Film Pick of the Week: Barbie - review by Yvette Huddleston
Barbie Amazon Prime Video, review by Yvette Huddleston
Director Greta Gerwig’s movie starring Margot Kidder as Barbie was, alongside Oppenheimer, one of the two big chalk-and-cheese blockbuster hits of the summer of 2023 – which birthed the cultural phenomenon of ‘Barbenheimer’.
Inspired by the popular Mattel doll beloved by generations of girls since it first appeared in 1959, the film takes an irreverent, feminist look at Barbie and everything she stands for. With a witty screenplay, co-written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, this is a candy-coloured romp that provides plenty of laughs and some food for thought along the way.
We are transported to Barbieworld, a perfect place where, the voiceover (beautifully delivered by Helen Mirren) informs us, “thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved”. Absolutely everything is pink and glossy and every Barbie can be anything she wants to be. There are Barbies who are scientists, lawyers, businesswomen, politicians, Nobel laureates, the list goes on. They go about their valuable and worthwhile lives, while all their Ken boyfriends (including John Cena and Simu Liu) hang out together at the beach. There is one another male doll – Ken’s best friend Allan (a lovely performance from Michael Cera).
At the centre of the narrative are the original couple – Barbie (Kidder) and her Ken (Ryan Gosling, hilarious). They seem happy enough and then out of the blue, Barbie has a bit of an existential crisis – she starts to think about death and dying and doesn’t feel like non-stop partying with her girlfriends. Worse is to follow – she then develops cellulite and flat feet! This is not how her life is supposed to be. For advice she goes to ‘weird Barbie’ (Kate McKinnon), a doll who has wild hair, crayon marks on her face and is permanently in the splits position, having been over-played with. She tells Barbie that she must travel to the real world to find out why this has happened. It turns out it could be something to do with hard working single mother Gloria (America Ferrera), an assistant at Mattel and a former Barbie owner…
There are some nice cameos too, notably from Will Ferrell as the Mattel CEO and Rhea Perlman as Ruth Handler, Barbie’s inventor. There are some laugh-out-loud sequences – such as the beach barbecue where each Barbie listens patiently with a fixed smile to her Ken playing yet another song on his guitar – and the action barrels along at a sprightly pace. Great fun.