Barbie: Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling keep this film afloat

Any publicity is good publicity and hearty discourse is one of the cheapest kinds. Has Greta Gerwig sold out? Yes – if you think that making a movie about a multinational toy manufacturer’s iconic product, a movie funded and endorsed by that corporate overlord, is ‘selling out’. That doesn’t disturb me because I’ve never considered Greta Gerwig an anti-commercial artist. With Lady Bird (2017), Little Women (2019) and her projects with Noah Baumbach, Gerwig has proven herself a clever, sometimes adventurous writer uniquely attuned to a big chunk of her generation’s quirks and hang-ups. As a director, she has injected millennial nostalgia and puckish, referential humour into mainstream narratives that rely on coming-of-age pathos and last-act catharsis. Her viewpoint is unabashedly that of a university-educated white woman who embraces her femininity and her love of pastels. Her choices of subject-matter don’t clash with that, including Barbie. To love the doll, to still feel for her as a symbol of childhood, however fraught, is to be at ease with her limitations. 

The film wields its politics explicitly, using rudimentary ideas about the performance of gender, gender inequality and consumerism to fuel the plot and inform its comic beats. It’s a Neverland story put through a screaming-pink feminist filter, updated for a world in which all characters are IP. 

Playing with dolls used to be a kind of initiation into motherhood and domesticity until Barbie came along with her fabulous sex appeal and wardrobe. At the start of the film we see scrappy little girls, staged like the apes at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, encountering Barbie-as-monolith – a symbol of mid-century sexual emancipation, a vessel for the liberated women’s dreams of self-actualisation. She’s also plastic, which Gerwig calls attention to in Barbieland, where the Barbies feed on air and have high-powered jobs (surgeon, novelist, president) that involve no actual labour or skill. Life is utopian until Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) starts thinking about death, which throws a wrench into her endless cycle of perfect days. 

In typical kids-movie fashion, the naive Barbie – like an elf from the North Pole – enters the real world and consorts with bewildered humans, realising in the process that the Barbies’ magical girl-powers have no bearing on contemporary life. In place of the cynical non-believer too ‘mature’ for Santa, there’s a moody teenager, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who rips Barbie to shreds for her phoney feminism (though she, along with her mom, will eventually be sucked into Barbie’s adventures). Conflict comes courtesy of the guys: Ken (a deliciously stupid Ryan Gosling) discovers the concept of patriarchy in the real world, which he uses to rule over Barbieland. Mattel’s leaders turn out to be a team of brainless men in suits, an all-too-expected twist that recalls The Wizard of Oz, another film that indulges our need for escapism while underscoring its shortcomings. 

The comedy is part nudge-nudge self-mockery (did you know this is a movie about a doll?), part poking fun at idiot men, albeit lovingly. Of course, there is no biting critique of Mattel. Many critics confuse sustained self-referential teasing with a mission to stick it to the man: consider the possibility that a real critique was never on the agenda. The Kens serenade the Barbies with an acoustic rendition of Matchbox Twenty’s ‘Push’, mansplain the Godfather movies, and behave like the characters in Zoolander (2001) – add Will Ferrell, with his screaming-infant shtick, as the head of Mattel, and you get a hodgepodge of gags meant for people of a certain age. Some land, some fall flat, but the film’s snappy tempo, its willingness to dip into pointlessly spectacular asides – a disco dance party here, a beach-side Battle of the Kens there – keeps things shiny and fun. Invoking a modish aesthetic spiked with Tupperware artifice, the film abounds in kitschy rear-projection screens and plastic waves. Spurts of animation give a gonzo effect to scenes of physical comedy. Even when the script winks too much, or when the girl-bossing grates too hard (America Ferrera’s hackneyed monologue about gender double standards is painful for a cynic like me), Robbie and Gosling’s committed performances keep the film afloat. Theirs are faces that might’ve worked in the silent era: Robbie, the ingénue; Gosling, the tramp. 

Barbie’s triumphs are relative. That Gerwig managed to impress her personality on the material in evident ways, that the film exhibits a level of visual originality that feeds into its postmodern games, shouldn’t feel so exceptional. In today’s blockbuster landscape, it is.

 ► Barbie is in UK cinemas now.