Movie Review: Barbie
‘Barbie’, most central and beloved of all the Barbies in Barbieland, lives life in plastic, surrounded by her offshoots (doctor Barbies, mermaid Barbies, supreme court Barbies, etc). An army of Kens, who do not have their own dreamhouses, jobs (unless you count “beach”) or purpose beyond adoring the Barbies, stand around keeping busy in their glimmer. Here, stereotypical Barbie, as she’s known, lives an effortless life without fault, character or diversion, and every night is girls’ night, where the dolls dance beneath a disco ball (feet moulded perfectly into the arch of their high heels) as the Kens compete for their affection. One day, stereotypical Barbie discovers her feet have flattened into normalcy, a tragedy which Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) explains heralds the imminent arrival of cellulite. To be perfect again, Barbie must venture into the real world and find the little girl who she belongs to, and she must do so alone. Ken comes with.
Margot Robbie is perfectly perfect, her performance so pristine that she could only be overlooked by an audience enthralled in the high-wire madness of Ryan Gosling’s hysterical and airheaded Ken. He’s just Ken, he’s Kenough and he’s “great at doing stuff”. With this duo as a foundation, following the hot-pink-brick-road of a marvelously practical production, it’s off to the races.
In the film that follows, Mattel addresses various perspectives on Barbie (that she both went to the moon before women were permitted to use credit cards and set back feminism “by 50 years”, as well as the many shades of cynicism in between), and though they have given more leeway than we might have given them credit for, at times there is a sense that they have nicely set the table to have their cake and eat it too. Will Ferrell, for instance, may be a silly CEO, but we are assured that he cares more about little girl’s dreams than the bottom line, “in an entirely wholesome way”. But this is a Greta Gerwig film after all, and just as Little Women so evidently explores the director’s relationship with that novel, there is an arm’s length quality to Barbie, as if you can feel Gerwig untangling her connection to this property, her responsibility to the audience, the ‘needs’ of Mattel and Warner Bros, matters of her childhood and the compromise of adolescence and worse, adulthood, and on and on.
She delivers not only a quintessential romp, but a film and story about self-consciousness, overtly conscious of itself, in constant communication with you, about Barbie™ as an icon, a brand, a production, a failure, an aesthetic, an artistic challenge, about the film you’re watching right now. Sometimes you’re meant to take the smallest step to finish those thoughts with your own judgement, but later on the film loses its nerve and starts to spell things out. It is a (parentally guided) kids’ movie, so it’s hard to find this too annoying, especially since Gerwig often shepherds her points through the crust of overly attentive viewers by speed or, on occasion, and more impressively for a film so light about its surface; with emotional, vulnerable filmmaking, met by the pitch perfect flux of Robbie’s Barbie.
The same double-think applies to the movie’s “dumb” humour, the element which shines brightest in the trailers. The joke is not that Ken comically bounces off of the big plastic wave, or even that he flies through the air like a toy being sailed to the other side of the playset in make-believe slow motion, but that you knew where this act of apparent bravery and bravado was heading, you know what Ken means to Barbie and that this is a futile endeavour in more ways than one, that this action typifies his ultimate subordinance, which is in contention with history outside of Barbieland, and colours his every act, and most of all that you are in on all this playfully simple or self-effacing humour. Plenty of times, just because of how clueless everyone seems, the moment is funny, the context is funnier, as with the bizarre presence of the ever-around Allan, who doesn’t have “a thing”, aka he does not surf, he does not dance (well), et al. In Barbie, as in its comedy forebears, the laugh lives down the hall from the joke.
The plot which carries this allegorical and light comedy can feel slightly rushed at times (especially in a key relationship in the real world, which is built promisingly but resolved without as much care). It is by no means Gerwig’s best film. It is certainly her most fun. Earlier this year we reviewed The Super Mario Brothers Movie tepidly, concluding that, despite the sheer number of corporate wranglers both steering and weighing that ship down, the film we got was the bare minimum, and in fact, the “worst case scenario”. Barbie occupies quite a similar space as a long-awaited, much beloved artifact of childhood, and is, with those same stringent circumstances, and still more, a best-case scenario. It’s fantastic.
