'Barbie' Brings the Classic Toy into the Real World
by EG
Director Greta Gerwig's new comedy about the iconic Mattel toy Barbie hits theaters this week and is likely to be the week's top movie. The movie promises many bright-pink laughs and up-to-the-minute critiques of the controversial doll's legacy, but can the movie transcend its brand-supporting DNA? Read on for details.
There isn’t exactly a God in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (unless you count Helen Mirren’s omniscient narrator), but the director does experiment with creation myths. Barbieland, a parallel universe populated by iterations of the Mattel doll, is her sandbox. The toy conglomerate’s vast archive, a trove of successful products, middling ideas and discontinued merch, are the tools.
Gerwig delights in the richness and weirdness of her material in this clever send-up of Barbie dolls and their fraught legacy. It’s impressive how much the director, known for her shrewd and narratively precise dramas, has fit into a corporate movie. Barbie is driven by jokes -- sometimes laugh-out-loud, always chuckle-worthy -- that poke light fun at Mattel, prod the ridiculousness of the doll’s lore and gesture at the contradictions of our sexist society.
With Gerwig, the pleasure is always in the details. Her Barbieland -- thanks to Sarah Greenwood’s production design and Jacqueline Durran’s costuming -- is a pink fever dream. A phantasmagoria of magenta and blush soundtracked by funky compositions by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, bubblegum anthems from Dua Lipa, Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice. Plastic trees and identical two-story Barbie dream homes line each avenue of this manufactured oceanside locale. Engineless vehicles roam the road but flying is the preferred mode of transportation. Think about it: Have you ever seen a Barbie take the stairs?
An army of Kens patrol the land’s pristine beaches. The chiseled dolls can’t rescue a drowning person or save anyone for that matter, but they do stand around and look pretty. Barbies do the real work: She is the president and all the members of the Supreme Court. She is a doctor and a physicist. She has won every Nobel prize and probably cured cancer. Barbieland is feminist utopia as inversion of our patriarchal reality. Voiceover commentary by Mirren add to its storybook quality.
That Barbieland isn’t structurally different from our world isn’t surprising. The representational doll has become an extension of political fantasy, an exercise in decade-dependent what-ifs. Barbie went to space, could vote and owned property long before many human women could. Her look has changed too, shifting to mirror society’s beauty politics.
Gerwig populates her pink vista with a range of Barbies played by a formidable and starry cast: Issa Rae, Emma Mackey, Alexandra Shipp and Hari Nef are a few of the faces in the film. But the protagonist of this wily and fun comedy is Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), the blonde-haired, blue-eyed manifestation of Ruth Handler’s imagination. Her Ken counterpart is played with impressive heart and humor by Ryan Gosling (with Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir and John Cena among the film’s other assorted Kens). The pair are a version of Eve and Adam, if Eve were God’s favorite and Adam acknowledged as the liability he was.
Their fall is not as righteous but just as dramatic. When Barbie finds her perfect life suddenly hobbled by existential thoughts, she seeks answers from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), a doll whose traumatic history (she was played with “too hard”) has turned her into the kingdom’s sage. On the outcast Barbie’s advice, Stereotypical Barbie, with an all-too-eager Ken in tow, heads to real-world Los Angeles to find her little girl. The relationship between Barbies and their human owners is tenuously outlined, so it’s best not to think too deeply about how it all works.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.