An existential comedy smothered by a pink thick fog of feminist driven male bashing, Barbie may be marketed as the story of Margot Robbie’s enlightened living doll, yet will be remembered for the sad saga of Ryan Gosling’s putdown Ken.
There is a scene in Barbie where it is explained that the doll should be embraced as a vessel to project inspiring ideas to its fanbase of young impressionable girls. Barbie, the movie, takes that wisdom one step further by becoming a high-heeled Trojan horse from which it espouses all matter of feminist nonsense that is eye-rolling at best and sexist at worst.
Directed and co-written by indie-film darling turned studio filmmaker Greta Gerwig (Little Women) and starring Oscar nominated blonde bombshell Margot Robbie, Barbie was marketed as a camp satire to be enjoyed by millennial women and their gay friends, as opposed to the fun playhouse adventure that its true target market – young girls – should have deserved. Gerwig instead delivers a mix of a live-action Toy Story meets the existential dramedy of The Truman Show as if it were scripted by Germaine Greer.
Barbie begins with the always stunning Robbie as “stereotypical” Barbie, who lives in the utopian matriarchal world of Barbieland along with numerous other variations of Barbie’s. These include brunette physician (Emma Mackey), black president (Issa Rae), plump lawyer (Sharon Rooney), and weird damaged goods (Kate McKinnon). Each Barbie has her own house, profession, car, and the biggest accessory of all, a “Ken”, with the stereotypical version played by Ryan Gosling.
When Barbie uncharacteristically questions her existence, she and Ken set off to the “real-world”, aka California, to find the source of her transition from perfect princess to complex mess, which turns out to be Gloria (America Ferrara) a Mattel employee and mother to disgruntled tween girl Sarah (Ariana Greenblatt). When Barbie finds that the real world doesn’t reflect her artificial sensibilities regarding women in society, her existential crisis deepens. Ken, meanwhile, is thrilled to find that men can hold positions of power just like his female overlords, leading to a battle for supremacy in Barbieland.
This battle of the sex’s scenario transitions Barbie from an entertaining fantasy satire into a consistently sexist propaganda piece, in which men both artificial and real are presented as dullard brutes. Where Barbie’s interaction with the real world inspires an ideological, inspirational, and philosophical awakening of what it is to be a woman, Ken embraces “the patriarchy” and all its “toxic masculinity”, which in Gerwig’s film means drinking lots of beer while viewing women as sexual objects. Considering Ken has no balls, such testosterone driven horn-bag behaviour is a mystery.
Real world representations of men are even more problematic. Will Ferrell’s portrayal of a Mattel CEO feels less like a character and more a throwaway sketch parody from his Saturday Night Live days. Even worse is the portrayal of Gloria’s husband (ironically played by Ferrara’s real husband Ryan Piers Williams) as a slack jawed dullard. No doubt the dolt is also a househusband who agreed to hyphen his surname.
Gosling, for his part, plays the part of lovelorn fool very well. He sings, he dances, he flexes his chiselled muscles with the best of them. Robbie is good as well in the title role, providing much more depth than anticipated in the portrayal of a child’s doll that is a iconic as it is problematic, which Gerwig addresses to her credit.
Yet from such depth comes deception, as the profound becomes pathetic, and the lauding of one sex comes with the bashing of another. Look out for the Feminazi Barbie range in stores soon.
