Barbie

Barbie

 Director - Greta Gerwig
Writers - Greta Gerwig,Noah Baumbach
2023 - USA
Stars - Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Issa Rae

Great Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ definitely had its Battenberg cake and gorged on it too: fulfilling its feminist credentials whilst not straying beyond gender binaries; having lots of fun at the expense of the toy’s history whilst simultaneously rebranding with Girl Power for modern consumers; both sly and popularist. Pairing it as an antidote to ‘Oppenheimer’ – and indeed, ‘Oppenheimer’ as the antidote to ‘Barbie’ – made Barbenheimer a cinematic phenomenon that surely no one could have predicted.

It was bright, brash, funny, aided no end with two knowing Barbie and Ken performances from Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling who managed to inscribe the two inhuman archetypes with genuine existential angst… But the Boys Will Be Boys And Girls Will Be Girls tropes and gags were pretty much from the playbook for American Gender War Comedies any sharp satire and complexity came to Hey! Everyone needs a Gendered Night and never the twain shall meet. For the gender war tropes, it wasn’t so far from the 1952 Feldstein/Orlando EC comic strip ‘A Man’s Job’: just reverse the disparities. ‘Barbie’ devolved into the kind of final act of gagless platitudes, speechifying, sentiment and Underlining The Point typical of American mainstream comedies, which was just about redeemed with that final line.

It scared the horses of some and won over the dubious – no one expected it to be this good and was an aesthetic, visual delight – but was a little less remarkable than the hype.