What does a reviewer do when seeing a film which is technically perfect with a confected comic plot featuring some laughs…but which you hated nearly every minute of?
In a sop to objectivity, Barbie (2023) earned 3.5 out of 5 from this writer but I am hitting the keyboard really hard (I learned to type on a manual typewriter in a newspaper office) because the anger hasn’t left me.
Whether they have a good point to make or not, I don’t want to go the movies to be lectured to by writer-director Greta Gerwig and partner/co-writer Noah Baumbach.
My apologies to the world for being white, heterosexual, male, free, hirsute, healthy and all the rest of the privileges I may have been lucky enough to have.
Has there ever been a film with so many messages? Or a pummelling of similar messages in such number?
This film may be aimed at children – or their gormless parents, who will rush out and satisfy the little cherubs with a mountain of merchandise – and these children don’t need that many messages?
If I want to get a lecture about how out of step I am with the world, let me invite my adult children home and let them have their head. They usually do.
My God, I didn’t know that, universally, men are all bastards? That’s how it’s depicted when Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) travel back to the real world.
Yet in Barbie-Land, where all the women are Barbies and who dominate the picture, men are completely superfluous. All the fun seems to be had by the ladies while the gents are there for eye candy (I think I recognise that uncomfortable scenario from my youth but the roles were reversed?).
Which world is right? Answer: Neither. Because there has been a change and, ever so gradually, it is beginning to even up and we are all the happier for it.
In fact the only people to come out of this film as winners are my generation. The old lady at the bus stop is told how beautiful she is and she answers: “I know.” Rhea Pearlman, as the spirit of Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, is charitably depicted. Mention of tax evasion (honest but unnecessary) sours that a tad.
Following several investigations of producing fraudulent financial reports, Handler resigned from Mattel in 1975. Investigations continued after her resignation, and, in 1978, Handler was charged with fraud and false reporting to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. She pleaded no contest, and was fined $57,000 and sentenced to 2,500 hours of community service. She blamed her illness for making her “unfocused” on her business (Wikipedia).
The Barbie story began in 1956 when Handler saw a toy in Germany called Bild Lilli and ripped off the design idea to make her own doll for Mattel, the company she created with husband Elliot and business partner Matt Matson. There was no room for Ruth’s name in the company (Matt-El). Men are bastards.
The Barbie doll was created in 1959 and was/is/will remain a favourite toy.
The Barbie film idea began with Mattel in 2009. Collaborations with Universal Pictures, then Sony couldn’t get off the ground and it took Warner Bros, which acquired the rights in 2018, to get it moving again. Oh, and a bloke called Ynon Kreiz.
In about 2013, Mattel’s sales were nosediving. A cultural shift in beauty standards, gender norms and representation were against the parent company of the white plastic doll. Mattel rapidly cycled through CEOs before Ynon Kreiz, a former chairman of Fox Kids Europe, launched a film division to go with TV shows, stage productions and theme parks. (Source: Variety)
Barbie is the company’s first release. Given the gargantuan ticket sales and share price boost, it must rank as one of the best debuts by a new film production company since the introduction of cinema?
Barbie the film begins with a spoof of Stanley Kubrick’s opening scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Prefaced by a voice over from Helen Mirren, little girls play with baby dolls before seeing Barbie. They then begin destruction, accompanied by the background of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. Clever but it disturbed me.
An ape killing another with a bone to denote man’s brutality to man (or should I substitute human in there?) is a different visual to seeing little girls dashing their baby doll’s heads against rocks.
We then see Barbie-Land where everything is peachy. In fact it’s colourful and clever and enthusiasts will recognise many of the Barbie toy accessories.
Plaudits to set decorator Katie Spencer and production designer Sarah Greenwood (previous collaborators on Atonement, Beauty and the Beast, Anna Karenina and Sherlock Holmes) for lavish work. Ashley Swanson did the Los Angeles scenes.
Robbie is superb. Beautiful, as shapely as the doll and sweet, she is living the perfect life until a bad vibe hits. She mentions death.
Going to visit Weird Barbie (Saturday Night Live alumnist Kate McKinnon in good form) she is given flat feet, a good gag as the doll and Robbie’s character both are designed to stand on tip toes when shoeless. She is told the only way to reverse her mood is to go the real world and find the child who is messing with her image.
Ken, hopelessly in unrequited love, stows away on the trip.
When in Los Angeles the two head to Venice Beach where Barbie finds to her horror that she is not idealised as perfect in the real world. In cynical 2023, Barbie and her costumes have become a joke. Meanwhile, Ken discovers patriarchy and horses.
He takes this back to Barbie-Land and changes the dynamic. President Barbie, Brain Surgeon Barbie, Supreme Court-members Barbie et al, change roles to become hand-maidens.
In LA, Barbie discovers Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who owned her toy but it is Sasha’s mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), who is to blame. She works for Mattel and draws Barbie designs which she would love to have recognised. A downbeat Barbie drawing has drawn the original to her door.
The three women go back to Barbie-Land, rechristened Kendom, and need to gather all hands to reverse the situation.
Here Gloria delivers a heartfelt sermon to the Barbies which is probably the only message the film may have needed:
“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault. I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know”.
3.5
I WRIGHT 