CineWomen: Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ is everything
Plus her first film as a solo director, ‘Lady Bird,’ ‘Joy Ride’ by Adele Lim, and ‘The Deepest Breath’ by Laura McGann
Barbenheimer.
Oppenbarbie.
Whatever your preferred portmanteau, the cinema event of the year — nay, the decade, or dare we say the 21st century so far — occurred this month with the simultaneous release of Warner Bros.’s Barbie and Universal’s Oppenheimer.
What began as a savvy case of counterprogramming — or a vengeful one, if Hollywood rumormongers are to be believed (there’s even a Wikipedia entry on the whole sorry saga) — emerged instead over the course of a year as a marketing bonanza. Rather than pitting Greta Gerwig’s bubble-gum feminist anthem against Christopher Nolan’s austere biopic on the father of the atomic bomb, moviegoers embraced them both, going so far as to pledge to see them on the same day.
With the National Association of Theatre Owners saying some 200,000 moviegoers bought tickets for the unlikely double feature, and a raging debate around which order to view them in, the momentum around the internet meme propelled the films to box-office records.
I wasn’t one of them.
Don’t get me wrong — I love this phenomenon, and delight at the collective engagement with my favorite pastime, especially at a moment when the movie industry is at an inflection point with the ongoing writers and actors guild strikes.
But choices were made that I don’t regret, including to see Oppenheimer at one of its few Imax 70mm showings, which by the time I got my act together were already sold out on opening weekend — I actually haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet as of this writing.
I expect to be reflective after Oppenheimer, and I expected to be reflective after Barbie too — though not quite as much as I ended up. I left the theater feeling rather raw, to be honest, and am glad I didn’t dilute the experience of either by seeing them together.
‘Barbie’
In an early montage in co-writer-director Greta Gerwig’s bubblegum feminist manifesto Barbie, viewers take a tour through Barbieland, where all the jobs are done by Barbies: doctors and lawyers, astronauts and physicists, postal carriers and construction workers, the President and the Supreme Court. (As for the Kens — well, their job is “Beach.”)
In this feminine utopia, Barbie can be anything, and “all the problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved.”
So we get feminist gems like freedom of the press but not freedom of speech for corporations. Award winners who say, “I work very hard, so I deserve it,” instead of “Thank you.” And lawyers who explain, “I have no difficulty holding both logic and emotion at the same time, and it does not diminish my powers — it expands them.”
Likewise, Barbie holds both the idealistic aspirations of the iconic fashion doll and her harshest criticisms at the same time. Barbie is meant to be, in part, a model for girls — with her own money, her own house, her own car, her own career — and an inspiration for those who play with her that they can be anything they want. But Barbie too promotes an unrealistic body image, rampant consumerism, and environmental pollution.
The film, like Lawyer Barbie, holds both of these truths at the same time, and it does not diminish the film’s powers — it expands them. For for all the pro-woman, indifferent-to-man rhetoric of the film’s central conceit, Barbie’s ultimate takeaway is that the door to all the opportunities afforded to Barbies in Barbieland should be opened to Kens too — just a little.
The movie centers on Stereotypical Barbie — the blond-haired, blue-eyed woman-doll one thinks of when someone says “Barbie” that star Margot Robbie seems to have been born to play. Stereotypical Barbie floats, literally, through life until one day her heels drop to the floor, cellulite appears on her thighs, and thoughts of death encroach on her dance party.
To restore order, Barbie must travel to the real world and connect with the girl who plays with her, but when she arrives at Venice Beach, California, with Ken (Ryan Gosling, in another inspired casting choice) in tow, she discovers, rather rudely, that Barbie didn’t solve all the problems of feminism and equal rights after all.
Feminists and, well, women, may be all too familiar with the dichotomies Barbie struggles to describe, and later the woman (it turns out) who plays with her, Gloria (America Ferrera), articulates: women should be pretty, but not too pretty; leaders, but not bossy; loving mothers, but not obsessive. These things may be obvious (to some), but they bear repeating in stark contrast to the Upside Down of Barbieland, where the Barbies aren’t numb to the patriarchy.
Where Barbie’s journey is characterized by complexity and nuance, Ken’s takes a beating with a blunt instrument, his understanding of manhood from the real world of Century City summarized in horses and brewskies and fur coats — delivered by Gosling with an absurd sincerity that’s the source of the movie’s charm. It’s upsetting to see Barbie’s Dreamhouse turned into an ugly, crude “mojo dojo casa house,” but Ken has a point, even if he can’t express it: He deserves his own agency outside of Barbie’s gaze.
Gerwig’s sharp script, co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach, is packaged in a smart and inspired visual aesthetic that draws on filmic allusions as diverse as 2001, The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, and The Red Shoes. Every choice here — every line, every prop, every idea — is at once thoughtful and fun, for a moving meditation on womanhood delivered as a singular cinematic experience.
Barbie (2023), directed by Greta Gerwig (theaters)
‘Lady Bird’
Revisiting Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, one can’t help but clock traces of Barbie, if not Barbie, six years before her billion-dollar blockbuster. The titular teen (Saoirse Ronan) sports a Barbie-pink cast and faded pink hair and decorates her room in girly pink and picks a prom dress her mother can’t help but ask, “Is it too pink?” There’s even a dream house, though in this case it’s blue, and — embarrassingly — not hers.
If Barbie is everything, as the tagline says, Lady Bird feels like she’s nothing, living on the wrong side of the tracks (literally) with working-class parents and surviving Catholic school (on scholarship) in Sacramento — “the Midwest of California” — without the grades that would enable her to escape to the East Coast.
Unfolding over the course of the 2002–2003 school year, this period coming-of-ager (with a rocking contemporary soundtrack) follows a not always likable protagonist as she navigates relationships with her ride-or-die bestie (Beanie Feldstein); a couple of boyfriends who turn out to be closeted (Lucas Hedges) or a dick (Timothée Chalamet); and her unemployed, possibly depressed father (Tracy Letts) — at times clumsily and at others with profound empathy.
The central pairing, however, is Lady Bird and her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf, at her complex best), who can’t get along because they’re so alike — graceless yet sentimental, hardscrabble yet dreamy, prickly yet compassionate. Fiercely loving, and loved.
Barbie may have everything, but she doesn’t have this.
Lady Bird (2017), directed by Greta Gerwig (Kanopy)
‘Joy Ride’
If you’re not sure what to expect from Adele Lim’s directorial debut Joy Ride, the film’s working title should clue you in: Joy Fuck Club.
Like Wayne Wang’s beloved Joy Luck Club, Joy Ride centers on a group of friends grappling with the Chinese immigrant experience, but that’s where the similarities end, with the raucous comedy exploiting sex, drugs, and K-pop in a raunchy ride that’s as shocking as it is endearing.
Ashley Park stars as Audrey Sullivan, a Chinese adoptee with white parents in a Seattle suburb called White Hills where she works as a lawyer with a bunch of white dudes. Naturally, as a child she gravitated toward Lolo (Sherry Cola), the outspoken daughter of Chinese immigrant parents chafing against working in the family restaurant business with her sex-positive artwork.
When Audrey’s firm sends her to China to close an important deal, she invites Lolo to go with her as an interpreter. Lolo also invites her socially awkward, K-pop obsessed cousin “Deadeye” (Sabrina Wu), and once in Beijing they connect with Audrey’s college roommate, Chinese television star Kat (Stephanie Hsu), who is hiding her promiscuous history from her Christian boyfriend.
Unbeknownst to Audrey, Lolo has set the wheels in motion to reconnect her friend with her birth family, sending the quartet on a cross-country quest where hijinks ensue, including a run-in with a drug dealer that results in their consuming copious amounts of coke; a ride — literally and figuratively — from basketball star Baron Davis that ends up injuring members of his team; and a performance of Cardi B’s “WAP” that goes career-endingly viral.
It’s crazy and chaotic, and in order to cram it all in, the plot and its self-imposed timeline start to unravel, but there’s a tenderness at the heart of Joy Ride and the relationship among the four friends that’s sweet and affecting nonetheless.
Joy Ride (2023), directed by Adele Lim (theaters)
The Deepest Breath
Death hangs over Laura McGann’s documentary The Deepest Breath from its opening moments, when world-champion freediver Alessia Zecchini is asked how she feels about it. It’s a fair question for a woman whose occupation — nay, passion — is taking a deep breath and swimming down, down, down as far as she can on whatever air she’s taken into her lungs. We’re talking the length of a skyscraper.
Danger is inherent in the extreme sport, so the importance of expert safety divers is paramount, and Alessia meets one she trusts in world adventurer Stephen Keenan, who befriends her, trains her, and eventually arranges for her to tackle the arch in the Blue Hole, a deadly diving location in the Red Sea.
Against the backdrop of some truly stunning imagery of the powerful oceanic milieu, The Deepest Breath traces Alessia’s and Stephen’s disparate career paths and nascent love story through home videos, competition footage, and on-camera interviews with family and friends. Alessia and Stephen themselves are conspicuously absent from the storytelling’s present, generating some mystery around their fate — a mystery that’s easily solved via a second-screen Google search, so the approach starts to feel cagey.
But The Deepest Breath offers an intimate entrée into an obscure sport and the intense personalities who partake in it.
The Deepest Breath (2023), directed by Laura McGann (Netflix)
