I don’t watch movies. Action movies — don’t like them. Superheroes, comic book figures — no interest. Comedies often just embarrass me. I have enjoyed the occasional rom-com — do they still exist? It’s not so much that I dislike movies as that I’m still so driven — even in retirement — that I feel bad just sitting down to “watch” something, whether a movie or sports or whatever. There’s too much out there to do, too many problems to reckon with, too many opportunities, too much to think and worry about. Just sitting and watching something for entertainment seems a waste of time.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie goes far beyond entertainment. It absolutely captivated me from the prologue to the final kicker. I didn’t move a muscle or take a breath the entire movie. I did get teary eyed throughout, both in laughter and in emotions. My wife bawled. Even when a dance number started, when normally I would drift back to reality, I was sucked in. Everyone now knows the movie is a huge hit, but the reason why is that it’s a masterpiece. It will probably never get the credit of “Casablanca,” but it’s in that league for me. For any of us who won’t get to go see the movie, here’s gift link to a NYT review, which I think captures the movie in its whole masterpieceness, including a discussion of the consumerism issue and Mattel. Note, the review contains major spoilers. A couple block quotes from the review below the fold.
After Barbie is eviscerated by that real-world teenager, she’s way more distressed than when she left Barbieland. She thought she was adored, but in fact she is disdained, objectified, powerless. This is a lot for a doll, but the movie’s gambit is to point out that it is table stakes for a woman. The movie sidesteps whatever role Barbie might play in perpetuating a narrow, idealized femininity; instead it gives this particular Barbie a crash course in modern misogyny. After decades of fretting about girls’ wanting to be as perfect as Barbie, Gerwig serves up a Barbie struggling to be as resilient as us. This is the movie’s brazen magic trick. Barbie is no longer an avatar of women’s insufficiency, a projection of all we’re not; instead, she becomes a reflection of how hard — but worth it — it is to be all that we are.
Helping Barbie navigate her topsy-turvy new existence are other women. Some are already embedded in her history: Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman); a mother who used to play with Barbie (America Ferrera); the daughter those Barbies were passed on to (Ariana Greenblatt). But one is a stranger, a woman she notices while she sits on a bench, gathering herself. It’s a type of woman she has never seen before, because there are no old women in Barbieland. This woman is played by the 91-year-old, Oscar-winning costume designer Ann Roth, a friend of Gerwig’s. (“Do you have many friends who are, like, 90? I do, weirdly. I have three real friends, not pretend friends, who are now 91, 90 and 91.”) When Barbie looks at her, she finds her beautiful and tells her so. The woman already knows. Suddenly Barbie, the fraught aspirational figure, has beheld someone she might aspire to be, and it is a radiantly content nonagenarian, reading a newspaper on a Los Angeles bench, who knows what she’s worth.
“The idea of a loving God who’s a mother, a grandmother — who looks at you and says, ‘Honey, you’re doing OK’ — is something I feel like I need and I wanted to give to other people,” Gerwig says. When it was suggested that this scene, which Gerwig calls a “transaction of grace,” might be cut for time, she remembers thinking: “If I cut that scene, I don’t know why I’m making this movie. If I don’t have that scene, I don’t know what it is or what I’ve done.”
