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Barbie


In the creaky old westerns and war movies which used to pad out the TV schedules when I was a nipper, there would sometimes come a moment when the music swelled, the chisel-jawed hero gazed into the middle distance and started to declaim a rousing speech about Democracy, or Justice, or the indomitable spirit of a little ol’ place we just happen to call the US of A, and I would zone out until the story started again.

Something similar keeps happening in Barbie, except the chisel-jawed hero has been replaced by Margot Robbie and America Ferrara, and the speech about Democracy and Justice is now a twee fridge-magnet homily about Being Yourself, or a bullet-pointed Tumblr post about how exhausting it is to be a woman living under ‘the Patriarchy’.  (And I’m sure it is - but I don’t want to listen to somebody preaching about it, and certainly not at that sort of length, in a lightweight movie.) 

Elsewhere, Barbie has plenty of nice moments, and I really wanted to like it. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are as charming as everyone says, there are some decent jokes, and the Mattel Corporation turn out to be good sports, or at least more interested in the bottom line than in their own corporate dignity, letting writer/director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach portray them as a comic-sinister outfit staffed by drones and oddballs.

But the script is oddly under-powered and scattergun: there’s no internal logic to the setting, the plot wobbles all over the place, and subplots and minor characters are abandoned as soon as they’re introduced. None of that would matter if it was full-on goofball comedy, but there aren’t enough gags for that, and what gags there are often don’t land. (And it’s a very minor point, but the 2001 parody which opens the film, with Barbie appearing in place of the Black Monolith, would work SO much better if she was in her box.)

It reminded me at times of another recent film, Kristen Wiig’s Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar. That too feels like a children’s film for adults (despite a couple of off-colour jokes) and like Barbie it features a kitsch beach setting, female empowerment, and a loveable doofus hero who gets to do a show-stopping musical number. It’s joyously silly, and superior to Barbie in every way.


But I gather it didn’t do much business, while Barbie is leveraging star power and the allure of familiar IP to hoover up billions. And maybe that (music swells, eyes gaze into the middle distance), is the true, indomitable spirit of a little ol’ place we just happen to call the US of A…


 

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