Barbie film review — Greta Gerwig’s day-glo comedy gives Mattel the last laugh

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The real world looms large in Barbie, the pin-bright new comedy of dolls, dream houses, mortality and materialism. For one thing, the film was always bound to be a conundrum: a mass-market Hollywood franchise-starter about a plastic heroine made by a self-aware star, Margot Robbie, and an indie-tinted director, Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women). For another, an on-screen road sign actually reads “Real World This Way”, put there to help guide an exit from Barbie Land. 

Of course, the two places have long had a close relationship. As Helen Mirren’s narrator reminds us, thanks mostly to Barbie, every real-world girl and woman now enjoys a life in which “all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved.” Some male ticket-holders may be surprised at the volume of female laughter. The zippy irreverence gives a swift answer to the question of what manner of movie even happens when Gerwig and urbane co-writer Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) get into bed not just with backers Warner Bros, but licensing toy giant Mattel.

What happens is pink. It’s the obvious answer but true all the same, Barbie Land bedecked in an assertive palette of rose, coral and fuchsia. What happens is also very funny: forever just knowing enough, hinged on endless droll internal logic. Robbie, thus, is Barbie, but only one among the sisterhood of Barbies, collectively taking charge of governance between trips to “beach”, where chiselled man-doll Ken (Ryan Gosling) pines for a) affirmation and b) Barbie. (Again, there are many Kens, but Gosling’s is meant for Robbie’s; or at least so he believes.) Still, the star is the centrepiece of a neatly plasticised aesthetic: smile fixed, outfits various, and every night ending with a choreographed dance number. 

“Do you ever think about dying?” Barbie asks her besties, mid-step. And the music stops — as it would.

So begins the real stuff of the movie: existential nausea made flesh as Barbie’s feet — moulded in the tiptoed shape of a high heel, a perfect sight gag — collapse into human flatness. Identity crisis raging, the solution must come beyond this matriarchal idyll. Cue the real world: often even funnier, but the absurdity of a different flavour. For Ken, Los Angeles is a joyful revelation, as Gerwig asks: No, but seriously, what would a Ken doll learn from the lingering whiff of patriarchy? For Barbie, already pursued by a panicked Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell), contact with genuine young women proves eye-opening. A disgusted Gen Zer calls her a fascist.

But the kids are only ever sort-of the point. If much of Barbie’s charm lies in refusing to patronise its audience, it achieves that by addressing itself squarely to an audience of smart 36-year-olds. Even so, the execution is impressive. Robbie gives a wonderfully calibrated performance; Gosling takes gameness to new levels. (“I have all the genitals,” he beams.)

And Gerwig knits their double-act into an often remarkable wider whole: a seamless blend of infectious, day-glo wit that also peers into the chasm between the have-it-all vision of femininity sold to little girls by Barbie and the grinding, impossible choices that face many adult women. (The same pointed mischief sees Gerwig slip in an allusion to current US politics before zagging off into another gag about Pretty Paisley Palazzo Pants.) 

At its best, the movie is like the kind of high-end restaurant that serves great food in the playful guise of favourite childhood desserts. The pleasures of that — and the chutzpah of doing it at blockbuster scale — are to be applauded. Honestly, people used to long for big-budget Hollywood movies as sophisticated, generous and intelligent as this. So what kind of idiot nitpicks?

Well: a large plot point is baldly pinched from Toy Story, and you do also wonder what actual 10-year-olds are meant to watch this summer. And yet, better that the movie makes the grown-up decision to speak to whom it’s speaking to and do it well. (It also makes a far sharper critique of consumerism than the muffled take on Don DeLillo’s dazzling novel White Noise that Baumbach and Gerwig made for Netflix last year.)

All roads lead back to the same place eventually, though. “Blame Mattel, they made the rules,” a character says early on. From there, the whole film proceeds as a meta dance with the owners of the intellectual property. Between the rolling skit on actual discontinued product lines (“Sugar Daddy Ken!”) and the profit-hungry, all-male executive team, you sense real-life Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz being gently nudged to the limits of his indulgence. And yet Kreiz can surely also afford to smile, given how much merch the film is now going to sell for his company. It is the one real world detail too real for even Gerwig to mention.

★★★★☆

In cinemas from July 21