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The Gender War Comes to the Big Screen: A Review of ‘Barbie’
Greta Gerwig certainly knows how to ruffle some feathers.
At first glance, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie seems innocuous. How can you ever be mad at a pastel world where dream houses exist, jobs seem to be nothing more than flimsy placeholder titles, and men are not dangers to themselves or others (particularly women)?
At its heart, Barbie is a social commentary piece with a thriving core of tangled threads revolving around the autonomy of one “stereotypical” Barbie (played marvelously by Margot Robbie — who truly deserves an Oscar nomination for her performance) as she undergoes an Alice in Wonderland-esque journey to the Real World.
And, yes, it sounds surreal yet silly. The camp of it is what makes the film work rather than just being a lecture in cinematic format. Dare I say it, Gerwig seemed to have been inspired by anime and Korean dramas from the fourth-wall breaking the movie has a tendency to do.
Don’t get me wrong: it all works fabulously. The movie packs an emotional punch — it hit me in the feels enough to make me cry three times — and there’s a lot of heart in what the cast does. Ryan Gosling delights as a rapscallion-like Ken while other characters sadly fade into the background, such as Simu Liu’s take on Ken and even…
