In Gerwig’s Barbie world, artifice deftly melds with art

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This article was published 21/07/2023 (1123 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Super-pink, super-sparkly and super-self-aware, the new Barbie movie is a blast.

Greta Gerwig’s smart, funny, gloriously all-over-the-place comedy-fantasy uses an insane amount of shiny cinematic artifice to say something genuinely real and relatable about the impossibility of being a contemporary woman.

Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives in Barbie Land, a pink, plastic, girl-affirming burg where all women are Barbies and Barbies are all women. She, as “Stereotypical Barbie” — the Barbie you picture when you think of Barbie — is our protagonist. Supporting Barbies include Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Ritu Arya and Sharon Rooney.

Of course, every Barbie has “her own home, her own car, her own career,” as Barbies do, and every day is as perfect as the last.

There’s also a Ken, among all the Kens, played by Ryan Gosling. He may be “just Ken” — Kens being somewhat extraneous in the Barbie universe (no one I knew growing up even bothered to get one) — but Gosling still manages to be a sly, self-deprecating comic scene-stealer.

Barbie is living a life of endless summer — sleeping in a heart-shaped pink bed, going to Malibu Beach, making a lot of unnecessary wardrobe changes — when, in the middle of a big musical production number, she’s suddenly beset by unrelenting thoughts of death.

That shadow of mortality soon manifests in flattened feet and then, horror of horrors, a patch of cellulite.

A distraught Barbie seeks out Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), a doll who’s been played with too much, her hairdo immediately identifiable as what you get when some enterprising kid hacks off Barbie’s tresses with safety scissors.

Weird Barbie tells our Barbie that her “malfunctions” are the result of something going on in the “real world.” Barbie needs to discover the true nature of the universe, which sets her on a journey to present-day Los Angeles.

Barbie Land’s peppy, pro-female vibe has led Barbie to believe that little girls inspired by Barbie Scientist and Barbie Senator will have grown up into complete equality. I mean, obviously! So, she’s dismayed to learn women are still dealing with some stuff. Plus, a lot of gloomy tweens happen to think Barbie is the embodiment of sexism, capitalism, “unattainable physical standards and the glorification of rampant consumerism.”

Barbie suddenly discovers crying.

Ken, on the other hand, who’s come along for the ride, is elated with this new place, where he seems to command some status just because he’s Ken. Through a hilarious man montage that combines sports, westerns and footage of mounted police, he discovers the patriarchy, which he takes to mean a world ruled by men and horses. He proceeds to take his new doctrine back to Barbie Land.

Soon multiple Kens are “playing their guitars at” multiple Barbies and mansplaining The Godfather. Pink Barbie houses are turned into horsey man-caves with leather loveseats.

With a lot of ructions going on in both Barbie world and our world, some Mattel executives — portrayed as dark-suited nitwits, with the chief nitwit being Will Ferrell — attempt to put Barbie back in the box. Meanwhile, renegade Mattel employee Gloria (America Ferrera) and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) are trying to create a better life for Barbie, and maybe even for Ken.

Gerwig does some serious world-building (which reportedly led to a worldwide shortage of pink paint) with a level of detail that makes for a lot of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them sight gags.

The crowded, crazy level of comic hijinkery includes an epic Ken fight, a catchy dance number, and Michael Cera as Allan, sending silent, yearning looks at Ken. There are some empowering speeches from Gloria and a poignantly lovely drop-in from Rhea Perlman as real-life Barbie creator Ruth Handler.

The plotting doesn’t always make sense, especially near the end, but the central premise — Barbie having an existential crisis — remains consistently clever.

Gerwig, who co-scripted with Noah Baumbach, delivers a smart, laugh-out-loud funny script, but it needs the wonderfully talented Robbie to make it work onscreen. An objectively beautiful actor who has managed to use her beauty in knowing, even subversive ways in films like I, Tonya, The Big Short and Babylon, Robbie carries off the tricky tonal balance of a movie that’s both a sweetly affectionate ode to Barbie and a sharp, satirical send-up.

Finally, as a story about creating worlds, Barbie, is, of course, a movie about movies. There are lots of cinephile jokes, often riffing on movies that appeal to film bros, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, “the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League.”

But Barbie also references Gerwig’s own work. The movie deals with girls growing up and with mother-daughter bonds, themes she’s explored in more serious films, such as Lady Bird and Little Women. Gerwig started as an actor — in particular as a muse to mumblecore filmmakers back in the 2000s — but has gone on to write and direct her own projects. Her journey is perhaps paralleled by Barbie, who, in a feminist riff on the Pinocchio fable, decides she doesn’t want to be thing that gets made. She wants to be the maker.

As Gerwig brings her blockbuster Barbie to the screen, in all her delightful, infectiously enthusiastic, pastel glory, let’s hope they both keep making things.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com