Barbie is wonderful and completely bananas
Margot Robbie is perfect as the flawless doll who becomes sentient and starts to have an existential crisis. That sounds serious, and it is in one sense, but this movie is zanily funny from start to finish.
Barbie
In Cinemas 20 July
★★★★½
When Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, “partners in love and art”, were writing Barbie during a Covid-19 lockdown they decided the movie needed to be “anarchic, wild, completely bananas and totally unhinged”.
It is all of that and much more. It redefines and repositions the Barbie doll, which has been a part of children’s lives since March 9, 1959.
Australia’s Margot Robbie, as the titular Barbie, and Ryan Gosling, as the main Ken, are outstanding as the dolls who come to life. So is all of the support cast.
Robbie received an Oscar nomination in 2017 for a much different film: the ice skating drama I, Tonya. She should receive another one for Barbie.
She is perfect as the flawless doll who becomes sentient and starts to have an existential crisis. That sounds serious, and it is in one sense, but this movie is zanily funny from start to finish.
The script is so, so clever. Gerwig, who directs, and Baumbach are big-brained filmmakers and in Barbie they show that off in the most engaging, inclusive way.
Take the opening scene, which is narrated by Helen Mirren. It’s a moment from prehistory. Girls are mothering pre-Barbie dolls, ones that look like babies.
Then Barbie arrives from above, from another world, towering above them in a black and white swimsuit. The girls look on in awe and start smashing their dolls. It’s an amazing, hilarious nod to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And that’s just the start. The laugh-out-loud jokes and comic scenes range from Marcel Proust to Men in Black, to variations on Mount Rushmore to mansplaining The Godfather.
The social satire is razor sharp because it’s so close to the truth. The targets include Mattel, the toy conglomerate that makes Barbie and Ken dolls, and is a producer of the film.
Here’s the starting point: Hundreds of Barbies and Kens live in Barbie Land, kaleidoscopic home of the dolls.
It’s an ideal world, or so it seems, in which a Barbie is president, Barbies fill the full bench of the Supreme Court and win all the Nobel prizes. The Kens, who came into existence two years after the Barbies, are handsome handbags.
The dialogue – “Hello Barbie, Hello Barbie, Hello Barbie, Hello Ken, Hello Ken, Hello Ken” and so on – sums up this visually dazzling, emotionally vacant place.
One day a stereotypical Barbie (Robbie) starts thinking about death. Soon after, she notices cellulite on her thigh. (Later, when Barbie decides she is no longer beautiful, the narrator Mirren returns to offer the filmmakers some advice about casting choices.)
For now, though, it seems whoever is playing with this Barbie doll in the real world is behaving badly. “Her humanness is interfering with your dollness,” advises Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon, in a star turn). To fix this, Barbie must venture into the real world, find the culprit and set her straight. A stereotypical Ken (Gosling), who fancies Barbie, joins her on this mission.
“I’d like to see what kind of nude blob he’s packing under those jeans,” Weird Barbie says of the Gosling’s peroxide blond, six-pack Ken. More on that later
Barbie and Ken arrive in Los Angeles and are spotted by the FBI. We learn it’s not the first time a Mattel doll has left the reservation.
“Two of your dogs have gotten loose,” an agent tells a junior executive at Mattel, who informs the CEO (a hilarious Will Ferrell), who orders the dolls be found and put back in their boxes.
Barbie and Ken are helped by a slightly rogue Mattel employee, Gloria (America Ferrera) and her tween daughter (Ariana Greenblatt). Gloria’s speech to a room full of Barbies, about what it’s like to be a real woman, is an Oscar worthy moment.
The plot is full of surprises, and jokes. Just when you think you know where it’s heading, it switches tracks.
It’s not a #MeToo Barbie. The patriarchy is part of the story, as is gender inequality, but each is considered in a nuanced and largely humorous way.
Ultimately, it’s about something that applies to Barbies and Kens alike: the expression of individuality, the need to be yourself and for that self to be accepted.
Well, there’s that and then there’s Ken. When he walks around in LA, he’s impressed that other men notice him.
In a library he spots a book about how men run the world. Next to it is a book about horses. This juxtaposition leads to some odd bedfellows when he returns to Barbie Land.
The production design (six-time Oscar nominee Sarah Greenwood) and costume design (dual Oscar winner Jacqueline Durran) has to be seen to be believed. It’s been reported that creating Barbie Land caused a global shortage of fluorescent pink paint. That’s not quite true but it’s also not hard to believe.
The cinematography (three-time Oscar nominee Rodrigo Prieto) is spectacular. All of this combines to make this film a visual treat.
The soundtrack is sing-along-with. One of the highlights is Gosling singing I’m Just Ken and showing the dance moves he learned for La La Land (2016).
Gerwig received Oscar nominations for two of her solo films, Lady Bird (2017) and the adaptation of Little Women (2019). She and Baumbach made the black-and-white comedy-drama Frances Ha (2012), with Baumbach in the director’s chair.
This is her best film, for all the reasons she floated about its conception. It is completely bananas, and that just might be something we need right now.
When Barbie and Ken first arrive in LA, decked out in a rainbow of colours and sliding on bright green rollerblades, Barbie, in a leotard, is ogled by a construction crew.
Still thinking like a doll, she sets them straight. “I don’t have a vagina and he does not have a penis.”
With that in mind, perhaps the highest compliment I can pay this 114-minute movie is that there is no time for a toilet break. I thought about it but stayed put, worried I would miss something I didn’t want to miss.
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