Think Pink (And Green): A Review Of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie

“Barbie”

We’re all Barbie, right, even if we’re Ken? It’s a Barbie microplastics world, aren’t we all pink inside, bouncing around with the little dollops of plastic we’ve consumed? (Or is that just the pink-on-pink rampage of advance publicity?)

But the movie itself is above the now-stilled din of promotional gab: the actors are striking and “Barbie” is here. I haven’t read reviews yet, but lots of tweets attain liftoff: Canadian filmmaker Chandler Levack (“I Like Movies”) tweeted, “the technical and cinematic craftmanship in Barbie blew my mind. also it is fucking bizarre in the most joyful, delirious way. like a master’s thesis on feminism and capitalism by someone who stayed up all night doing ketamine. a truly visionary delight.”

I’ll take that! But to that, American documentarian Penny Lane (“Hail Satan?,” “Listening To Kenny G”) replied, “I understand this is meant as a compliment, but a work of art described as ‘a master’s thesis on feminism and capitalism done by someone who stayed up all night doing ketamine’ sounds like my actual literal worst nightmare, like for the love of god, no.”

Discourse! For the comedy-horror-nightmare-satire-musical-autocritique of her fourth directorial outing, after “Lady Bird” (2017);  “Little Women” (2019) and the co-directed “Nights and Weekends” (2008), writer-producer-director Gerwig raids the toy store—the entire goddam cinematic toy factory of the past century—and she’s unabashed about underlining it. 

I mean, Godard’s way up there: “Barbie” is “My Barbie Life To Live” and “Two Or Three Things I Know About Barbie” and “Farewell to Language”; although it’s a corporate leviathan with a production budget reportedly running north of $135 million, there are biting little verbal passages of blunt politics about objectification, capitalism and “sexualized capitalism” and patriarchy that would not be out of place in the speechifying to camera by 1960s students in Godard’s “La chinoise.”

Greta Gerwig directs “Barbie.”

On one level, nudging fun for a wider audience comes from standard japery about corporate behavior, in this case, Mattel, with a CEO in the form of a flailing, distinctly constrained Will Ferrell, without much of the improvisational cacophony of which he is capable.

On another level, there’s the cornucopia-on-the-beach of references and influences, the happily heedless Frankenbarbie aspect. Let’s take a few of the masterpieces that have been cited: the advertised “2001: A Space Odyssey” for the preamble; “The Wizard of Oz”; “Singin’ in the Rain”; “All That Jazz” (good morning, “Irrepressible Thoughts of Death Barbie”); Powell-Pressburger’s “A Matter of Life And Death”; Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “Model Shop” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort”; Jerry Lewis’ cutaway-sets “The Ladies Man” and Hitchcock’s voyeurism-happy “Rear Window”; the architectural critiques of Tati’s “Playtime” and “Mon Oncle”; as well as “Wings Of Desire,” “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind”; “Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown,” “Saturday Night Fever” and “The Truman Show.” (Not to overlook the rule-of-three gag about close-ups of the arches of Margot Robbie’s feet, a la “Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood.” (“Margot has the nicest feet,” Gerwig told an Australian TV show.)

“Barbie”

“Barbie” is clever. Dauntingly, remorselessly clever. The tonal extravagance of this “NB/GG Pictures Production,” from a screenplay Gerwig composed during lockdown with her partner, Noah Baumbach, lies partly, she’s said, in their fear that big-budget movies might never return, so they swung for the fences and rounded the bases. (They must have made each other laugh all day long.)

Plus, there’s a prime message: “Because Barbie can be anything… little girls can be anything.” But there’s lots more where that came from, such as a recurring gag about an all-female Supreme Court that resists “plutocracy.” “Barbie” is a picture with unabating commentary, like “Idiocracy” for the rights of the invaluably political Teen Vogue website. Subversive? Maybe! The last line of the movie—which feels like it could have been the first written—puts the velvet hammer down.

The fourth wall takes splats and scrapes and winds up well worked-over: “It takes two to rip a portal!” is a typical quip. Others: “I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce”; “We have gender-neutral bathrooms up the wazoo” and “Don’t blame me! Blame Mattel! They make the rules.” (They make the money, too.)

“Barbie” is now playing in theaters.