Now onto the next big ‘event’ we have for our cinematic summer. Now, that sound I might be hearing could just be my 10-year old self astounded that I’m out watching a movie based on, like, a girlie doll. But nuts to it. As a grown-ass man, I reserve the right to watch whatever the hell I feel like. And hey, I’m far from the only one—it seems everyone is at the very least somewhat curious about Greta Gerwig moving on from Little Women to a film about a woman who’s nominally about 12 inches high. Here, I see whether I can withstand the urge to make Aqua references with my take on Barbie.
There were animated films based on Barbie before, but they were pretty much what you’d expect—Barbie and the Nutcracker, Barbie And The Masque of the Red Death, and so on. As far as live-action films based on dolls aimed at girls go, Bratz actually got there first…may god have mercy on the souls of those involved there. So that’s probably why this one took everyone off guard—and right from the start, Gerwig makes it clear that is a very different toy movie than say Transformers or GI Joe, thankfully.
We start off in Barbie Land—a seeming pocket dimension inhabited by life-size versions of every permutation of our titular doll, be they astronauts or presidents, with our focus being on the one that exists just for the sake of being Barbie, as played by Margot Robbie (there's also the outcast Barbie played by Kate McKinnon, who's really having fun here). She apparently does pretty much nothing all day but smile, hang out with her fellow smiling friends, and occasionally say hi to ostensible boyfriend Ken (hers as played by Ryan Gosling). Ken is relegated to an existence of eternally chasing Barbie’s affections, but more interestingly engaging in unsubtly homoerotic standoffs with the Ken played by Simiu Liu—something that sort of pays off earlier but you’d prefer we saw more of!
Anyhoo, Robbie Barbie soon starts experiencing an existential crisis that compels her to venture into the inhospitable hellish landscape that is real-world Los Angeles, with Ken tagging along just because. It soon transpires that pastel and pink cuts it way less in our reality for Barbie, and that’s before Ken stumbles on concepts like ‘patriarchy’.
Yep, it’s a film expounding on gender studies by way of life-size dolls—and as far as these sorts of concepts go, hey, it’s not half watchable. Just on pure direction, Gerwig manages to get some of those little touches down—the Kens and Barbies actually move in an ever so slightly stiff way like you may expect from dolls, without it being too much or too weird. Even the introduction is actually amusingly over the top in a way others wouldn’t bother with—and that’s before we get into battle scenes fought as…erm…music-video-offs.
Oh, and there’s also a subplot introducing Will Ferrel as the CEO of the actual Mattel Corporation, with the film feeling a little unsure as to how far to go in parodying its nominal sponsor. That’s probably the weakest part here—maybe it would’ve worked better if it was Steve Carrel instead, I dunno.
But yep, this is something that ultimately expounds a lot of themes into its run time of—wait, it’s not yet two hours? Much less two and a half hours, or three hours! Oh, thank mercy for certain trends being buckled. Anyway, from the contradictory social expectations of contemporary women to the ultimately empty and dissatisfying results of patriarchal vapid masculinity, Gerwig gets through a lot—and hey, it’s done with some zest and color if nothing else. We even have Michael Cera playing an ‘Alan’ doll that was lost to history in the mix, so between social commentary and old-school toy nods, there’s a lot to go through. More importantly, there is a rather intensive character and emotional arc for Margot Barbie--which, amid all the madness, is the critical thing to get right, and it does just that.
So all in all I certainly don’t mind Gerwig taking a name like this and making it her own—some jokes miss and some parts feel a bit unsure, of course, but there’s a reason that this is getting people and plenty of pink-clad groups of ladies in particular back into cinemas. It’s something familiar, but done differently than you might think—and, in an age of uncertainty in the film industry, where streaming is showing cracks alongside the traditional means, perhaps that’s just the thing to actually get folks excited about films again. Even a few years ago, who’d think we’d have earnest talks on gender roles delivered by Barbie? All we need now is a Pet Rock film delving into the complexities of mining rights, and we’ve got something…
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