I was prepared to find “Barbie” somewhat silly, perhaps even weird or surreal.
But I did not expect it to be so politically ambitious, so morally bankrupt — or so utterly infuriating.
While the summer’s surprise smash-hit has a couple of worthy features, it is little more than a feminist rant: shrill, shallow, preachy, propagandistic and so single-mindedly focused on the male-female power struggle that it has no room for any decent relationship between men and women.
To cite the worthies first:
Margot Robbie is simply sensational as the titular lead. I can’t think of another performer who could’ve pulled off this difficult role with such seamless and sunny aplomb and appeal. Rhea Perlman is likewise terrific as original Barbie creator Ruth Handler.
And I loved the long diatribe by America Ferrara’s real-world character on how difficult it is to be a woman in this day and age — constantly judged by impossible, often contradictory standards, and generally feeling like a failure: “We have to be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.”
Beyond that, the movie is a thinly veiled crusade against our so-called “patriarchy” — a Mattel-style fable in which both men and motherhood get thrown under the Barbie bus.
The film gets off to a rough start with a bunch of little girls smashing baby-dolls to pieces — a sight that is cringy and unsettling, even if it is couched as an amusing send-up of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Later, motherhood takes another hit when we’re repeatedly reminded how much everyone dislikes the early doll named Midge, who was modeled as pregnant. Look: If the Barbie-world can have cool women who are overweight or disabled, why is an expectant mom “just weird”? To me, this is warped and dangerous thinking.
Unless of course you want a society without marriage and family.
If the film really hopes to suggest that career, power and “nights out with friends” are more important than spouses and kids, my response is this: You are thinking like a patriarch — and that is not a win.
For any of us.
In any case, after the baby-bashing intro, we meet the original Barbie in her make-believe world of glitzy glowing pink — where, says the narrator, “Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved.”
By this she means: Men are witless, helpless and pretty much ignored — mere window dressing with no skills, no importance and no influence in the world.
This, we later learn, will show us how women feel about the real world we live in. But here as elsewhere, “Barbie” must exaggerate to a ludicrous level to make its point; rather than coming across as revolutionary and cutting-edge, it is merely dreary and depressing.
Is this really summer entertainment for young girls?
And do grown-up women really find it fun to watch Ryan Gosling play a brainless and emasculated jackass?
In any case, Barbie and Ken (Gosling) eventually wind up in the real world, where Ken finds “the patriarchy” so inspiring that he returns to Barbie-land and flips it upside down, making the whole realm a sort of 24-hour-a-day man-cave.
And once again, the film must take this to extremes, playing on the worst excesses of men to make us look like jerks who can’t be trusted.
As I squirmed and groaned through these outrageous scenes, I scribbled down in my ever-present notebook the following adjectives for the way men are portrayed: drunk, bossy, selfish, demanding, messy, egotistical, possessive, jealous, combative, pushy, and narcissistic.
Granted, some males are like this — perhaps even many. But if anyone today made a major motion picture stereotyping women in this absurd and insulting way, they’d string him up from the highest tree.
Personally, I would have preferred weird or surreal.
