Barbie review | Greta Gerwig’s pink mutiny

A still from 'Barbie', which released in theatres on July 21.

It’s convenient to remember that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie — written by Gerwig, along with her life partner, writer-filmmaker Noah Baumbach — has Mattel as one of its producers. Mattel created Barbie — specifically, a lady named Ruth Handler designed it for the toy magnate — and Barbie, the hundreds of kinds there are, is its gravy train. So, of course, it was never going to be a dour takedown of corporate toy companies and how they perpetuate the worst stereotypes about femininity for little girls. That’s so 1980s. In fact, Gerwig’s protagonist is the original Barbie. She is Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie, embodying her flawless, fussy statuette and mindlessness with aplomb).

A still from 'Barbie'.

The film soars by giving Stereotypical Barbie the journey that could rescue her from the plasticity and the pinkophilia that plagues her. There is plenty of zeitgeist appeasement going on here. The film’s clever starting point is: If there is President Barbie, Supreme Court Barbie, Doctor Barbie, Lawyer Barbie, Astronaut Barbie (the buzz at the theatre was that Depressed Barbie was in the works), besides those in various skin colours, ethnicities and body-shapes and the Original Stereotypical Barbie, then Barbie is all of them simultaneously. It allows the writer duo to simultaneously and smoothly both mock and admire its source material. The narrative, its humour and world-building, talk to the teenager or tween who is already brought up by parents whose mission it has been to save their smart little girls from Barbie oppression. I watched the film with a big audience, at a suburban Mumbai multiplex. The majority in the audience consisted of dolled-up teenagers and Gen-Z influencers awash in pink, who squealed and hooted through the film. I and some others above that age group did the same. The film’s high-powered soundtrack features Dua Lipa, Nicki Minaj, HAIM, Lizzo, Billie Eilish and others, and has all the patriarchy-smashing one-liners, with a sense of humour that’s so zany and uproarious, that the first ever Barbie movie is one of the most potent endorphin valves at the theatres in recent memory.

So Barbie lives in her pink, resplendently plastic world, in her multi-storey doll-house with a hot pink slide. She wakes up, waves to all the other Barbies — they are all addressed as just ‘Barbie’ — fake-showers, fake-eats and fake-drives her bubblegum pink convertible when Ken (Ryan Gosling, a comedic triumph, his relish at playing the role of Ken adds to making the gender-political messaging in the film supremely enjoyable) joins her for a ride. Ken exists because Barbie exists. All the other men, mostly ornamental in the story, are also ‘Ken’. Barbie’s Ken adores her and is always looking for ways to impress her, while Barbie, by turns, either entertains him with a grin or a guffaw, or dismisses him as an impediment to her luxuriously easy life.

A still from 'Barbie'.

One morning, Barbie discovers she has tears, she plummets down the slide instead of the easy, willowy slide that she is used to, and horror of horror, her heels always up on an incline for her stilettos, drops down to a full flat. Was Stereotypical Barbie turning into Depressed Barbie? The solution, offers Weird Barbie (who else but Kate McKinnon to play this outlier’s role) is to leave Barbieland and go to the Real World, specifically to one angry, woke tween, and to Mattel, the company which created her, for the fix. Ken accompanies her. The two are at odds at every stage of the way in the Real World, ensuing scenes of great hilarity. Barbie has to somehow escape a group of men led by the Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell, whose every expression and every dialogue in every scene he is in rips). She meets Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) who is venomous about Barbie regressiveness, leading to more tears from Barbie’s perfectly kohl-lined eyes. Sasha’s mother Gloria (America Ferrera), a toy designer, it appears, has something to do with the upstaging  of  Barbie’s la-la land. The mom, at least an ’80s child, has grown up on the routine diet of Stereotypical Barbie and will have to help Barbie get her life back. Both Barbie and Ken realise in the Real World that it is actually a man’s world. Barbie is disgruntled and worried. Ken goes, “hmmm!”

With a fresh and robust infusion of good old patriarchy, and all that goes with it including galloping horses, Ken returns to Barbieland. Barbie, Sasha and Gloria follow, only to find the old order upended by men. President, Lawyer, Doctor and Astronaut Barbies are servile and facetious. How will Barbie save herself and the girls? Will the Kens relent and discover their own worth? Will Barbie ever see a gynaecologist? Through risky (but still bathed in pink)  high jinks and a profoundly absurd dance number that Gosling leads, patriarchy gets the lesson intended.

A still from 'Barbie'.

Gerwig’s vision is big bang satire and her path is circuitous — sometimes the film feels like a sequence within a movie within another movie which is a fable. Barbie is feminist fable, meta-messaging suited to the times as well as terrific comedy. This summer’s best entertainer is a doll shedding serious plastic — in order to become a movie star, and to unleash enormous fun.

Barbie released in theatres on July 21