Ryan Gosling steals the show in the most unlikely victory of the year

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Anthropologists think there may be tribes living in the far reaches of the Amazon Basin who haven’t yet figured out the marketing campaign for the new Barbie movie, but for the rest of us, the damn thing has been melting our eyeballs for weeks. So it’s with unexpected pleasure to announce that Greta Gerwig’s movie – while still primarily a summer comedy adventure about a Barbie playset – is far from the money-making so many of us dread. In fact, it’s very strange, conceptually slippery and often risqué and funny.

Barbie’s young fan base will enjoy the silliness, the dance numbers, and above all the bright colors – after two hours I left the cinema I could barely see her. But the movie was written with older audiences in mind, and its pleasures are often planted between inverted interludes. More often than not you just enjoy the meta-spectacle of Gerwig, whose latest film is the slick 2019 adaptation of Little Women, as she and her co-stars pull themselves out of what at first seems like an inevitable corporate trap.

The book begins with an arched narrative from Helen Mirren, in which Mattel’s solemn line (you can imagine it being dictated to Gerwig and her writing partner Noah Baumbach in the boardroom) hits home with an absurdly intuitive degree. We’re told the mere existence of this elegant and ambitious toy has solved every problem women face: thanks to Barbie, little girls in the real world now know they can do anything and be anything, while Barbieland itself is a fragrant, female-centered Eden, where every A day in the bustle of bliss.

Everyday activities here feel like they’re being dictated from behind the camera by a six-year-old: meaning in the context of Barbie, they’re startlingly realistic. Ken (Ryan Gosling), whose job is “beach,” bounces off the waves while surfing and is rushed to a hospital tucked away. But that evening, halfway through the Dua Lipa dance, the stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) asks her fellow Barbies, “Have you ever thought about dying?” – and it becomes clear that outside, the human world, from where Barbie and Kens are (somehow) controlled, things are going dangerously wrong.

Instead of crushing metaphysics, the script simply brings Robbie and Gosling to Los Angeles, where Robbie’s Barbie finds her doomed owners, Sasha Greenblatt’s Ariana Greenblatt and her mother, Gloria (America Ferrera). Meanwhile, Ken Gosling, intoxicated in the delights of a society built to serve the needs and desires of men, decides to bring some paternalism back to Barbieland, causing the entire place to instantly go to seed.

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