Barbie (2023)

Director: Greta Gerwig

Stars: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling

Short Review, no spoilers

Overall, Barbie is something of a peculiarity however, who am I to argue with the millions who have been to see it, and its apparent power to get banned in several countries. Nevertheless, I left the cinema wandering who would be most satisfied with the film as a whole – it didn’t strike me as either particularly child-friendly or nostalgically adult-friendly and in fact, probably better suited to Greta Gerwig fans than Barbie fans. It’s quite fun briefly but then descends in to verbose, concentration-testing dialogue and feminist sentiments which may or may not be inspiring, perhaps depending on how much you’ve heard it all before and better delivered. Gerwig seemed keen to protect her indie image with attempts to intellectualise and referencing Pavement rather than attempt a brave and fresh look at what Barbie offers the world today. It feels like a disappointingly missed opportunity.

Full Review (spoilers)

I feel that I went through a brief but tumultuous relationship with the new Barbie movie (better half of the Barbenheimer phenomenon? I have yet to endure the masculine side of this very straight, white coupling). My initial cynicism was abruptly overturned when the trailer was played at my local cinema – I loved it! It seemed to be what I had never thought of, or thought possible in this day and age – a vision of Barbie that was equal parts ironic and celebratory. I was as super-excited as every Barbie fan should be – as a world-weary almost 40-year-old it seemed to offer both exaggerated nostalgia and a wryly humorous examination of the daft fantasy that is Barbie. It looked funny! Where once I was puzzled over the assignment of Greta Gerwig as director, I now speculated that she may actually be perfect for the job. A situation where in taking two seemingly polar opposites – an enduring dinosaur of mass-marketed mega toys and ‘indie’ darling of current day American film - a perfectly complementary balance might well be achieved.

What in fact seems to have occurred is less an odd couple match made in heaven as a match made in hell. The ultimate outcome is that girls and women are dictated to by a pair of overbearing parents helicoptering over them and inexplicably, it is the plastic doll who sits there inanely but consistently promoting sentiments that girls can be and do anything they want through a dogma that has been taken apart many times and more effectively for years that engages more sympathy. By the end, I felt sorry for Barbie - bullied nigh on out of existence by modern day, surface-level soul-searching – and myself for having to endure long, drawn out, apparently meaningful moments that were really an example of the unfocused, unimaginative, social media-style muddle that is current debate these days – overly influenced by a treacherous tussle between hardline capitalism and modern day right-on ‘left’ espousements.

When I first settled in to a pleasingly packed auditorium (at 11am in the morning by the way) and took in an interesting mix of audience with many getting in to the pink spirit of things, I felt something of the thrill of a uniting and somewhat significant event. And the start of the film seemed perfectly in keeping with what I had come to expect. Beginning with a wonderfully wrought vision of how Barbie came in to being, it plays as the opening moments of 1959: A Doll Odyssey, as little girls dash their baby dolls in to the earth when a giant monolith of glamorous, womanly toydom in a fetching swimsuit emerges in to their realm, revealing aspirations beyond a fantasy of domesticity and motherhood.

Shooting forward to the present day, Barbieworld appears as an expansion of everything that was opposite to the original baby doll – utterly divorced from the real world, virginal, individualistic, and heavily materialistic. I chuckled wryly, remembering the peculiarity of my simultaneous fascination and frustration with this toy as a child – the Dreamhouse that has a little elevator but no walls, the presence of ghastly but intoxicating pink everywhere. It seemed to be working through what I had anticipated – a knowing but amusing examination of the obscure practicalities we accept of a mass-produced doll, like tip-toed feet that fit perfectly modelled high heeled shoes, and permanent shiny-toothed happiness. However, it wasn’t long before my open-minded want to enjoy gradually began to close down like a fading grin. I’m clearly out of date – I haven’t perused a toy catalogue gorging on which pink nightmare I would just love to own for at least 30 years. But I could not believe that any toy based entirely around fantasy (which all toys are) has been rolling out dolls based on real human beings … EVER. So for me the presence of more real-looking diverse ‘Barbies’ in Barbieworld jarred immediately. I wasn’t aware that they had ever made Barbies that are BMI bothering, anything other than strictly and clearly man or woman, or frankly just normal looking. Barbie awareness of its totalitarian white promotion of a particular kind of surface aesthetic beauty is no new thing – they made Christie a long, long time ago to address the race issue, but really, she was just a brown-skinned, black-haired version of Barbie. THAT’S Barbieworld. Everyone is just a modified version of Barbie. Ok so maybe that’s what the filmmakers are deliberately doing here, except that everyone is Barbie or Ken in name instead of physicality? But in which case, if it’s a simple reversal, then the same applies? In that here a community would seem to be diverse but actually isn’t because they’re all called by the same name? I didn’t get the sense that that particular level of irony was being explored to its fullest potential if at all.

Another significant back-fire and mis-hit is that - in a film apparently promoting reclamation of power and attention from men - Ryan Gosling’s Ken completely steals it. He gets more of the comedy and more of the character complexity; Gosling’s performance is better than Margot Robbie’s (although he has much more to work with); and whereas Ken realises a full character arc, Barbie’s role falters just as it might have developed, and positively disintegrates as the film progresses. It is also one of the notable circumstances through which the film opens up an interesting can of worms before tying itself in a knot by apparently trying to resolve it. Ken’s delight at discovering the world of patriarchy is very funny at times but results in getting caught between the two potentials of either illuminating something pointedly and entertainingly or developing a premise more fully and critically. What plays out is a wayward address to the problem of patriarchy followed by acquiescence through equality. As a result, Barbie is demoted as the heroine and star of her own particular universe and Ken is promoted from his traditional role as supporting sidekick. By the end, Ken no longer has to endure the quiet valiance of taking a step back and allowing the limelight to his girlfriend, instead enjoying reward for his patriarchal petulance, while Barbie’s ending is the excited demand for a real-life vagina. In offering Ken equality, the film misses the entire point of Barbie promoting women to the forefront, and of Barbie being a central - if fantastical - offering as a heroine to girls the world over.

One of the questions no one is asking is why a toy that is aimed at girls is so fraught with neurosis when toys stereotypically designed for boy’s apparent wants are not burdened by the same. It seems like a wasted opportunity to explore such things in a radical way that need not necessarily fear upsetting the sponsors/manufacturers. I did enjoy the inclusion of ‘weird’ Barbie – my own childhood favourite doll was an accidental misfit: she ended up somewhat grunge, with dreadlock-ish hair and adorned with Mr T’s red, off the shoulder, long-sleeved T-shirt. By happy accident, she was transformed from just another dumb doll to something kind of cool. What I am trying to say is that ultimately, Barbie has the potential to be a fantasy toy that girls can interpret how they want, appropriate or reject as they wish. Instead, this film briefly introduces the freedom to play before heavily burdening it with the anvil of already-developed adult angst that frankly we could all do with a little less of.

To sum up, if I found watching Barbie an ultimately deflating and at times angering experience, the aftermath was that I did reflect nostalgically on what Barbie meant to me as a child. And one of the most significant of those reflections is that I remembered how much I always preferred Sindy