Oh Barbie! This is one hell of a party
Barbie 108 mins, 12A ★★★★★
BARBIE is easily the comedy of the year. Weird and wonderful, it’s one of the funnest and funniest movies made — and is brilliantly spearheaded by actress and producer Margot Robbie, along with writer-director Greta Gerwig.
That said, though it was all set to feature cameos from Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan, the two don’t appear. Deep sigh. What I’m trying to say: this tentpole event is only 99.9 per cent perfect.
The plot boils down to a mission. Barbie (Robbie) is forced to leave Barbieland (a sparkly place where cute girls run the world) to discover why her pretty little head has imploded.
Her boyfriend Ken (Ryan Gosling) comes along for the ride and, once in Los Angeles, the pair are astonished to find it’s hard to be a woman. Most things are beyond our Ken (Gosling excels as this delicious dolt) but he learns fast and what he brings back to Barbieland is a whole lot of Donald
Trump/Andrew Tate-style energy. That’s right. On his home turf, Ken wages a war on woke and even though this results in much daffiness — ensemble dancing, frantic frisbee throwing, a gallopingly out-of-control horse fetish — the sense of menace is real. Can Barbie, with the help of a bickering mother and her daughter (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt), turn things around?
That Will Ferrell plays a flesh-andblood character (Mattel’s opportunistic chief executive) is one of many clues that Gerwig and her writing partner Noah Baumbach know they’re part of a rich tradition.
Ferrell was the big cheese in The Lego Movie, which was directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Since then, as writerproducers, they have given us SpiderMan: Into the Spider-Verse and SpiderMan: Across the Spider-Verse. All the above movies make peace with corporate empires and the nostalgia industry.
Gerwig is flagging that she’s learnt from the best. (Just as there are umpteen Spider-Mans in the latest superhero multiverse epic, there are endless Barbies and Kens in the Greta-verse. They all deserve a shout-out, though Rob Brydon’s Palm Beach Sugar Daddy
Ken will always have a special place in my heart). This movie isn’t afraid to have female characters holding the floor. Though never preachy, it’s speech-y — Rhea Perlman, as Barbie’s real-life Jewish creator Ruth Handler, channels the Wizard of Oz’s Glinda to give a memorable pep talk.
The awakening experienced by its heroine would make the likes of Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf fist pump the air. But the whole shebang is just as likely to tickle girls and boys who enjoyed 2006 movie Barbie: Mermaidia. Dame Helen Mirren provides the sardonic, semi-jaded and utterly scrumptious voiceover and, the night I saw this movie, her delivery of a line about Robbie’s ridiculously beautiful face earned the largest round of applause.
Robbie is patriarchy’s nightmare, dressed like a daydream. She’s been trying to make a popular feminist classic for years (she threw herself into two genius romps — Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad, both of which failed to make moolah). Undeterred, she’s pushing yet another story about a woman’s right to be “weird, dark and crazy”. Fingers crossed, it’s a case of third time lucky.