Barbie should be called Ken

Finally, the Barbie film is here, for which we must be thankful, as the tsunami of pre-publicity meant you probably felt obliged to lock your bathroom door so the trailers didn’t follow you in there.

It’s a film that wants to have it all ways. Let’s parody Barbie but also isn’t she a feminist? There’s of lot of zeitgeist appeasement going on here. But the production values are sensational and there are some excellent jokes, even if Ryan Gosling’s Ken leaves Margot Robbie’s Barbie standing. They should have called this Ken, but I guess that’s not going to help bring down the patriarchy.

This is the first project from Mattel Films, the toy company that hopes to create a cinematic universe like Marvel. It currently has several films in development, including a Polly Pocket one, and I’m already fearing what the marketing people will do.

This is written by indie darlings Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, and directed by Gerwig. It opens with a prologue narrated by Helen Mirren saying that before Barbie was invented in 1959, the only dolls that existed were baby dolls, as little girls were meant to aspire only to motherhood, but then: “Barbie changed everything because Barbie can be anything. Thanks to Barbie, feminism has been solved.” I did laugh but also shouldn’t it be: you can be anything so long as you acquire the right body image issues first? (Joking — sort of.)

Cut to Barbie Land, because there’s a land where Barbies live? Apparently so. And here’s our Barbie, Robbie’s Barbie, living in a Dream House, showering in her Dream Shower and wearing hot outfits. The artifice is wonderful. When she opens her Dream Fridge we can see the contents are painted on. This is a place where the Barbies run everything and are doctors, vets, lawyers and astronauts although I didn’t see one spreadeagled nude with a limb missing, so they missed a trick there. The Kens, meanwhile, are fed up of playing second fiddle. “She’s everything. He’s just Ken,” says the film’s poster. Gosling’s Ken only gets to have “a great day” if Barbie looks at him. Poor Ken. Plus, I think, he must be traumatized by all the girls who have looked down his trousers and been disappointed.

But what’s this? Barbie, it seems, is having an existential crisis. Her arched feet go flat. She thinks about death. She’s told she’s “ripped the portal” between Barbie Land and the real world and has to go to LA to find whomever is playing with her and I didn’t really get it. I think you have to have a PhD in physics to get it. Barbie does not like LA where she has gone out of fashion and “little girls hate me” but Ken, who discovers that men run everything here, is delighted. Meanwhile, the head of Mattel (played by Will Ferrell) must catch these escapees to “put them back in their box” even if I wasn’t sure what danger they represented. This becomes quite caper-y, which is a drag.

Gerwig has a keen eye for exaggeration, self-irony and knowingness. When Barbie fears she is losing her prettiness, Mirren’s narrator interrupts to say: “Filmmakers, don’t cast Margot Robbie if you want to make this point.” It is funny, but also an example of playing it all ways? Call yourself out before anyone else does? Yet it’s entertaining enough, and while Robbie is perfect visually, Gosling manages to bring some real vulnerability and heft to poor gelded Ken.

Now I must apologize to Oppenheimer film fans as I won’t get to it until next week. I’ve also been locking the bathroom door against the trailers for that.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.