Film review

  • Barbie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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with huge success, a demographic ranging from nostalgic Barbie enthusiasts of yesteryear to viewers hostile to outdated notions of gender that the doll represents.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

  • Il Postino

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Radford (1994)

    Between 1949 and 1952 the poet and communist politician Pablo Neruda lived in exile from his native Chile.  His several ports of call during that time, most of them in Europe, included Capri, where Neruda stayed in a villa owned by Italian historian Edwin Cerio.  In 1985 the Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta published a novel (its Spanish title translates as Ardent Patience):  set in the Isla Negra area of Chile, this invents a friendship between Neruda and his postman, a local teenage boy.  The novel begins in 1969 and ends around the time of Neruda’s death four years later.  Michael Radford’s Il Postino (‘The Postman’) ­– an international hit, best known even in America by its Italian rather than its English title – is a peculiar conflation of Neruda’s actual period of exile and Skármeta’s fiction.  The action takes place on the island of Procida, off the coast of Naples, in the early 1950s.  The postman is now a lost-soul forty-year-old, Mario Ruoppolo (Massimo Troisi), whose relationship with Neruda (Philippe Noiret) brings out Mario’s poetic sensibility, strengthens his romantic nerve and sharpens his political awareness.  The fusion of the first and last of these has tragic consequences.  Neruda returns to Chile but, several years later, pays a return visit to Procida.  He learns from Mario’s wife Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta) that her husband wrote a poem which he was invited to recite at a communist rally in Naples.  The police broke up the rally violently and Mario was killed in the mayhem, shortly before the birth of his and Beatrice’s son, named Pablito in honour of Neruda.

    I’d seen this much-loved tragicomedy once before, twenty-odd years ago, and recalled not liking it much.  I couldn’t remember why, though, and the storyline is interesting enough:  it seemed time for a second viewing.  The two main actors make Il Postino well worth watching; otherwise, my estimation of it hasn’t changed with the years, though one reason for that reflects a trend that has developed since I last saw the film.  Celebrity-fronted travelogues in Italy are now a television epidemic.  Italy Unpacked, which teamed up the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon and the chef Giorgio Locatelli, aired just ten years ago; it sticks in the mind not because it was great but because in 2013 it was still reasonably distinctive.  After two series of Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy last year, 2023 has already seen Anton and Giovanni’s Adventures in Sicily and Clive Myrie’s Italian Road Trip (and probably more that I’ve either forgotten or never noticed).  Although Michael Radford obviously can’t be blamed for this, I struggled to get TV-travelogue fatigue out of my head as I watched his film – especially because Radford seems to revel in the landscape, the language and the natives as if in anticipation of shows like the ones just mentioned.  It’s something of a consolation that at least Il Postino doesn’t drool over the local cuisine, too.

    This Italo-idealisation comes through loud and clear in Luis Enríque Bacalov’s (Oscar-winning) score, whose plaintive melody feels like pastiche Ennio Morricone (the latter’s score for Cinema Paradiso (1988) in particular).  It comes through also in a supporting cast full of what-a-character characters:  Beatrice’s innkeeper mother (Linda Moretti), a lachrymose battleaxe; the ardent communist telegrapher (Renato Scarpo), Mario’s boss at the post office; the priest (Carlo Di Maio) who vetoes Mario’s choice of atheist Neruda as his best man, only to capitulate when he sees the poet at (pretend) prayer in a church pew.  Even the people you’re meant not to like, such as a smoothly insincere, right-of-centre local politician (Mariano Rigillo), are rendered innocuous by Radford’s isn’t-this-delightful treatment of the material.  Mario, though literate, has had only a rudimentary education.  When he first gets into conversation with Neruda, the great poet has to explain what a metaphor is.  This paves the way for many jokey, increasingly tiresome references to metaphors (one of which is actually a simile, though Neruda doesn’t seem to notice).  The roguish eroticism of a silent courtship scene between Mario and Beatrice proves the film can be just as tedious when it isn’t talking.  The beautiful Beatrice – named, of course, to allow a Dante conversation or two between Neruda and the postman – plays solo table football.  Mario watches, mesmerised by her attitude and, as she bends towards the table, her cleavage.  The display culminates in Beatrice putting the mini-football in her mouth – provocative, like.

    Il Postino’s reworking and relocation of Skármeta’s story are sometimes clumsy.   On one of his early bike rides up to Neruda’s residence in the hills above Procida, Mario delivers a letter from the Nobel Prize committee.  It seems to inform Neruda that he’s been nominated or short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature (I didn’t know the committee formally notified hopefuls in this way).  The letter is evidently important to Neruda but he tells Mario he doesn’t think he’ll win the Nobel.  During Mario and Beatrice’s wedding reception Neruda receives an urgent telegram:  because of the earlier scene, you expect this to be glad tidings from Stockholm; the wire in fact tells Neruda it’s now safe to come back to Chile.  The timeframe of Skármeta’s novel means that Neruda does indeed win the Nobel Prize in the course of the story (in 1971).  Mentioning it at all in Il Postino, set twenty years earlier, seems pointless.  Soon after the wedding, Neruda and his wife, Matilde (Anna Bonaiuto), return to Chile.  Mario is uncomplaining but disappointed that Neruda doesn’t, as he assures Mario he will, stay in touch.  Beatrice and her mother are more volubly annoyed but neither breathes a word when Neruda and Matilde eventually arrive back in Procida.  And there’s no motive for this return visit.  It’s just a mechanism for telling the audience what happened to Mario – and for Beatrice belatedly to hand over to ‘Don Pablo’ the medley of sounds of the island which Mario recorded for him, including the beating heart of their unborn child.

    Michael Radford, now in his mid-seventies, hasn’t been a prolific director but was quite a high-profile one in the 1980s and 1990s.  According to Wikipedia, it was through Another Time, Another Place (1983), Radford’s first dramatic feature (and the only other film of his I’ve seen), that he got involved in bringing Ardent Patience to the screen.  After seeing Another Time, Another Place, Massimo Troisi, who had bought the film rights to Skármeta’s novel, wrote a treatment which he sent to Radford.  The two men then worked together on developing the script for Il Postino (along with the father-and-son team of Furio and Giacomo Scarpelli).  Troisi was, as well as a popular actor and comic performer in Italy, himself the director of three film comedies by the mid-1980s.  He intended to co-direct Il Postino with Radford (in the Italian release version – but only that version – the pair share the directing credit).  It seems fair to regard Troisi as the prime mover of the project and he’s certainly the film’s chief asset.  Although the voice delivering Neruda’s Italian dialogue is obviously dubbed (the voice belongs to Bruno Alessandro), Philippe Noiret is unsurprisingly expert – particularly in his early scenes, when Neruda makes wordlessly clear he has better things to do than pay attention to his postman, who appears to be loitering without intent.  But this is, in more ways than one, Massimo Troisi’s picture.  He delivers a skilful, graceful (Oscar-nominated) performance.  Through his physical presence and one’s foreknowledge of the circumstances in which he made Il Postino, he also brings it real poignancy.

    Troisi suffered from rheumatic fever as a teenager and heart problems throughout his adult life.  By the time the Il Postino shoot began in early 1994, he was very ill – ‘so weak’, says Wikipedia, ‘that it was only possible for him to work for about an hour each day.  Most of his scenes were shot in one or two takes.  A shooting schedule was designed to allow the film to be shot around him.  This was aided greatly by the fact his stand-in bore such a striking resemblance to Troisi.  [The stand-in] was used for all back to camera, long/medium shots and most of the bicycle riding sequences’.  Troisi ‘recorded all of his dialogue early in the production, in case he died before filming could be completed’.  In the event, he died, at the age of forty-one, less than twenty-four hours after principal photography ended.  Troisi’s international breakthrough as an actor was posthumous.  For Italian viewers familiar with his other screen appearances, watching him in Il Postino may not be shadowed in the way it’s bound to be for those of us who don’t know him in any role other than his last.

    Mario Ruoppolo comes from a family of fishermen.  The film’s opening scene sees him out on a boat with others in the early morning.  In the next scene, he’s complaining to his father (uncredited) that the fishing trip has given him a cold.  As the father determinedly concentrates on his breakfast, Mario continues to lament his lot:  he wistfully describes a postcard received from two family members who have recently emigrated to New York.  He witters on so much that his father eventually loses patience and breaks his silence.  Reminding his son he’s never been any good at fishing, he tells Mario to follow his kin to America if he wants to or, if he doesn’t, to get himself a job without further ado.  That’s how Mario’s journey to the post office and Neruda begins.  If other sequences were as well shaped and natural as this one, Il Postino would be a stronger film.  But Massimo Troisi, despite the exasperating cuteness of the piece, dignifies every scene he’s in.  His physical fragility and the delicacy of his characterisation are hard to disentwine but you’re left in no doubt you’ve been watching a very gifted romantic comedian.

    16 July 2023

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