Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s cinematic reinvention of Mattel’s most (in)famous toy comes on like a sugar-rush mashup of Pixar’s Toy Story 2, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the cult live-action feature Josie and the Pussycats and the Roger Ebert-scripted exploitation romp Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject. Audiences will be delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.
After a heavily trailered 2001-parody opening, we move to a pastel pink haven in which, “thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved”. This is Barbieland – a fantasy world in which big-haired dolls can be anything (lawyers, doctors, physicists, presidents), thereby inspiring equivalent feminine achievement out there in the “real world”. (“We fixed everything so all women in the real world are happy and powerful!”)
Like a dreamy version of the nightmarish Being John Malkovich, everyone here is Barbie. Except the men, who are just Ken. Or Allan (a hapless Michael Cera). But mainly just Ken – an appendage without an appendage. At the centre of all this self-referential fluff is producer-star Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” – a role so perfect that when Helen Mirren’s narrator makes a sardonic gag about the casting, no one minds. So it comes as a surprise when this habitually smiley creature finds herself haunted by thoughts of sadness, anxiety and death. Worse still, she develops flat feet and (whisper it!) cellulite – two horsemen of the Barbie apocalypse.
A visit to Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie” (“she was played with too hard”) reveals that a wormhole has opened between this world and the next. Now, like Amy Adams in Enchanted, our fairytale heroine must take a ride to reality, accompanied by Stowaway Ken (Ryan Gosling), who promptly discovers The Patriarchy, in which men (and horses) are in charge!
Meanwhile at Mattel HQ, Will Ferrell is reprising his Lego Movie role as the adult quasher of childish dreams, demanding that Barbie get “back in the box”. But by now, Barbie has met gothy teen Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who tells her that “you’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented”, adding; “You set the feminist movement back 50 years, you fascist!” Far from saving the world, Barbie seems to have helped create a dystopia in which “men look at me like an object” and “everyone hates women!”.
There’s something of the rebellious spirit of Todd Haynes’s 1988 cult classic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story about Gerwig’s deceptively upbeat blockbuster. Haynes’s zero-budget underground masterpiece (which has never had an official release) used increasingly disfigured Barbie dolls to tell the tragic story of a talented musician whose life was overshadowed by anorexia. Yet in Gerwig’s multiplex-friendly spectacular, this spectre of unrealisable expectation is slyly reconfigured into a weirdly liberating parable about being whatever (size, profession, attitude) you want to be – whether Ken and The Patriarchy like it or not.
There are jokes about the red pill from The Matrix, the snow globe from Citizen Kane, the male “meaning” of Coppola’s The Godfather, and fanboyish emotional overinvestment in Zack Snyder’s director’s cut of Justice League. Yet Barbie is never anything less than inclusive – meaning that young(ish) fans raised on such animated staples as Barbie in the Nutcracker and Barbie of Swan Lake will find as much to cheer about as wizened old critics looking for smart film references. Like her terrific 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Gerwig’s latest has no intention of ditching its source material’s core audience, even while allowing those with more snooty cinephile tastes to excuse their enjoyment of her film by comparing it with canonical works.
A smart script, co-written with Noah Baumbach, reminds us of Mattel’s constant attempts to reinvent their product (Earring Magic Ken;Palm Beach Sugar Daddy; inflatable breasts Skipper – yes, really) and their embarrassed discontinuation of models that incurred consumer/retailer ire. It all culminates in an entertainingly feisty dismantling of male power (“He took your home; he brainwashed your friends; he wants to control the government”), pepped up by Gosling’s deliciously vacuous apex-Ken performance and carried shoulder-high by Robbie, without whom this audacious flim-flam could well have fallen flat on its face. A moving cameo by Rhea Perlman as the creator of all this madness lends a touch of heartfelt pathos. But it’s Robbie and Gerwig (along with the production designers and songwriters) who make this fizz, ensuring that everything is awesome, even when it isn’t.
