Doll Parts — Barbie review

A version of this appeared in The Scotsman.

“I am become Barbie, destroyer of worlds” could be the jokey Oppenheimer-esque tagline to Greta Gerwig’s much-hyped new film about the pop-culture-conquering doll whose weirdly storied history as a frenemy of feminism provides what little substance there is to this DayGlo pink nightmare.

Less a movie than a collection of meme-able moments, the film’s much-hoped for subversion amounts to little more than gentle digs at the film’s corporate paymasters folded into a derivative story in which “Stereotypical Barbie” (played by Margot Robbie) undergoes an existential awakening that forces her to leave Barbieland and enter the real world. There she’s soon horrified to discover that women aren’t in charge and all the positive messaging she thought Barbies were inspiring in little girls has had the opposite effect.

Though initially this suggest the film is going to have some bite, Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach don’t really follow through. Abandoning the internal logic of a promising premise that ties the interior life of Barbie to the way she’s played with in the real world, they fall back instead on heavily ironic fish-out-of water gags and insider jokes about cancelled toylines and absent genitalia, all the while desperately inuring the film against criticism with lots of wink-wink meta-commentary designed to make people who don’t fall in line with the film’s blanket marketing campaign feel like spoil-sports.

Part of the frustration, though, comes from the fact that its conceptual ideas have already been well trodden, not just in The Lego Movie (something reinforced by the casting of Will Ferrell as the head of Mattel), but also in Enchanted, The Truman Show, the Toy Story movies, The Last Action Hero, The Purple Rose of Cairo, The Nightmare Before Christmas and even last year’s underrated Don’t Worry Darling, to which this film often feels like a perky flip side, especially when poor dimwit Ken (Ryan Gosling) discovers something called “patriarchy” and, through sheer dumb luck, manages to remake Barbieland in his own image.

The film is certainly scratching at something interesting here in the satirical potshots it takes at both the easy ride mediocre men have in the world and the extent to which pop culture has frequently reinforced this way of thinking. But it’s also one of the bigger ironies that Barbie only really comes to life as a movie when Ken gains some agency and Gosling is allowed to cut loose. Gosling gets the lion’s share of the intermittent laughs and his Grease-riffing musical interludes suggest this is better viewed as a rough template for some future Broadway or West End show.

As for Robbie, she’s also perfectly cast, so much so that the film’s best joke comes when the narrator (voiced by Helen Mirren) breaks the fourth wall to mock Robbie’s suitability for the role. It’s just a shame her character arc is so insipid, filled as it is with feminist sounding platitudes and, at one point, a plea for an “ordinary Barbie”, something this film, sadly, has no trouble delivering.