(courtesy IMP Awards)
There’s a strangely superficial idea floating in the collective thinkosphere that if something is colourful and confected and fun, it can’t possibly having any weight to it – thematic, emotional or otherwise.
And while sure that’s true with some deliberately light and bright things, the collective catch-all dismissiveness of that assumption means that a good many things that eschew morbid black and a sagely melancholic state of mind are thrown on the scrapheap of flighty irrelevance, deemed to be valueless and a waste of time.
Well, more fool anyone who does that with Barbie, the Greta Gerwig-directed pink-hued masterpiece which takes a whip smart and deliriously funny script by Gerwig and runs with it all the way from Barbieland and back again, sunshiney technicolour wonderfulness trailing endlessly in its wake.
Taking in the trailer, and of course, the film itself, you could all too easily assume that while there is silliness and frothy lightness aplenty, that there’s nothing much beyond the vividly toned landscapes, insistently vivacious smiles and a mindset that happily, giddily screams that every day is a joyously party!
And to be fair, at the start of Barbie, what you get the sense of is Barbieland as an endless festival of fun, where everyone smiles ALL THE TIME, where the very open-plan homes (walls? Ha who needs them?!) allow for a buoyantly happy neighbourliness and where every second of every day of every week is a chance for life to be a gaudily, immaculately and colourfully euphoric.
It’s paradise in plastic and Stereotypical Barbie, which is how the film humourously but affectionately refers to protagonist Barbie (Margot Robbie) in all her high-heeled, fashion-forward blond fabulousness, loves every last moment of it, her days filled with drives in her pink convertible, which she ends up in by simply floating down from her multi-level house – mirroring, notes narrator Helen Mirren, the way people play with Barbie; who, after all, bothers to do something as mundane as take her down the stairs? – trips to the beach to see all the other Barbies and Kens (the less said about Midge, and maybe even Skipper the better though the film pays due homage to all the members of the Barbie universe) and spending with her prime boyfriend, yes, Ken, played with boyishly desperate enthusiasm by Ryan Gosling in fine form (acting wise and sigh, yes, that chiselled chest).
It’s a perfect existence, with nary a blemish and no hint of existential anguish – when you have a dream house and a convertible and a jet ski and … and … and …; along with new outfits that appear like magic why would you agonise over anything? – and so, when Barbie awakes one morning under the sequined doona (duvet) and realises the thoughts of death which temporarily damped down the confected fun of the party the night before, are back, and she’s walking flat-footed (gasp!), she has no choice but to consult Weird Barbie, played with garrulously intense liveliness by Kate McKinnon, who’s covered in crayon and has a haircut that looks like angry ferrets ran amuck in her blond locks.
For it is this less-than-perfect Barbie, who by the way, has the best house up on a hill, than knows what goes in the minds of Barbies and how they are influenced in their perfect slice of colourful living by how they are played with in the real world.
A real world where Mattel pumps out the very toys of which Barbieland is the gloriously sparkly – there’s a reference to this word in the film, by the way, that is an inspiredly arch comment on the way assumptions about women colour what’s done in their name without no regard for who they actually are or what they want, and it will make you LAUGH – epitome of and where all the iridescently neon every day pizazz of Barbie and Ken is lamentably absent.
Getting there is an absolute sequence of pinkish modes of transport and playful 2D animation, but the stark reality of a world where women are not in charge – in Barbieland, where women call the shots and get to do everything from being President to writing Nobel Prize-winning works of literature – assaults Barbie who can’t believe that the female empowerment of her home is trampled all over by a patriarchy which Ken adores (apparently he think it has to do with horses; his sweet if nascent misogyny is heavily equine-influenced, and it, like so much else in this film, is thoughtfully hilarious) and which sends smart, capable women like Gloria (America Ferrera) and her disaffected daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) off to decidedly uncolourful and disempowered margins.
If Barbie is ever going to get her mojo back, and all this crying and obsession with mortality, inherited from the sad person playing with them (dolls are the product of those who use them) has her tagged as Irrepressibly Thoughts of Death Barbie, she must work out how to make her puppet mistress happy.
After all, that’ll fix things instantly, right?
If this was a Barbie movie written by anyone else other than Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach maybe so, but drenched in a hypercolour, peppy weirdness that’s warm and welcoming and deliberately disturbing too, nothing comes easily, something which stuns Barbie for whom everything has always been pristine, perfect and alive with seamlessly simple and satisfying possibility.
Barbie is full to the brim with a slew of sagely incisive and cuttingly funny observations about women’s place in the world, and the impossibly contrary expectations placed upon them, but here’s the thing – miracle of miracles, it never once feels weighed down by them and gives them vibrant necessarily vibrant prominence and voice while maintaining a comedic sensibility that ranges from archly clever to wittily oneliner-heavy and on to just plain silly goofiness. (Even when things do get super serious, such as when Gloria delivers a monologue for the ages which garners cheers from the audience for its power, truth and intensity, it all takes place, somehow, against a candy-hued background that robs it not a drop of its persuasively inspirational truthfulness.)
It’s a gorgeously on-point balancing of the serious and the silly and it works so well that even when things gets a little darker and Barbie-dystopian towards the end, and Barbie ends up having some warmly comforting but confrontingly truthful conversations with the likes of Gloria and the ghost of Barbie creator, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), none of the elements that make Barbie so deliciously rich, funny and involving are sidelined or subsumed by the other.
It’s quite possibly one of the well-judged and perfectly-realised films to come out this or any year, because it manages to pay affectionate though observantly critical homage to its namesake, while balancing some meaningful pronouncements about feminism and the twisted way the world treats one half its population with comedy so lushly clever and boundlessly funny that you wear a smile on your face even when the movie strides, heels cast aside, into territory that lacks pink and embraces a tad more darkness than Barbie would ever normally countenance.
Barbie will likely be a phenomenon, that rare post-the worst of COVID film that cuts across gender and generational lines, with a heart, mirth-inducing sensibility and a brain, which knows that sometimes finding yourself, even with the disruption that causes, might be the most transformational, Berkenstock-clad thing of all and may make all kinds of worlds, even those not adorned by pink and endless sunshine and colour, way better than anyone thought they ever could be, and one Barbara “Barbie” Millicent Roberts, a changed woman ready to take on whatever comes her outlook-changed way, never thoughts might be hers.