The most famous toy doll on earth, a shiny star cast, one of the most respected female filmmakers of our time, and a mighty marketing offensive. They were the ingredients for a rarely seen hype. How would Barbie ever live up to those inhumanly high expectations? Well, if anyone has experience with inhumanly high expectations, it’s Barbie – she saddled generations of girls and women with it. Precisely by flatly acknowledging that in the film, director Greta Gerwig in turn manages to keep all promises.
The trailers already hinted at that Barbie would bet heavily on self-mockery. But we never dared to hope that Gerwig and her co-writer/husband Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) would (be allowed to) extend that critical look so radically throughout the entire film. The Lego Movie, which also poked fun at its own capitalist character, still played it safe compared to this film. There is no trace of compromise here, Barbie is not even a bit of a commercial for Mattel. Or did you ever imagine that the word “patriarchy” would play a central role in a movie about Barbie, and would be embodied, among others, by… Mattel’s CEO (Will Ferrell’s wonderfully hypocritical role)?
The story begins in Barbie Land, the bright pink dream world where the Barbies – plural, because the range is wide and diverse today – live. Kens are also around, but they are of little importance: while most Kens spend their days on the beach as handsome accessories, the Barbies run the land. President, judge, Nobel laureate, they are all. “Thanks to Barbie, all forms of inequality and sexism have been eliminated,” Helen Mirren’s voice-over says reassuringly. To then subtly add: “Or so the Barbies think. Because they live in Barbie Land, and who am I to burst their bubble?”
The horror van of cellulitis
The utopian Barbie Land can be seen as a direct comment on the motto that Mattel has been using for years now: Barbie can do everything, Barbie inspires young women, Barbie is empowering! Gerwig immediately exposes that idea as an opportunistic sales pitch. When Stereotypical Barbie (the iconic blonde, played by Margot Robbie) suddenly starts to have dark thoughts, and even discovers a trace of cellulite on her slender leg – the horror! –, she is sent to Los Angeles by Rare Barbie (an eccentric Kate McKinnon) to solve her problem and close the “torn membrane” between Barbie Land and the real world. A fat nod to repairing a hymen? It would be just one of many references to Barbie’s enforced sexlessness and what it says about our expectations of women.
In the real world, the scales fall from Barbie’s perfectly made-up eyes: “Everything seems to be reversed here,” she says shocked, after her first run-in with a gang of horny construction workers. And it gets worse: Barbie will also find that most women are not at all grateful to her. A teenage girl (Ariana Greenblatt) scolds her: “You’re everything that’s wrong with our culture, fascist!”
Don’t get us wrong: Barbie is not a pedantic pamphlet. It is first and foremost a crazy, colorful comedy, with, among other things, an absolute star role for Ryan Gosling as an increasingly innocent Ken who is very much in search of himself and his Kenergy, and erupts several times in pathetic ballads. But underneath all those goofy jokes is a thorough, thorough analysis of what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated world. The speech that America Ferrera gives deep in the film about the impossible paradoxes that women face every day, will be received with loud applause in many a movie theater.
Interesting destination
It feels weird writing this, but closes despite its extravagant packaging Barbie perfectly matches Gerwig’s earlier work. Although this time she seeks out an artificiality stylistically that goes against the casual naturalness for which she is known, she remains true to the feminist themes of Lady Bird in Little Women.
Barbie maintains its balance between fun and brains wonderfully consistently, and even though you feel the makers struggle in the last fifteen minutes to find a suitable conclusion, the film eventually reaches an interesting destination. After a wild ride in Barbie’s pink convertible, Gerwig takes us to a refreshing end point that’s far more complex and human than “all men are trash.”
Barbie should be the starting point of a true ‘Mattel Cinematic Universe’ – films about Hot Wheels and Barney the dinosaur are already in the pipeline. It can now go two ways: either be Barbie and the almost absurd artistic freedom that Gerwig was given was no more than bait to tempt other directors to serve Mattel, or we have left for a very interesting series of blockbusters.
Barbie plays in cinemas from today.
