Oh Barbie, your big movie promised us Fun! Wild! Zany! But we got a stupid fake feminist, her lobotomized lapdog – and a laughably cynical $145 million ad for Mattel… MAUREEN CALLAHAN’s very barbed Barbie review
Just who is a Barbie girl in a Barbie world?
Damned if this movie knows. What could have been a joyous, cheeky summer confection is weighed down by endless talk of patriarchy, politics, toxic masculinity, and a bunch of other references meant to sound smart but amounting to nothing.
This is Barbie as pastiche, a movie that references other movies while searching for its own identity, its own thesis, and ultimately failing.
Margot Robbie is ‘Stereotypical Barbie’ — Queen Barbie, really — who awakes in her Barbie Dream House one morning to ‘irrepressible thoughts of death.’
Her permanently arched feet go flat. She develops a tiny bit of cellulite. These two physical imperfections are treated as more worrisome than her existential crisis, enough to propel her, along with Ryan Gosling’s pitch-perfect Ken, out into the real world.
This is just one of the myriad plot contrivances that feel lazy and unearned.
What could have been a joyous, cheeky summer confection is weighed down by endless talk of patriarchy, politics, toxic masculinity, and a bunch of other references meant to sound smart but amount to nothing. (Pictured: Margot Robbie as Barbie).
This is Barbie as pastiche, a movie that references other movies while searching for its own identity, its own thesis, and ultimately failing. (Pictured: Ryan Gosling as Ken).
‘Weird Barbie’, played by Kate McKinnon, informs Robbie’s Barbie that her dark thoughts have caused a ‘rift in the space-time continuum.’
No explanation as to how or why. No real discussion or depiction of the membrane separating the real world from Barbie’s Utopia, where women rule everything and the men — the Kens — are lobotomized lapdogs. Sex objects.
‘I’d like to see what kind of nude blob he’s packing under those jeans,’ says Weird Barbie.
If only Stereotypical Barbie knew what sex was. She understands concepts such as quantum physics, fascism and tax evasion, but she and Ken have no idea how Baby Barbies are made — despite the existence of Pregnant Barbies and Mommy Barbies.
Is Robbie’s Barbie — meaning all Barbies — smart or dumb? This movie wants to have it both ways.
Similarly, Barbie wants to be more than a pretty face yet cries, literally, over not being pretty enough.
What happened to co-writer and director Greta Gerwig, who did the wonderful cult films ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Little Women’?
Was the lure of directing a blockbuster too great? Even if it meant kowtowing to the interests of Mattel, for which this film serves as one giant ad?
After all, this is the first movie from Mattel Films, and it feels done by committee: Have Barbie be feminist but not too feminist, smart but stupid (she thinks the Miss Universe contestants are Supreme Court justices), physically perfect but wildly insecure — then insulate all criticisms by hiring a female director.
‘I think we felt pretty strongly that it needed to be told from a woman’s point of view,’ Mattel Films executive Robbie Brenner told Variety. ‘This is the ultimate female-empowerment movie. It’s in the DNA of the movie. I think we all felt like it should be a female.’
What happened to co-writer and director Greta Gerwig (pictured), who did the wonderful cult films ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Little Women’? Was the lure of directing a blockbuster too great? Even if it meant kowtowing to the interests of Mattel, for which this film serves as one giant ad?
I saw a special early screening of the movie Wednesday night with a crowd of suburbanites on Long Island, mostly girls and young women – and there was a collective gasp when a male character uttered this line: ‘I’m a man with no power. Does that make me a woman?’
This is not the world modern women recognize. It feels retrograde, obvious – and not a little simplistic.
In pushing Stereotypical Barbie out into the real world, Weird Barbie presents her with a choice of footwear — a pink spike heel or a Birkenstock sandal, a direct reference to Keanu Reeves choosing between the red pill or the blue pill in ‘The Matrix’.
Reader: ‘The Matrix’ made way more sense. And that’s saying a lot.
So off Barbie and Ken go to ‘the real world’, which is limited to Venice Beach, California.
You’d think such a conceit would have these characters wanting to travel to as many major cities as possible — New York, Paris, Rome, Athens (the birthplace of mythological female warriors and goddesses) — but no.
We get Venice Beach and a Mattel corporate office that feels like something out of ‘Severance’, dark and spare. It looks cheap.
If the avalanche of all things Barbie hadn’t tipped you off already, it seems reports are true that the bulk of the film’s $145 million budget went to marketing and publicity.
And if the execs behind a movie with such a built-in audience, such built-in goodwill, have to wield a months-long campaign insisting how FUN! and WILD! and ORIGINAL! and ZANY! this movie is — well, it isn’t.
‘Weird Barbie’ (Kate McKinnon, pictured) presents Robbie with a choice of footwear — a pink spike heel or a Birkenstock sandal, a direct reference to Keanu Reeves choosing between the red pill or the blue pill in ‘The Matrix’. Reader: ‘The Matrix’ made way more sense.
If the avalanche of all things Barbie hadn’t tipped you off already, it seems reports are true that the bulk of the film’s $145 million budget went to marketing and publicity.
If ever there was a film that called for the Baz Luhrmann treatment — a maximalist kaleidoscope of wardrobe, set design and musical numbers executed with the highest production values — it was this.
Alas. We must settle for stupendous speechifying about ‘womanhood’ circa now and abide Barbie’s fears that someday she, too, might look as strange as Weird Barbie.
We must watch as she tries to wrest Barbie Land from an uprising of Kens who have taken over and installed beer-filled mini-fridges, pull-up bars, and enormous flat-screen TVs that run ‘The Godfather’ on a loop. A world in which Barbies are congenitally bad at sports and love nothing more than hearing their Kens serenade them for hours or explain how basic technology works.
Don’t you get it: men are evil, and women their powerless victims.
The movie actually hits its stride in the last 25 minutes, and here we get a glimpse of what it could have been: A ‘Barbie’ that’s warmer, less ironic, yet clever and funny and self-aware.
There’s God as a woman, Barbie and Ken as a role-reversed Adam and Eve, a self-actualized Ken wearing a sweatshirt that reads, ‘I am K-enough’. All land beautifully.
It’s a shame that, by this point, we’re ready for the film to end.
‘No one,’ Barbie creator Ruth Handler says in the movie, ‘looks like Barbie.’
Except Margot Robbie. So young girls are once again left to square that circle.
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