First, there’s a prologue, narrated by Helen Mirren and riffing on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, explaining the impact of early Barbie on little girls in 1959 she was an exotic and aspirational replacement for their boring old baby dolls, whose job was to train them for motherhood-Gerwig shows these little girls on a rocky beach, dashing their baby dolls to bits after they’ve seen the curvy miracle that is Barbie. That’s a shame, because the first half-hour or so is dazzling and often genuinely funny, a vision that’s something close to (though not nearly as weird as) the committed act of imagination Robert Altman pulled off with his marvelous Popeye. Barbie never lets us forget how clever it’s being, every exhausting minute.
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The things that are good about Barbie- Robbie’s buoyant, charming performance and Ryan Gosling’s go-for-broke turn as perennial boyfriend Ken, as well as the gorgeous, inventive production design-end up being steamrollered by all the things this movie is trying so hard to be. Instead, it’s a movie that’s enormously pleased with itself, one that has cut a big slice of perfectly molded plastic cake and eaten it-or pretend-eaten it-too. But none of those things make it subversive. It’s true that Barbie does many of the things we’ve been promised: there is much mocking and loving of Barbie, and plenty of skewering of the suits. The narrative is that Gerwig has somehow pulled off a coup, by taking Mattel’s money but using it to create real art, or at least just very smart entertainment. (She and Noah Baumbach co-wrote the script.) For months now there has been loads of online chatter about how “subversive” the movie is-how it loves Barbie but also mocks her slightly, and how it makes fun of Mattel executives even though their real-life counterparts are both bankrolling the whole enterprise and hoping to make a huge profit off it.
Gerwig has done a great deal of advance press about the movie, assuring us that even though it’s about a plastic toy, it’s still stuffed with lots of ideas and thought and real feelings. There are inside jokes, riffs on Gene Kelly-style choreography, and many, many one-line zingers or extended soliloquies about modern womanhood-observations about all that’s expected of us, how exhausting it all is, how impossible it is to ever measure up. With Barbie the movie-starring Margot Robbie, also a producer on the film-director Greta Gerwig strives to mine the complexity of Barbie the doll, while also keeping everything clever and fun, with a hot-pink exclamation point added where necessary.
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