Barbie has long been famous for exercising something akin to total mind control on the nation’s female under-sixes, but even so it’s hard not to marvel at the sheer level of meme-ified hype Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has achieved this summer. Pop-ups, tie-ins, special screenings… Google its stars’ names and a digital sprinkle of fuchsia glitter appears. It was probably quite hard to talk the marketing team down from dyeing the worlds’ oceans pink.
Still, the idea of Gerwig being allowed to play with Mattel’s favourite toy is so irresistible that Barbie probably didn’t need to go to all this effort: This is a director whose films are automatically get-the-gals-together landmark events. And if Barbie doesn’t quite have the emotional sensitivity or the storytelling craft of Gerwig at her best (as seen in Lady Bird or Little Women), it still has enough archness, weirdness and unabashed femininity to be completely exhilarating.
Gerwig’s signature joke here is to treat the practical ramifications of the actual Barbie toys coming to life with total seriousness. Barbie showers in invisible water, floats into her car from above and hangs out with friends who are all also called Barbie. Sarah Greenwood’s production design is extraordinary, splicing details from every era of Barbie’s style journey into a coherent universe of Dream Houses nestled among the familiar rocky mountain ranges of classic movies, bordered with sparkling transparent plastic seas.
The opening sequences have the nostalgic sensory overwhelm of being back in a tweenage bedroom, high on the pupil-dilating scent of glitter nail polish, with Barbie and her friends partying in a burst of sequins, light and bubblegum pop. “You guys ever think about dying?” asks Barbie, immaculately realised by Margot Robbie. The music cuts. Existential dread is not on brand for Mattel. But it’s catnip to this film’s twenty and thirtysomething core audience, one that’s fallen for the kind of nihilistic hyper-femininity whose touchstones are Lana Del Ray or Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.
Barbie’s death wish comes from her real-life owner, and so (on the advice of Weirdo Barbie, played with goggle-eyed zaniness by the wonderful Kate McKinnon) she has to break out into the real world to track her down. And Ken tags along, although he doesn’t add much: “My job, it’s just beach,” says Ryan Gosling, visibly loving getting to explore his funny side. What follows is a warped coming-of-age comedy where poor Barbie has to discover the horrors of sexism, self-consciousness, cellulite, objectification and the omnipresent patriarchy, while Ken has a pretty nice time being the centre of attention for once.
Gerwig’s satire is searching, extending right up to the all-male board of Mattel (the grey-suited villains here) and its bland vision of diversity: You can be whatever you want to be, as long as you’re also a Barbie, with all the aesthetic and political palatability that implies. Inevitably, she struggles to neatly close this Pandora’s box of critique. So instead, she and co-writer Noah Baumbach satirise feminism too, and the way that we optimistically think that articulating the problems with the status quo will actually change things. “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance of being a woman under the patriarchy you robbed it of its power!” one Barbie tells another, proudly and emptily.
It’s a glorious, nihilistic conclusion to a film that unfortunately takes quite a bit longer to actually finish. The final scenes descend into a mawkish excess of earnestness, and the storyline following Ken’s lurch into men’s rights-type sexism and subsequent rehabilitation is undermined by the fact that while Barbie becomes fully human, he’s never allowed to be more than a spaniel-brained himbo.
Still, this is a wonderfully fun watch that somehow manages to simultaneously celebrate and satirise the Barbie brand, its feminism and girliness pairing like gorpcore sandals with a floaty pink skirt. It’s Barbie’s world, and it’s a thrill to live in it, at least for an hour or two.
In cinemas worldwide Fri Jul 21