‘Barbie’ doesn’t care about your agenda

New film a ‘truth bomb’ delivered via candy-colored Trojan Horse

By JOHN PAUL KING

When you’re a Barbie, every day is perfect. You get to do whatever you want and be anything you want to be, whether it’s fashion model Barbie or President Barbie, and that’s just the way things naturally are.

When you’re not a Barbie, however, it might look more than a little bit like Barbie privilege.

This is, of course, a perspective flip undertaken by filmmaker Greta Gerwig in her latest film, which brings the doll of its eponymous title into the “real world” to look for answers after she experiences an unexpected existential crisis, in an endeavor to turn it into something deeper than a flashy, overhyped toy commercial masquerading as a big screen blockbuster. It’s not the only one, but it’s the most obvious, and it has most of the movie’s inexplicably vehement detractors feigning outrage over what they deem as “woke” propaganda.

It’s certainly true that “Barbie” is loaded with the kind of messaging that conservatives deplore. In the screenplay co-authored by Gerwig with partner Noah Baumbach, Barbieland exists through the imagination of all the children who play with her; every Barbie (and Ken) lives there, but the plot focuses on their “stereotypical” iterations (Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling), who are forced to confront the differences between the idealized utopia in which they live and the still-farfrom-perfect reality inhabited by their human counterparts. Barbie, crestfallen, just wants to go home – but Ken, after seeing a world where the men seem to be in charge, is inspired with a different notion.

That premise, needless to say, gives Gerwig’s movie plenty of fodder for cultural commentary, and it holds nothing back as it goes after all the usual targets with palpable glee, so it’s no surprise a segment of the population would get their feathers ruffled over it.

What’s less predictable, perhaps, is the level of animosity aimed at the film from quarters one might expect to embrace it. This might be a function of Barbie’s “problematic” image, which has been tarnished by decades of criticism from those who (not wrongly) have called out the iconic doll – and the company that sells it – for promoting an idealized, male-defined image of femininity and undermining its purported message of female empowerment by simultaneously creating an unrealistic body image for women; let’s face it, there are people who just don’t like Barbie, for these reasons and more, and never will.

Since the film clearly addresses these controversies, however, and attempts to move past them toward a more evolved manifestation of the character, one might be tempted to suspect there’s more behind the aversion for the very idea of this movie that compels so many people to belittle it, unprompted, on their social media feeds; and since – despite dismissive declarations of shallowness that have been levied against it, sight unseen, from the moment it was announced – “Barbie” goes much deeper than the predictably divisive political constructs of the so-called “culture wars” in its ambitious effort to be more than we expect it to be, we might be able to look further into those depths for more insightful reasons.

For starters, the path the movie takes to resolve its plot leads through many ideas that, for the more jaded among us, can easily seem like lip service. The idea that empathy, that seeing what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes, can fix all the problems of the world is so familiar that it can be reduced to a platitude; it’s a nice sentiment, but only the most romantic of optimists can be convinced of its believability, and perhaps of its sincerity, too. With that in mind, it’s easy to appreciate why so many people might be predisposed to resist its warmand-cozy appeal.

Then there’s the well-publicized barrage of cinematic references – influences to which Gerwig has given a dizzyingly exhaustive array of shameless nods in her treatment of “Barbie” – that pop up as “Easter Eggs” from the movie’s very first sequence and continue without pause for pretty much its entire runtime. From “2001: A Space Odyssey” to “Blade Runner,” from “The Wizard of Oz” to “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” she lovingly crafts her visuals to evoke connections to myriad classics that have shaped her self-evidently masterful understanding of cinema – but while those might be fun for movie buffs with a penchant for trivia, they don’t do much for the average viewer who has likely never seen anything directed by Jacques Demy, let alone have knowledge about his use of color in crafting the “look” of a film. In fact, knowing that such elements are there could even feel like exclusionary intellectual snobbery.

Still, after experiencing the film firsthand, such reasons feel like excuses to us, rationalizations to justify a dislike that stems from something more personal – and perhaps, more uncomfortable – than the rhetorical stances that often dominate the analysis and judgment of film or any other art form. Though it makes no apologies for its espousal of feminist ideals or any of the other core “liberal” principles it embraces, it nevertheless dares to suggest that the problems of the world can’t be solved by merely upending the status quo. There may be quite a few amusing jokes about “The Patriarchy” involved, but by the time it’s over, “Barbie” posits that tearing it down isn’t really the solution so many of us imagine it to be – and that’s a frightening concept for anyone who is invested in the idea that it is.

There are many standout moments in “Barbie” – and yes, you can take that as an unequivocal recommendation of the film, which to us feels like a disruptive “truth bomb” delivered via a candy-colored Trojan Horse into the heart of contemporary culture and features superb and layered performances, not only from its two oft-maligned leading players but from a host of supporting cast members like Kate McKinnon and America Ferrera (who deserves to be a front-runner in next year’s Oscar race on the strength of one show-stopping monologue alone) as well – but two of these capture its essence. The first is a “Forrest Gump”-ish exchange between Barbie and an elderly woman on a park bench, which consists of only four words; the studio, reportedly, wanted it cut, but Gerwig – who insisted on complete creative control before accepting the job – declined to concede. It’s a transcendent touch, and its power lies beyond words, so we’ll just leave it at that.

The second comes later, when Barbie confides to a mysterious woman (Rhea Perlman) she encounters by seeming chance that “The real world isn’t what I thought it was” – to which she receives the reply, “It never is.”

If “Barbie” can be said to have a moral, that’s probably it –and it’s one that has shaken humanity to its core for centuries.

Is it any wonder that so many human beings, believing themselves to be secure in their unquestioned and pre-programmed personal illusions, don’t want to hear that message?

But what do we know? Taste, like life itself, is a subjective experience, and the only opinion that ever matters – at least for you – is your own.