By Anwen Crawford
BARBIE, ★★★
(PG), 114 minutes
The conceit of Barbie is that Barbieland, where the dolls live, is a utopia for Barbies. Barbies – and there are many Barbies – dig the roads, run the health clinics and win Nobel prizes. Each Barbie lives in her own, open-plan Dreamhouse. Every day is another perfect day. The film’s director, Greta Gerwig, has compared Barbieland to a prelapsarian Paradise, a place “with no death, no ageing, no decay, no pain, no shame”.
Barbieland is not a utopia, it’s a version of the United States. There’s a Barbie President (Issa Rae), and a Barbie-friendly Constitution. The full bench of the Supreme Court is a set of Barbies.
Ryan Gosling (left) and Margot Robbie in a scene from Barbie.Credit: AP
Visually, Barbieland is a throwback to the era of Technicolor musicals. It boasts painted backdrops and meticulous set and costume design – if Barbie doesn’t win the Oscar for costume design next year, I’ll eat my hat (Barbie-sized). But Gerwig is constrained by the fact that Barbie’s world was only ever an idealised miniature of mid-20th-century America. Decades later and this is the nearest to an Eden that can be conceived by a Hollywood director: a very pink suburbia, ruled by the competent.
For the sake of plot, some shadows must intrude. Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), to give her full name, is troubled by thoughts of mortality. Her previously arched feet, which fit perfectly into her high-heeled shoes, have collapsed, causing consternation among both the Barbies and the Kens. She seeks counsel from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon, having a great time), who lays out the state of things.
On the other side of Barbieland, in the real world, are humans who are playing with their Barbies. A Barbie who is played with “too hard” by her human, like Weird Barbie with her scribbled-on face and punk hair, starts to develop symptoms here in Barbieland. Go forth then, Barbie, and find who is hurting you. Set your world – and the human world – to rights.
But first, a word on the Kens. Ah, the Kens. There are many, many Kens, including Ken number one, Stereotypical Barbie’s stereotypical sidekick, played by Ryan Gosling in full himbo mode. Ken is blond, waxed and gormless; his job title is “Beach”. He spends his Ken days diving into fake waves and posing on fake sand. Ken is a little frustrated by the fact that every night at Barbie’s Dreamhouse is a girls’ night in, with no place for him. Still, he lives (as much as a doll can live) for Barbie.
Ryan Gosling as a Ken in Barbie.
Barbie is good: the whole point of Barbie is that she is good. She’s every Good Witch and Sugar Plum Fairy melted down and poured out again into a perfect mould. But Ken is ridiculous, and the actors shine accordingly. Robbie carries the film but Gosling steals it, with a great deal of help from the script, which gives Ken all the best jokes, an extended musical number, and the most interesting character arc. Villains – or a wanna-be villain, in this case – have the most fun.
Barbie and Ken venture out into the real world – Los Angeles – to find the source of Barbie’s malaise. This turns out to be a Mattel employee named Gloria (America Ferrera) with a lifelong enthusiasm for Barbies not shared by her grumpy tween daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). It will be Barbie’s great discovery that she is not universally adored by humans. As for Ken, well, Ken discovers patriarchy, much to his delight.
Mistaking the United States for the world – for all possible worlds, including Barbieland – is one way in which Barbie is typical of current pop culture. The other is the way in which Barbie has critic-proofed itself, more or less, by giving voice in its script to every possible argument against it. Do you think that Barbie is an instrument of women’s oppression? There’s a speech about that. Are you concerned that Robbie is too pretty for her character to mount a convincing critique of beauty standards? There’s a joke about that.
There are jokes at the expense of Mattel, Barbie’s manufacturer, and at the expense of the film’s distributor, Warner Bros. There’s a joke about Barbie being a “fascist” (“I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce!” Barbie retorts) and an admittedly very funny joke about Ken’s newfound love for dude rock.
Margot Robbie as Barbie in her Dreamhouse where “every night is girls’ night!”
I wouldn’t have expected less from the combined minds of Gerwig and her screenwriting partner Noah Baumbach. Both have specialised, in their previous work as directors, writers and actors, in chewy, sharp-witted characters. Gerwig, in her directorial debut Lady Bird (2017), gave us a troubled and funny adolescent girl for the ages in the film’s title character, played by Saoirse Ronan. And as a screen actor herself, including in Baumbach’s films Greenberg (2010) and Frances Ha (2012), Gerwig has conveyed an awkwardness and anxiety so palpable that it’s strangely sublime.
The anxiety that manifests in Barbie is of a different kind. It’s the anxiety of a 21st-century artist who can’t commit to an argument without being nervous that someone, somewhere, will disagree. It’s the anxiety of a director who’s crossed over into the Hollywood big league but wants us to know that she knows that we know that she’s smarter than the material. The result is a film both pro and anti-Barbie, earnest and cynical at once.
Ultimately, Barbie the film suffers from the same problem as Barbie the character: it ends up flat-footed. The film is buoyed by jokes, yet heavy with speeches, bright with fantastical dazzle, but dulled by its real-world sequences, which, in comparison with Barbieland, look and feel perfunctory. The characters’ ultimate realisation is that they should be more themselves, more in touch with their feelings. Feelings prove nothing and no one can argue otherwise.
Barbie is released in cinemas on Thursday.
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