through the portal between dimensions is staged in a series of tableaux that reminds one of Elf: Barbie is the second film this year after Beau Is Afraid to mark the Jon Favreau nü-holiday season staple’s 20th anniversary with a resuscitation of its endearingly primitive mix of computer-generated and practical special effects. This movie even incorporates Will Ferrell as the CEO of Mattel in a very game supporting role, essentially shifting into the board room-fronting James Caan character of the prior movie. On a performance level, even more committed is Gosling, who at first threatens to grate but eventually impresses just by dint of sheer effort and persistence.
The aging heartthrob ably acquits his bulging arms and lithe movement to scenes of combat, singing and dancing, of which there are several each — Barbie is equal parts satirical comedy, musical and action film. Gerwig’s embrace of large-scale foot and car chases, physical altercations and choreographed dance numbers constitute a level of formal ambition she hadn’t demonstrated in her previous two films. Barbie does suffer a bit from the pacing problems Gerwig evinced, especially in the choppy Lady Bird, but sequences like a montage featuring Gosling in Los Angeles tout a well-honed comic rhythm.
Gerwig not only pulls the set pieces off quite handily, but they are also thematically resonant. This is because her and Baumbach’s aforementioned hang-ups and critiques of Barbie primarily center on body image and the unrealistic beauty standards perpetuated by the doll. When Stereotypical Barbie starts to be bogged down by pervasive melancholy and thoughts of death, her once perpetually arched feet are flattened and she’s at risk of gaining some cellulite on her thighs. References are also made to the “nude blobs” in place of the playthings’ genitals. There are plus-sized and wheelchair-bound Barbies. It’s a body-focused movie that appropriately takes on some very corporeal genres in action and musicals.
Despite Gerwig’s feminist and anti-capitalist overtures and evident pains to make the movie about perils of neoliberalism, this is still a two-hour advertisement. My viewing partner (indeed a grad-school-enrolled millennial) was hip to all of the film’s layered messaging but nonetheless walked out saying she wanted to go buy a Barbie. It’s a real “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” situation, to quote Audre Lorde. But Barbie is largely a blast all the same, and makes some admirable choices in where it leaves its characters and in the restraint it does exercise, the roads it refuses to go down. One has to hand it to Gerwig for offering up the most counterintuitive ouroboros of an IP franchise-starter imaginable.
photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
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