Barbie is easily the comedy of the year. One of the funnest and funniest movies ever made, it’s also breezily outrageous, starting with a wicked pastiche of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s ‘Dawn of Man’ scene. By refusing to play safe, star and producer Margot Robbie, and writer-director Greta Gerwig, have done themselves proud.
The plot boils down to a mission. Barbie (Robbie), has an existential crisis and is forced to leave Barbieland (a sparkly place where cute girls run the world) to discover why her pretty little head has imploded.
Her boyfriend, Ken (Ryan Gosling), comes along for the ride and, once in Los Angeles, the pair are astonished to find it’s actually hard to be a woman. Most things are beyond our Ken (Gosling excels as this delicious dolt) but he learns fast and what he eventually brings back to Barbieland is a whole lot of Donald Trump/Andrew Tate-style energy.
That’s right. On his home turf, Ken wages a war on woke and even though this results in much daffiness – ensemble dancing; frantic frisbee throwing; a gallopingly out-of-control horse fetish – the sense of menace is real. Can Barbie, with the help of a savvy mother and daughter (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt), turn things around?
That Will Ferrell plays a flesh-and-blood character, (Mattel’s opportunistic chief executive), is one of many clues that Gerwig, and her writing partner Noah Baumbach, know they’re part of a rich tradition.
Ferrell, of course, was the big cheese in 2014 classic The Lego Movie, which was written and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller who, since then, as writer-producers, have given us Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. All the above movies make peace with corporate empires and the nostalgia industry.
Gerwig, basically, is flagging up that she’s learnt from the best. (Just as there are umpteen Spider-Mans in the latest super-hero multiverse epic, there are endless Barbies and Kens in the Greta-verse; they all deserve a shout-out, though Rob Brydon’s Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken will always have a special place in my heart).
This movie isn’t afraid to have female characters holding the floor. Though never preachy, it’s definitely speech-y – Rhea Perlman, as Barbie’s real-life creator Ruth Handler, channels the Wizard of Oz’s Glinda to give a memorable pep talk.
The awakening experienced by its heroine would surely make the likes of Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf fist pump the air. But the whole shebang is just as likely to tickle girls and boys who really enjoyed the 2006 cartoon movie Barbie: Mermaidia.
Helen Mirren, by the way, provides the sardonic, semi-jaded and utterly scrumptious voice-over and, the night I saw this movie, her delivery of a line about Robbie’s ridiculously beautiful face earned the largest round of applause.
Robbie is patriarchy’s nightmare, dressed like a daydream. She’s been trying to make a popular feminist classic for years (she threw herself wholeheartedly into two genius romps – Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad, both of which failed to make moolah). Undeterred, she’s pushing yet another story about a woman’s right to be “weird, dark and crazy”. Fingers crossed, it’s a case of third time lucky.
