I wasn’t allowed a Barbie doll growing up. My English mother insisted we play instead with Sindy – Barbie’s homelier British cousin. Sindy’s vital statistics were less Playboy Bunny and, in hindsight, more Real Housewives, but at least her heels were a little closer to the floor.
With this bittersweet recollection, I was rather hoping the Barbie movie would be something of a documentary, and fill me in on everything I had missed out on when my friends went to play at other friends’ houses.
It doesn’t quite do that. But clever writer-director Greta Gerwig (of 2019′s Oscar-winning Little Women) somehow manages to deliver a light-hearted film about existential dread and female oppression and empowerment. The script is littered with Barbie lore and fascinating facts, plus wittily pointed lines and the relentless teasing of Barbie’s “superfluous” platonic boyfriend, Ken.
It’s a toy-based meta-comedy, one that subverts expectations of movies based on playthings and aimed as much at grown-ups as children.
In the saccharine, multi-coloured world of Barbieland, Margot Robbie’s gorgeous “Stereotypical Barbie” awakes in her Dreamhouse, greets her fellow Barbies (all Nobel prize winners, presidents and doctors) and the sycophantic Ken (a perfect Ryan Gosling), and embarks on “the best day ever” before having another best day ever tomorrow.
The repetitive inanity of all this unmitigated positivity is just starting to grate when Robbie’s Barbie stops abruptly in the middle of a dance routine to muse, “Do you ever think about dying?” Horrified at her change of tone, she makes a visit to “Weird Barbie” (Kate McKinnon), a punk-haired outcast “who was played with too hard in the real world” to find out what’s going on. (This is a brilliant nose tap because everyone had that one doll whose hair was hacked, dyed or burnt off. Here, Gerwig delivers redemption by giving Weird Barbie back the power.)
Suspecting that Barbie’s human owner in the real world must be in a bad emotional place herself, with the feelings of nihilism infecting her doll, Barbie the do-gooder sets off to find her human and make things right.
When Barbie and hanger-on Ken step into real-life Venice Beach and encounter a real world in which men run the show, the story gets more entertaining and the film’s point more salient. What felt at first like a paean to the world’s most famous doll is unveiled as a critical commentary on sexualised capitalism, destroyed self-worth and the bullshit of physical perfection.
Gerwig, writing with film-maker husband Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story), does a great job of sending up Barbie’s chequered history (like the discontinuation of the pregnant Midge doll, and “Growing Up Skipper”, the tween Barbie whose bust grew at the press of a button). They have the dolls riff on the positives they have brought to little girls, and acknowledge Barbie represents a dream but seldom a reality.
Throughout, Gerwig’s love of cinema is evident in the nods to classics ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Singin’ in the Rain. Gosling and the other Kens perform a fabulous number, I’m Just Ken, and everything is pretty and pink.
Despite its worthy message, the plot is a bit uneven and some scenes are more a hotchpotch of neat ideas than narratively compelling. Gerwig also struggles to find an ending.
Barbie might be style over substance but she’ll remind you how fun play used to be. Fingers crossed Sindy makes the sequel.
Rating out of 5: ★★★ ½
Barbie directed by Greta Gerwig is in cinemas now.
