Review: new Barbie film proves a totally pink delight

Wow. The biggest movie audience I have seen since the pandemic turned up just now. You almost wanted to ask them where they have been these two past years. Or at least mangle the immortal line at the end of Brief Encounter: “Thank you for coming back (to the cinema).”

And thank goodness, we, all of us, in our serried, packed ranks had a total treat of a film as our reward – utterly unlike anything else you will have ever seen, exceptionally witty and endlessly inventive. Heaven alone knows how anyone could have dreamt up a story along these lines, but it works fabulously well.

The gist is that Margot Robbie is Barbie in blissfully perfect, predominantly pink Barbieland where all the girls, all equally and unthinkingly happy, are called Barbie and where all the boys, mere adjuncts to the girls, are destined forever to play second fiddle, pointlessly hanging around on the beach and looking handsome.

But then something weird starts to happen. Robbie’s Barbie – more specifically stereotypical Barbie – starts to find herself thinking about death. She loses her ability to float out of her wall-less house down into her car; and an odd anxiety starts to grip her. Weird Barbie (very cleverly played by Kate McKinnon) explains to her: something has damaged the membrane which separates Barbieland from reality; in other words, oh horror, humanness is intruding on her doll-ness, with all its mush and sadness.

The only answer is to head off to the real world (specifically Los Angeles) where it all gets a little Elf and Enchanted like, the comedy of fantasyland trying to navigate the mean, mean streets of the big city. The complication, though, is that Ken follows her and discovers the possibility of patriarchy. So he skips it back to Barbieland before Barbie can and turns the whole place into Kendom.

The second half sees dolls playing out the battle of the sexes – and it’s a hoot. Plenty of people have labelled the film anti-man. You’d have to desperate to be hurt to think that. No, what it actually does is beautifully send up all the things men stereotypically think women need and love them for. Our superiority, our mansplaining, our vanities – all become our weaknesses as the Barbies try to regain power. In the end, this very very weird film does perhaps get a little bit over-weird (quite an achievement) and does actually descend just a bit into over-meaningful mush, but for the most part it pitches everything perfectly, thanks to two simply brilliant performances.

Robbie is terrific as a Barbie suddenly assailed by all sorts of feelings and complications; but it’s Ryan Gosling’s Ken who steals the show (so really, truly, you couldn’t actually complain the film is man-hating). He is superb both as the hurt Ken all too aware of Barbie’s indifference; equally he is superb as the Ken who fights back and tries to take control with his new notion of patriarchy. The result is a film which is a rich and rather wonderful delight, frequently laugh-out loud, beautifully imagined and enormously clever. And if it actually fills our beleaguered cinemas in a way that Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible don’t seem to have done, then it is also a film that we should all feel grateful for.