Barbie movie review: The Margot Robbie-Ryan Gosling film seeks to reinvent Barbie for an age where asking questions is more important than the patience for answers, and where choices are always either/or.
Like the author of the book Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, Natasha Walter, recently put it, “In a world in which women are told they can be anything, too often they still have to be dolls as well.” Perfect and neat at all times, be what is needed of them.
In Barbie, brought to us after all by Mattel, the creator of the eponymous doll, the reverse is also seeking to be true: Now that there is a Barbie who can be everything, she has to be a woman as well. But should we look for women in our dolls or dolls in our women? Surely feminism is beyond this point already.
However, this film by the talented Greta Gerwig, co-written by her with her partner Noah Baumbach, is seeking to reinvent Barbie for an age where asking questions is more important than the patience for answers, and where choices are always either or: a stiletto or a Birkenstock, a Ken or a can be, patriarchy or war of the genders.
And still, the film is about the “stereotypical Barbie” — thin, tall and beautiful — finding herself. Not the pregnant (and discarded) Barbie, not the Weird Barbie dressed like a clown, not the President or Doctor Barbie, or the one in space. Trying to turn the gaze inwards into the phenomenon of the doll and its many reinventions to stay relevant, Gerwig sticks to the one Barbie who will go down most palatably.
The film’s highest points are when Robbie’s Barbie ventures into the “real world”, out from Barbie Land, on discovering to her horror that she is developing cellulite on her thighs and her feet have gone flat, no longer arched like the heels she wears. She has had thoughts of death lately — equated actually with cellulite in one scene — and it’s been all “downhill” since.
Now she must go into the real world, and find out what’s troubling the owner of her doll version, which through “space continuum” blah-blah is rubbing off on her in the real world. Gosling’s Ken hops along for the ride, and Barbie realises almost immediately that, contrary to what they have been told in Barbie Land, creation of dolls in the image of powerful people who run the world doesn’t mean that Barbies have changed the real world.
It’s men who run things here, not unlike the unfortunate Kens in Barbie Land waiting forever of approval of the Barbies. Gosling’s Ken, treated similarly by Robbie’s Barbie as an appendage in Barbie Land, can’t have enough of what he finds in the real world. Barbie meanwhile is shocked at every turn about what she finds.
Almost quickly though, when the film is getting into its stride about how a Barbie and Ken would fit in, in the real world, we are transported back into Barbie Land. The real-word mother-daughter pair who own Robbie’s Barbie come along. What follows is what happens when the twain cross paths.
You can’t shake off the feeling of the overarching Mattel influence on the film, in raising questions about Barbie and what it means or doesn’t for real women, but ensuring that the most uncomfortable ones land as feeble jokes or are kept to the background.
Gerwig is an inspired choice because of the reputation she has built with films like Lady Bird and Little Women, and her touch is there in the small jabs at the gender wars, in the meta awareness of Barbie being — at its heart — a thing of beauty to be admired. And undoubtedly loved, by many. Helen Mirren, as narrator, commenting on one point in the film that casting Robbie was the whole point of Barbie actually never being ugly is too glib for its own good.
While you might enjoy the ambition of Robbie as producer and Gerwig as director in associating with a project that could have gone either way — and it does go right for the large part — the irony is that real-life Robbie is the hero that Barbie could actually have gone for.
The dazzling Robbie is never not beautiful. She is also never just only beautiful. She awes your eyes, but she also warms your hearts. She can be anything, and you can look beyond that blond hair, boobs and body to identify with this.
Gosling has a much smaller role, though his dilemma as the superfluous Ken plays out more fulfillingly. But again, like Robbie, Gosling is an actor of latent charm, who can stride into a room and own it, or let his woman do her thing.
Gerwig is smart in choosing these two charismatic actors to play her leads. If only her Barbie and Ken matched up to either the plastic, or the fantastic.
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