Tripwire Reviews Greta Gerwig’s Barbie

Pretty In Pink

EIC Joel and Senior Editor Andy haven’t seen this (impossible to ignore no matter how hard you try) film as it’s not aimed at old (male) codgers who apparently are prone to having their masculinity threatened by a movie about a children’s doll. There’s cinematic and societal progress for you. No doubt we will get round to watching it at some point (we’re still too in awe of the latest Transformers movie to cope with anything else) so we brought in Andy’s daughter Beth, who is seventeen and most definitely in the demographic (and gender) that the film is aimed at. Effectively she went to see it so we didn’t have to.

So here it is, the Barbie review by seventeen-year-old Beth Colman…

Barbie
Director: Greta Gerwig
Stars: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon

It’s hard to write about a movie that managed to hype itself into being a cause célèbre with such ease, but here goes – yes, it’s aimed at girls like me, with Barbie World a haven of female empowerment, with the doll brand, debuting in 1959, retro-fitted as a symbol of independence. The movie’s basically about that idealized vision meeting the reality of a male-dominated world head-on. In this quirky little movie, the plastic emotionless Barbie becomes humanised and then has to save her world and stop it being taken over by the Ken-dolls. Not exactly a cutting-edge premise but this ain’t high concept stuff after all.

The movie begins with a dance sequence (as you’d expect) which segues into Barbie (Margot Robbie) declaiming taboo thoughts about death, which jars with the utopia of Barbie World. From there she visits “Weird Barbie” who states that she is a broken doll who must find her owner in the real world. Upon arrival, she discovers the reality of being human, and the issues of being a woman in a man’s world, experiencing sexism. It’s a brief visit and she swiftly returns to Barbie land with Ken.

There’s an odd cameo from Will Ferrell, who plays the CEO of a large corporation who is keen to put Barbie in a box and then sell her, but is never seen after this sequence. And then there’s the closing montage, which many in the audience thought was moving, which I agree with to a certain extent despite the emotion seeming forced and tacked on (kitsch is as kitsch does, after all). The sudden jumble of “meaningful” messages at the end of the movie was confusing, half-baked and all over the place. In any case, any impact they may have had ended when the credits rolled and the Barbie World song took over.

The movie was a bit of a mess, but not without its moments, the delineation of the relationship between the mother and daughter (played by America Ferrara and Ariana Greenblatt) and their journey into Barbie Land being of interest, where they manage to grow as people and find true harmony through emotional expression and wearing pink. A magical moment, if you will.

I would say that as a girl the message of the movie (women finding fulfilment without requiring male assistance) did chime with me, notably when Barbie rejects Ken’s proposal of being his “low maintenance low distance girlfriend”. Furthermore, the addition of Rhea Perlman playing Ruth Handler made the movie slightly less cheesy, and brought a sense of nostalgia for a generation who recall her role in Matilda.

All in all, I connected with the overall themes and messages in the movie, despite its incoherent, lightweight tone and absence of a plot. In this sense it hits home, although it being a Barbie flick there’s little more to it than that. Entertaining yet vapid fun with a dollop of feminism thrown in – that and the intensive marketing campaign have captured the zeitgeist (creating a rivalry between the Saturday morning cartoon Barbie and the infinitely weightier and genuinely cinematic Oppenheimer simply due to both films having the same release date was the height of unbridled shamelessness – Christopher Nolan should sue!). A must-see movie regardless of its artistic merit.

Barbie is in cinemas now. Here’s the film’s trailer