Barbie (2023)

I was already tired of people’s opinions about Barbie even before the movie opened—they don’t like the color scheme, they don’t understand what it has to do with feminism, they think it’s too woke, etc. (in the latter case, I’m always tired of that opinion now). Director and cowriter Greta Gerwig seems to be on a mission to reclaim the popular and reviled Mattel toy doll world and make it all fun again and also, maybe, righteously feminist. Mattel is on a mission to break open a movie franchise. The 2001 homage / parody / rip-off in the overture basically explains it all, before whipping up Also Sprach Zarathustra. In Barbie, there’s a Barbie world and there’s the real world. The Barbie world is a matriarchy whereas the real world is still a patriarchy. When a portal opens between the two worlds—because reasons reasons—things start to go awry. Barbie (Margot Robbie) loses the high flex of her arches from wearing heels and then starts to show signs of cellulite. These are terrible things and must be set right. Ken (Ryan Gosling) stows away on the expedition to the real world, where he is utterly entranced by patriarchy—thinks it’s a great idea, wonders why no one ever thought of it before, and takes it back to Barbie world, where things go further awry. Barbie is an affable enough mess, trying hard. Gerwig’s humor comes through, most noticeably in the performance of Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie, and Gerwig’s hipster instincts for music as primary signifier remain as detectable as ever: Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Khalid, Cyndi Lauper of course, Aqua’s “Barbie World,” the Spice Girls, Indigo Girls, Tame Impala, etc., etc. They’re all here. Mattel itself is on board and featured heavily. Will Ferrell, for example, is the Mattel CEO. Nice to see a corporation that can laugh at itself (cough-cough), but it’s more plain they’re more interested in raking up dough. There’s a dark side to all this too, though dark in the style of the TV series Wednesday, that is, not really dark. Maybe Barbie addresses depression in a good-humored way when one character works up variations of the doll like Irrepressible-Thoughts-of-Death Barbie and Crippling-Shame Barbie. But you already know what you think of Barbie. Don’t let my opinions annoy you further. Broey Deschanel over at youtube says it a thousand times better than I ever could.

Lady Bird (2017)

I admit I've been suspicious of Greta Gerwig's long-trending indie queen popularity. She has appeared in movies I count among my favorites, notably Damsels in Distress, where she acquits herself well. Acquits herself well? She's one of the best parts if not practically carrying it. But she has also appeared in movies I'm less inclined to favor, such as Greenberg or Frances Ha, which already have imposing reputations but mostly looked like mannered indie-level exercises to me. She usually seems to be playing a version of the same character—a person slightly off, the kind people say marches to the beat of another drummer. That personality is still felt acutely in Lady Bird, Gerwig's directing debut and third or fourth screenplay. In fact, in many ways, Saoirse Ronan (Hanna, Brooklyn)—taking the title role as Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson—often seems to be doing a straight-up impersonation of Gerwig to put some of these scenes over. But that's about the end of any carping on my part. This is otherwise a tremendously heartening movie in so many good ways. It's a tender coming-of-age story, with obvious autobiographical details: set in Sacramento, in the early 2000s, Lady Bird's mother is a nurse and her father is a computer programmer struggling to survive in an industry prone to youth movements. Lady Bird, who turns 18 during the six or eight months of this story, is hungry for life and experience, ashamed of her family's modest means, compulsively trying to make it with cool kids, and committing her share of mistakes. At the heart of Lady Bird is a story of a difficult mother/daughter relationship, marked by fierce love and even fiercer alienation. Laurie Metcalf plays her mother, Marion, and she is fine. There's no shortage of quirky situations and hipster affectation on display here—among other things, Gerwig has a rock critic's taste and sense for ironically programming the soundtracks of lives—but what I like best are the scenes between people, between family and friends. They are sharply observed, develop at their own pace, almost always ring true, and they can leave you wrung out more than once in a reasonably short movie. All things considered, this is an exciting directing debut.