Barbie review: Margot Robbie is explosive in Greta Gerwig’s lurid assault on senses

In The Sting, a distinction is made between an everyday piddling backstreet hustle and the fabled “big con”. This is an operation that costs a great deal of money, involves much expertise and employs many talented actors. George Roy Hill’s 1973 film doesn’t endorse the big con, but it admires the invention and ingenuity involved.

There is nothing piddling or backstreet about Greta Gerwig’s rambunctiously lurid assault on senses you didn’t know you possessed. And there is certainly more to Barbie than an act of deceit. The film is much concerned with a sincere effort to interrogate the continuing frustrations of growing up female amid a still-unapologetic patriarchy.

Margot Robbie, explosive throughout as the “stereotypical” Barbie, gets to act out some of those concerns as a self-conscious plot spins ever deeper into creative absurdity. But it is America Ferrera, playing a citizen of the real(ish) world, who connects most explicitly with the film’s key concerns.

Deep into the confused last act, she delivers a speech that, in remarkably clear-eyed fashion, addresses all the hypocritical paradoxes that pester girls as they pass towards womanhood. You can never do enough, but everything is your fault. You are expected not to get old, but you’re not allowed to complain when you do. Arriving in a film so drenched in irony – positively drowning in the stuff – the monologue seems all the more bracing. This Barbie is definitely about something.

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And yet. There remains a nagging awareness that the screenplay, by the director and Noah Baumbach, is wrapping this discourse around an advertisement for a multinational toy empire that makes billions flogging girls unattainable models of femininity.

Does the film address this? Naturally. Gerwig and Baumbach are among the smartest American film-makers working today. In the opening scenes we hear that “thanks to Barbie” all problems have been solved. You can be Dr Barbie. You can be President Barbie. It’s all a bitter gag, of course. When we meet the fictional board of Mattel, the company that has manufactured the doll since 1959, we find each member a flat-faced bloke. “I’m a man with no power. Does that make me a woman?” one says.

So it’s as much an attack on Barbie as it is a celebration. Right? Well, not really. The product has been on everyone’s lips for the past year. Every promotion for the film is also a promotion for the toy. That comparison with the big con is not entirely fanciful. It’s also not entirely a criticism. Like the fanciest of scams, Barbie is carried off with a conviction that deserves sustained applause and occasional loud hoots.

The film begins in a plastic world apparently fashioned from giant versions of Mattel’s products. The swimming pool is painted over. The cars move without a noise. Just about every woman is a Barbie. Just about every man is a Ken (the most stereotypical of whom is played with bodacious idiocy by Ryan Gosling).

[ Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling on Barbie: ‘I remember thinking, I’m never going to live this down’ ]

[ Barbie girls - and boys - think pink at film’s Irish premiere in Dublin ]

The too-perfect world shudders when – this is not really a kids’ film – our main Barbie contemplates death and finds her body taking on hitherto unfamiliar human traits. She travels to fleshy Los Angeles and is shocked to find no replica of the idyllic gynocracy from which she has just emerged.

The screenplay is positively philosophical at times, drawing distinctions between Barbie as individual and Barbie (or maybe “Barbie”) as genus. But there are also deranged car chases, game comedy routines and musical numbers that gesture to Bob Fosse. And there are moments of raw emotion – not least those involving Rhea Perlman as a reincarnation of the doll’s creator. So, yes, this strange, strange film is a big con, but it’s one you can’t help tipping a pink cowboy hat towards.

Who would have thought it would contain more existential musings on death than we find in Oppenheimer?

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