Greta Gerwig (2023)
You can’t google Greta Gerwig’s film without pink stars exploding onto the screen; the items the search brings up all carry pink headlines. Crimson seating in Curzon Wimbledon’s Red Screen, where Sally and I saw Barbie, is the closest that cinema’s décor gets to the picture’s signature (not to say relentless) colour but plenty of the audience – few of them young, one a very old, osteoporotic lady – made up for that, even if none of their outfits was as shocking pink as the architecture of Gerwig’s Barbieland. Barbie is visually eventful, to put it mildly – as it has to be: a movie aiming to be a serious money-spinner in 2023 must supply non-stop sensation for fear of audiences getting bored. And this is proving to be, to put it even more mildly, a serious money-spinner. Barbie cost $128m-$145m to make, opened in cinemas worldwide on 21st July and has already taken $795.7m (numbers on Wikipedia, as of 1st August). It targets, evidently with huge success, a demographic ranging from nostalgic Barbie enthusiasts of yesteryear to viewers hostile to outdated notions of gender that the doll represents. Children, too, despite the 12A/PG-13 etc rating: the film’s promotional clout will, in the short term anyway, create a new generation of Barbie owners. (By the way, the BBFC certificate warns of ‘moderate innuendo, brief sexual harassment, implied strong language’. As far as I heard, the last item consists of one ‘mother******’ with the ****** bleeped out.) A great deal of talent has gone into Barbie, behind the camera and in front of it, but the result is a bit of a head-scratcher. The movie’s aesthetic is considered and consistent to a fault. The plotting and sexual politics are much less coherent.
That’s disappointing because Greta Gerwig’s previous film was a cogently modern and satisfying take on another famous piece of Americana-for-girls. Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) is an inventive piece of storytelling true to the spirit of the original and of its author – a version of the novel that expresses the film-maker’s and Louisa M Alcott’s feminism without traducing the latter. A short, smart prologue to Barbie raises hopes that Gerwig’s interpretation of a very different cultural phenomenon will be similarly focused. Spoofing 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the prologue describes the Dawn of Barbie. ‘Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls,’ a voiceover (Helen Mirren) explains, ‘but the dolls were always and forever baby dolls, until …’ Little girls, playing with dolls in a landscape just like the one occupied by Stanley Kubrick’s apes, pause to gaze up, and up, at a pair of legs belonging to Barbie – a gigantified Margot Robbie. Gerwig’s equivalent of the black monolith that triggers an evolutionary shift in 2001 wears a black-and-white strapless swimsuit and cat-eye sunglasses, which she lowers to wink at the groundlings. The little girls then launch into slow-motion smashing to smithereens of their baby dolls.
The next sequences introduce life in Barbieland, where the dayglo pink houses have no walls and the inhabitants no genitalia: these various humanoid versions of Barbie and Ken dolls fake eating, drinking, surfing and more. Robbie’s heroine, sometimes referred to as ‘Stereotypical Barbie’, co-exists with – among many others – Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Diplomat Barbie (Nicola Coughlan) and the Mermaid Barbies (Dua Lipa). Stereotypical Barbie’s boyfriend Ken (Ryan Gosling) is Beach Ken, who rubs shoulders less comfortably with Tourist Ken (Simu Liu), Basketball Ken (Kingsley Ben-Adir) and Artist Ken (Ncuti Gatwa). The population is notable for its ethnic diversity and the women are in charge – President Barbie (Issa Rae) in particular. The men are vain, competitive but callow accessories: Beach Ken can barely function without his girlfriend’s attention. There are also non-Barbie females in evidence, like Midge (Emerald Fennell) and Skipper (Erica Ford), and just one non-Ken male – Allan (Michael Cera). On the surface, the realm is a feminist utopia. Trouble in paradise starts when the protagonist experiences an existential crisis: stereotypical Barbie (I’ll call her just Barbie and Beach Ken just Ken from this point on) is disturbed by signs of human frailty – bad breath, flat feet, cellulite and fear of death.
Barbie seeks the help of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) – so named because her owner in the real world played with her too vigorously and her face shows signs of wear and tear. A virtual pariah, Weird Barbie tells Barbie that, in order to understand her self-doubt, she needs to find the child who played with her – advice that triggers Barbie’s pivotal journey to Los Angeles. There Barbie learns that her owner is an early teenage girl, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), but that Sasha’s mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), is the catalyst of Barbie’s problems: while suffering her own identity crisis, Gloria started playing with Sasha’s toys, thereby transmitting her concerns to Barbie. It seems the situation, physical or psychosomatic, of Barbieland residents reflects the behaviour or state of mind of their real-world owners.
As I watched, I was unsure why, despite all the high-powered job titles, there was such an emphasis on partying in Barbieland: I gather from conversations I’ve had since that a Barbiephile, regardless of their doll’s supposed walk of life, will often collect outfits with which to dress her up to the nines. This may explain why in Barbieland girls just want to have fun (as the film’s soundtrack briefly confirms at one point) but I still don’t get how the Kens fit into the scheme devised by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, who shares the screenplay credit with her. The Kens’ tetchy vying for the limelight in Barbieland seems to add up only if their owners in reality are similarly inclined males – that is, boys unlikely to play with dolls in the first place. If their owners either are girls or are boys who don’t need to be macho, why would the Kens behave as they do – unless these owners are all precociously aware of what-typical-men-are-like and have their dolls carry on accordingly? As it is, there’s no indication the Kens have been owned by anyone.
The pink road along which Barbie drives to Los Angeles might seem to nod to the Yellow Brick Road but the relationship between Barbieland and reality is less imaginative than the one between Kansas and Oz: Barbie’s excursion to LA looks like a matter of getting from A to B. (Gerwig and Baumbach may intend this as a satirical comment on the notorious unreality of Hollywoodland but it’s also conspicuously convenient to the writers, in terms of what happens next.) En route from Barbieland, Barbie discovers she has a passenger in her car – stowaway Ken. On arrival in Santa Monica, it’s an eye-opener to both that the real world is a patriarchy. You’re soon wondering why Gloria spends time with her daughter’s doll since she’s also an employee of Barbie manufacturers Mattel (on the evidence of the film, the only female on their workforce): a Barbie is surely the last thing Gloria needs outside office hours. Never mind: the Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell) and his henchmen, alarmed that Barbie’s weltschmerz threatens commercial disaster, want to capture her for some kind of reboot but Gloria and Sasha help her escape, accompanying her back home with the Mattel posse in pursuit. In other words, it’s just as easy for humans, whether well- or ill-intentioned, to enter Barbieland as it was (and will be) for Barbie to exit the place.
Ken has already headed back (I missed his means of transport), bringing his fellow Kens glad tidings that men rule the real world. This sparks the Kens into unaccustomed proactivity. They plan to amend the constitution to enshrine male dominance. They (somehow) indoctrinate the Barbies and reduce them to subservient roles: in Kendom (as Barbieland is to be renamed), females will be uncomplaining housewives and girlfriends etc. Barbie is miserable until Gloria launches into what is, in view of the prevailing tone hitherto, an incongruously straight-faced lament: the message is that it’s hard to be a woman but this is definitely not an injunction to stand by your man. Although Gloria’s heartfelt (admittedly well-written) speech culminates in ‘I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us’, it raises Barbie’s spirits and revitalises the other Barbies. They (somehow) manipulate the Kens into reverting to their earlier behaviour – arguing among themselves. When the time comes to vote on the proposed new constitution, the Kens are thus too preoccupied to do so and Barbieland’s status quo is restored. The Barbies have learned a lesson, though: policy changes confirmed by President Barbie include a (somehow) better deal not just for outcast dolls like Weird Barbie but also for Kens.
The corresponding real-world enlightenment in the narrative appears to be Mattel’s recognition that it needs to develop greater diversity of product – though Will Ferrell’s CEO hasn’t really changed his spots: his ‘enlightened’ outlook is who cares, provided that it makes money? This is amusing enough but connects uncomfortably with reality outside the film. The project that has resulted in Barbie has been in the works for more than a decade. Mattel Inc, as the copyright owner, was naturally a key player throughout; Mattel Films is one of the production companies with their name on the movie. Just a few weeks before its release Mattel announced the addition to their range of ‘a Barbie doll with Down syndrome, created to allow even more children to see themselves in Barbie, as well as have Barbie reflect the world around them’. Greta Gerwig was supposedly allowed complete creative freedom by Margot Robbie and Warner Bros (who had jointly bought the film rights and invited her to direct); and Mattel, as represented by Ferrell and his entourage, is a central target of Gerwig’s satire. But the actual company is also a major beneficiary of it. In interviews about Barbie, Mattel executives have been congratulating themselves on being prepared to laugh at themselves. With good reason: they’re laughing, along with Gerwig, all the way to the bank.
Gloria’s big monologue isn’t, alas, the only speech of its kind in the later stages, where a rising tide of uplift threatens to swamp Barbie. The feelgood stuff is just about palatable in the reconciliation of Barbie and Ken because Ryan Gosling keeps Ken invincibly (appealingly) silly. When he whines about his lack of purpose without Barbie and she urges him to find his own autonomous identity, the advice is weightless because you don’t believe there’s a hope of Ken succeeding. The heroine is another matter, though. Still unsure who she herself is, Barbie encounters the spirit of the late Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), co-founder of Mattel and inventor (in 1959) of the Barbie doll, which she named for her own daughter, Barbara. Gerwig looks to have cast this small key role in the hope that Rhea Perlman’s astringent, straightforward presence and delivery will conceal the blah conception of the scene. It’s a vain hope, as Ruth blethers on about Barbie’s never-ending evolution, yet her verbiage inspires Barbie to decide to ‘become human’, despite the messy complications it involves. Heading back to LA, ‘Barbara Handler’, as Barbie now calls herself, is escorted by Gloria and Sasha to her first appointment with a gynaecologist.
Margot Robbie’s improbably perfect looks and somewhat unnerving stare, which can give her characters an air of artificiality even when they’re human beings, serve her well in Barbie. She shows plenty of physical comedy skill in exaggerating her own doll-like quality and, especially, in embodying downcast Barbie’s plastic inflexibility. Robbie is human enough, of course, to express Barbie’s transition into ‘real’ feeling: it’s the script’s fault rather than hers that this is doomed to come across as phony feeling. (Ditto the irritating meta moment when Barbie complains ‘I’m not pretty anymore!’ and Helen Mirren’s voice interjects with ‘Note to film-makers: Margot Robbie is not the actress to get this point across’.) Ryan Gosling, however, repeatedly upstages Robbie. I didn’t smile that often during Barbie; when I did it was usually because of Ken. Gosling achieves various shades of petulance, all of them funny. In Santa Monica, Ken visits a library and emerges from it with books about patriarchy: when someone approaches him outside, he clutches the books to his chest, anxiously possessive. It’s the most pleasing single movement in the whole film.
My ignorance of the extent of the Barbie family is part of why I struggled to get to grips with some of what was going on. I’d heard of Ken but not of Allan or Skipper or Midge: until the closing credits, where images of the dolls that inspired them appear, I didn’t realise these three were Mattel products rather than Gerwig’s and Baumbach’s inventions. (For anyone else in the dark about this trio, Allan is Ken’s buddy, Skipper Barbie’s kid sister and Midge her pregnant, less glamorous friend.) I was still left puzzled by Allan, though. According to Helen Mirren’s narrator, when she introduces the denizens of Barbieland, Allan, a dweebish misfit among the Kens, can’t, unlike them, be replicated: why not? The answer (such as it is) seems to be that he’s a kind of honorary Barbie: when Barbie, Weird Barbie and Gloria, in pink boiler suits, join forces to dismantle Kendom and reinstate Barbieland, Allan, in the same uniform, is the one male who lends a hand.
In an interview before Barbie was released, Greta Gerwig told the Guardian she knew the film had to be ‘completely bananas’ and ‘totally unhinged’; its ‘anarchy’, she says, derives from ‘the deep isolation of the pandemic … that feeling of being in our own little boxes, alone’. Gerwig has also stressed in interviews how much she thinks about death. It’s not hard to believe that the experience of the pandemic further intensified that tendency: besides, she and Noah Baumbach, her life partner, must have been working on the Barbie script at around the same time he was adapting Don DeLillo’s thanatophobia-themed novel White Noise for the screen (Baumbach’s film, in which Gerwig co-starred, was released last year). Both Gerwig and Baumbach are gifted film-makers and scenarists but ‘anarchy’ in this instance, seems to be a fancy name for running with an idea and dropping it when the writing going gets tough. The ingenious connection – then, when it suits, disconnection – between what happens in reality and in Barbieland is a prime example. The film’s cinematography (by Rodrigo Prieto), production design (Sarah Greenwood) and costumes (Jacqueline Durran) are all impressive (even if the songs written for it – as distinct from the established hits chosen for the soundtrack – are not). But whenever she finds it tricky to follow things through comedically, Greta Gerwig takes a shortcut to woke earnestness. No surprise that this has earned her plenty of censure in the right-wing press although an upside of Barbie’s fickleness is that even some of these reviewers disagree with each other: Armond White’s and Jack Butler’s National Review pieces are a case in point. I must admit that I’ve found reading thoughtful reviews of the film – Anthony Lane’s in the New Yorker is excellent – more entertaining than watching it. Barbie is vividly coloured but, at heart, it’s oddly dull.
25 July 2023
