In the Barbie world life in plastic is fantastic
Posted on 23rd November 2023
Greta Gerwig’s surprisingly subversive movie about the eponymous Barbie, in all her weird and wonderful incarnations, stars Margot Robbie in a role that she was surely born into, as Stereotypical Barbie. Her stereotypical pal Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, is equally well matched. As narrator Helen Miran cheekily intimates, it is having your cake and eating it to have these perfect human specimens undermine the allure of physical attractiveness. Both actors fill their roles so exactly, it’s sometimes hard to see the line between condemnation and celebration.
The movie starts off with a very clever parody of Kubrick’s 2001. Thereafter it is littered with filmic references, ranging from the Matrix to Citizen Kane, a device surely intended to seduce those of us less familiar with Barbieworld. If you do know your way around, however, there are layers of fun here that go beyond ticking off parodies – this is a world where “all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved” by a plastic doll. Quite apart from the lawyer, doctor and physicist incarnations the winsome couple meet along the way, there is Barbie of Swan Lake, inflatable breasts Skipper, Earring Magic Ken and Palm Beach Sugar Daddy. All of them incarnations of the doll’s chequered history. Meanwhile, Will Ferrell, as Mattel’s patriarchal evil genius toymaker, is painted with a delightfully broad brush – a wicked warlock intent on quashing Barbie’s fairy tale visit into the real world by literally putting her back in the box.
He need not have bothered, as Barbie quickly learns from Aariana Greenblat’s gothy Sasha, she has been “making women feel bad about themselves since she was invented, setting the feminist movement back 50 years”. It’s just one of the films revelatory left turns that keep its audience engaged. To say much more would be to spoil the many treats this inventive, genre defying movie has in store, but it’s fair to say that in between the gloss and the sparkle, it packs in more incisive social commentary than any number of more “serious” films that spring to mind.