‘Barbie’ May Be the Most Subversive Blockbuster of the 21st Century – Rolling Stone

It’s robust to promote a decades-old doll and actively make you query why you’d nonetheless purchase a toy that comes with a lot baggage. (Metaphorically talking, after all — literal baggage bought individually.) The makers of Barbie know this. They know that you understand that it’s an try by Mattel to show their flagship blonde bombshell right into a bona fide mental property, coming to a multiplex close to you courtesy of Warner Bros. And so they’re additionally nicely conscious that the announcement that Greta Gerwig could be co-writing and directing this film about everybody’s favourite tiny, leggy bearer of unattainable magnificence requirements instantly reworked it from “twin company cash-in” to “twin company cash-in with a really excessive chance of wit, irony, and somebody quoting Betty Friedan and/or Rebecca Walker.”

In a single day, the passion from followers, movie critics, and followers of movie critics was overwhelming; it doubled as soon as images of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, a.okay.a. Barbie and Ken, rollerblading in matching radioactive-pink outfits leaked on-line. This may not be a crass try and shill toys. Effectively, OK, it nonetheless could be, as a result of it’s a film about Barbie. However the Woman Hen director wasn’t going to simply toe the occasion line. She would have her personal agenda right here, smuggled below the duvet of pastel-colored model nostalgia. The fourth-wave-feminism name is coming from contained in the Malibu Dreamhouse!

There was an inherent promise, in different phrases, that we’d not merely get a two-hour senseless business. Barbie undoubtedly makes good on that promise, which nonetheless doesn’t fairly put together you for what looks like probably the most subversive blockbuster of the twenty first century thus far. This can be a saga of self-realization, filtered by each the spirit of free play and the sense that it’s not all enjoyable and video games in the actual world — a doll’s story that frequently drifts into the territory of A Doll’s Home. Barbie remains to be a magnet for controversy about what the female splendid is, in addition to a Proustian madeleine for a number of generations whose childhoods had been formed by dressing her up as a imaginative and prescient of what a grown lady could be. Gerwig needs to honor these recollections whereas exploring these blended messages. She additionally needs to make one thing through which the phrases “Proustian madeleine” are uttered with full sincerity by mentioned object. It’s a tall order for an 11.5-inch icon.

Each morning, Barbie (Robbie) wakes up in her lovely, open-faced mansion, waves to the legion of different Barbies of their lovely, open-faced Barbieland mansions, and greets the day with a smile. Early afternoons are reserved for listening to President Barbie (Issa Rae) make government choices, or watching a Barbie journalist win a Barbie Pulitzer, or cheering a Barbie Supreme Courtroom that lays down the legislation for the nice of all Barbiekind. Late afternoons are for going to the seaside, the place Ken (Gosling) endlessly competes for Barbie’s affections towards Ken (Simu Liu) and Ken (Kingsley Ben-Adir), amongst different Kens. Nighttime is for extravagantly choreographed disco-dance events, DJ-ed by none aside from Barbie (Hari Nef), and — a lot to Ken’s dismay — all-girl sleepovers. Ultimately, the cardboard backdrop will rotate from moon to solar, and it’s time for yet one more day in utopia.

Besides, in the course of one in all their common super-cool and completely superior sing-alongs, Barbie blurts out, “You guys ever take into consideration dying?” Nobody, least of all of the shiny, pleased one who mentioned it, has any concept the place that random bummer got here from. The subsequent morning, Barbie’s imaginary bathe is chilly. Her imaginary milk has curdled. The collective perkiness of her pals and neighbors solely appears to focus on her inexplicably dangerous temper. Her stiletto-ready arches instantly fall flat. After which, she comes head to head with what can solely be described because the Thanos of the Barbie Cinematic Universe: cellulite.

And thus, Alpha Barbie seeks counsel from Bizarre Barbie (Kate McKinnon), that reclusive doll who lives up within the cubist citadel on the hill and hasn’t been the identical since her proprietor “performed along with her too arduous.” It’s essential to enterprise from Barbieland into the actual world, she tells her, through a ship, a camper, a rocket ship and a snow cell, clad in outfits to match every mode of transportation. When you arrive within the equally plastic metropolis of Los Angeles, she should discover the younger lady who performs with you. Hoping to impress his real love, Ken tags alongside for the experience.

As soon as in our world, Barbie will encounter sexual harassment, gender inequity, the advantages of crying, the CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell) and the mom (America Ferrara) and daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) who’ve launched such morbid ideas into her mind. Ken will uncover horses, Hummer SUVs, and poisonous masculinity. She returns along with her new human pals to Barbieland in a state of dazed enlightenment. He comes again as a full-blown Kencel, spreading a gospel of full-frontal dude-ity.

Gerwig is a triple-threat expertise who’s by no means misplaced contact along with her inside baby, which is why her coming-of-age masterpiece Woman Hen (2017) feels so speedy in its teen-angst drama and her singular adaptation of Little Ladies (2019) is as a lot an emo fan letter to Jo March as it’s a Masterpiece Theater-level interval piece. You may really feel her reconnecting with the child who as soon as spent afternoons dressing up dolls, in addition to the tween who dismissed things like infantile, and the twentysomething who started to see Barbies as one thing probably problematic. There’s a kind of summit between these youthful selves, mediated by an older and wiser Greta, that taking place onscreen beneath all that visible sparkle and dazzle. (And belief us after we say that cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and all the manufacturing design workforce have outdone themselves on the subject of creating the visible equal of a Barbie play set come to life.) To not point out a stability between kitsch, meta-commentary, and real appreciation that Gerwig is trying to strike right here. There are sufficient references to remind people of a protracted historical past of Barbie tradition and facet characters — huge up Michael Cera’s Allan, the resident beta male of the Barbieverse! — and a number of other bear in mind this? tidbits relating to Mattel’s extra cringeworthy choices. (Lookin’ at you, Rising Up Skipper.)

That in all probability would have been sufficient for the studio and the toy firm footing the invoice; throw in some film-nerd catnip like that ingenious 2001: A Area Odyssey parody preamble, and ensure Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling nail the what-me-worry sunniness and put on the varied eras’ couture, and growth! The sound of cash piling in will drown out the haters. As a substitute, Barbie provides ranges of intelligence and interrogation into not simply the script, co-written by Noah Baumbach, however the narrative itself. Quite than flip away from the luggage, the film unpacks it. What was it about these dolls we liked, and what’s it about them that now causes such divisive emotional reactions? Let’s not simply drop Barbie and Ken into the actual world circa 2023 — let’s have them query what it means to be plastic position fashions that run up towards trendy attitudes about womanhood and Neanderthal notions of manhood. You’ll nonetheless get your mondo Barbiemania, however you’re going to have cope with some pop-cultural potholes left in its wake. This can be a film that wishes to have its Dreamhouse and burn it right down to the bottom, too.

Fortunately, Robbie and Gosling are onboard for all of it, whether or not it’s a wink on the viewers, rocking an old-school musical quantity, or mounting a righteous “fuck you” to the patriarchy swaddled prettily in pink. Each get the task(s), and perceive the layers. Which helps when there are sufficient films crammed into this one epic story of Doll-Doll Revolution to nearly qualify as its personal trilogy. Many of the varied mix-and-match components work: the high-concept comedy (minus Will Ferrell’s scenes, which surprisingly fall flat), the mother-daughter drama, the hero’s journey, and the droll digs at Matchbox 20’s “Push.” Typically, its attain exceeds its grasp. When the subtext sometimes turns into textual content — there’s a speech concerning the unattainable paradoxes of being a girl that America Ferrera sells with sound and fury, and nonetheless comes off like an op-ed — it’s arduous to not really feel like you have to be receiving school credit for watching at the same time as you nod alongside. You may already hear the trolls dragging their knuckles towards their keyboards, able to put up their shut-up-and-dribble takes and accuse the movie of co-opting Barbie within the title of corrupting minds.

Essential pondering isn’t thoughts corruption, after all. Neither is mentioning you can love one thing and acknowledge that it’s flawed or has turn out to be inflammatory over time, then striving to repair it. It’s undoubtedly not a foul factor to show a possible franchise, whether or not constructed on a line of dolls or not, into one thing that refuses to dumb itself down or pander to the bottom widespread denominator. And the victory that’s Gerwig, Robbie, and Gosling — together with a supporting forged and crew that revel within the concept of becoming a member of a benefic Barbie occasion — slipping in heady notions about sexualization, capitalism, social devolution, human rights and self-empowerment, below the guise of a profitable, brand-extending journey down reminiscence lane? That’s sufficient to make you giddy. We weren’t kidding concerning the “subversive” half above; ditto the “blockbuster.” An enormous film can nonetheless have huge concepts in 2023. Even a Barbie film. Particularly a Barbie film.

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