Greta Gerwig dared to turn Barbie into a film, but will it pay off?

By Louise Rugendyke

It’s Barbie’s world and we’re just living in it. Credit: Steven Siewert

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Greta Gerwig can’t quite believe she got away with it. She has written a “wild, bananas Barbie movie” that is the most anticipated film of the year. A movie so big and so pink, it was held responsible for a worldwide shortage of pink paint.

A movie about a doll who broke the mould. A doll with more than 200 careers. No backstory. No husband. No children. A movie with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken in head-to-toe neon rollerblading at California’s Venice Beach.

A movie that takes the dreams and heartbreak of girls seriously. A movie that made me, a 46-year-old woman, squeal at the sight of Peaches ’N Cream Barbie in the opening credits and then hold back tears at the end of the 25-minute preview.

Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig at the world premiere of Barbie in Los Angeles last week.Credit: AP

A movie about Barbie in the middle of an existential crisis. And Ken? Well, he’s more than every Barbie bargained for.

“It almost seems kind of mystical to me,” says Gerwig. “But I will say: every time Margot was dancing in that dance, and then just said, ‘Do you guys ever think about dying?’ – I am surprised every single time because that is a genuinely surprising thing for Barbie to say.

“And I must have written it and directed it, but it still catches me off guard.”

The Oscar-nominated writer and director is sitting in the Park Hyatt, in a room looking at the Sydney Opera House. She is wearing a navy Gucci suit with gold buttons and talks in long, looping sentences, half laughing at the audacity of it all. She could be slightly woozy from the jet lag or it’s the fact she has been pumping, freezing and packing breastmilk to send home to the US for her four-month-old son. “Some ingenious woman probably started the company,” she decides.

Gerwig is on the first stop of a Barbie world tour that will take her to Seoul, Los Angeles, London, Berlin and New York. She’s here with Robbie – who not only stars as Barbie, but is a producer as well – plus castmates Issa Rae and America Ferrera. “I’ve done junkets before,” says Gerwig. “But this is on another level.”

Of course it’s on another level! It’s Barbie. The doll knows no bounds. And that’s the point of the movie. Barbie Land is the living embodiment of “you can be what you can see”. Need a Nobel Prize winner? There’s a Barbie for that. Supreme Court Justice? Yep, there’s one of those, too. Astronaut? Teacher? Garbage collector? Tick, tick and tick.

“Barbie is this idea of selfhood being spread out all through all these different people,” says Gerwig. “And that’s true of the Kens, too. So, it’s not contained in one form. It’s the multiplicity of Barbie, which is philosophically sort of strange but wonderful, maybe even enlightened.

Greta Gerwig meets fans while in Sydney as pat of the global Barbie tour.

“And within that is relentless positivity and good cheer and feeling amazing about oneself, 100 per cent of the time, and feeling amazing that other people feel amazing. Which seems like a tremendous thing. Most people don’t feel amazing all the time.”

And that is where Barbie begins. In Barbie Land, every day is a great day. All problems have been solved. Then one day, Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie malfunctions. Her feet are flat. She’s thinking about dying and her heart-shaped morning waffle is burnt. She is sent to see Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) who says the malfunction is caused by a rip in the space-time continuum between Barbie Land and the Real World. To fix it, Barbie must travel to the Real World and fix her human owner in order to fix herself.

Beyond that, who knows what it’s actually about. Most journalists (including me) have only seen the first 20 minutes, plus a five-minute montage of the rest of the film. In interviews, cast members have talked about being baffled by the script, but signing on anyway because it was Gerwig. “I’ll be 100 per cent honest,” said Rae, who plays President Barbie. “I didn’t get it.”

Even Gosling admitted in a GQ interview he had no idea who Ken was. “His job is beach,” said Gosling. “For 60 years, his job has been beach. What the f— does that even mean?”

At a wild guess, I would say it means Barbie sticks to the Gerwig playbook. Think of her films Lady Bird and Little Women, coming-of-age stories with funny, spunky heroines at their centre. Barbie is that, with added glitter. It’s about a loss of innocence and discovering the world isn’t quite what you thought it would be. That time between being a kid, when you think anything is possible – Barbie is right! – to the jolting realisation that maybe the world isn’t so pink. Maybe it’s all been a lie.

Of course, Gerwig won’t say. But she does rebut a Mattel executive’s summation in a recent Time story that it isn’t a feminist movie.

Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken.

“Of course it is,” she scoffs. “Of course it is [a feminist movie]. I mean, what it also is or tries to be as far as it can be, is a humanist movie. And, in that I want it to be …” – she pauses and then changes tack – “Look, making a doll, or making lots of things, is a strategy to deal with the anxiety of being alive and mortal.

“And all human beings employ strategies for the fact that everything is temporary and how do we figure out what to do with our time here or what to worship, what to change. So a doll is one of many strategies and I think, in that way, it is a feminist movie – but it is also looking at how everybody deals [with that]. Does that make sense?”

It does, because Ken is lost, too. It’s just as much his story as it is Barbie’s. He’s trying to figure out who he is.

Barbie now comes in 175 different body shapes, hair colours, ethnicities and abilities.Credit: AP

“Exactly!” says Gerwig. “Ken, in this reverso world, is the one who is also discovering himself as not an accessory but a person in and of himself.”

Look, if all this is sounding like Gerwig has completely overthought a movie about Barbie, she probably has. For Gerwig, Barbie has been four years of work. A film bookended by the birth of her two sons, with a pandemic in between. She was approached by Robbie to write and direct it after Robbie scooped up the rights in 2018.

“The truth is, I was in that bit of postpartum delirium,” says Gerwig. “Where to reconstruct what I was thinking is extremely difficult, but suffice to say, I said yes. And I said, ‘Noah Baumbach would like to do this with me’, which he did not say, that is something he found out later. And he said, ‘Did you sign us up to write a Barbie movie?’ And I said, ‘Yes, we’re going to do that’.”

Baumbach is Gerwig’s partner of 12 years. A well-known writer and director in his own right who met Gerwig when she acted in his 2010 comedy Greenberg. They’ve since worked on four films together and are, in the best possible way, the Barbie and Ken of the indie film world.

The first glimpse of Barbie last year broke the internet. Credit: Getty

With Barbie, they settled on a set of rules for Barbie Land – “there’s no elements, there’s no water, there’s no fire. There’s no real electricity and there’s no wind, except if it makes your hair look cool” – but they also had to work out who Barbie was.

To Ken, she’s everything, but to Mattel, she’s their most prized and fiercely protected possession. More than a billion have been sold since she was created in 1959 by US businesswoman Ruth Handler, who wanted a doll onto which a little girl could “dream of her future”. She is also the first step in Mattel’s plan to cash in on its vast catalogue of toys, with 15 more films announced.

“In a way, there was no real story,” says Gerwig. “But what we did have is an icon that’s existed since 1959. And what it did have was a lot of feelings and opinions in all directions. So that felt like, well, if it’s not exactly a story, it has emotional valence, which is where we begin to find our story.

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach arrive at the 77th annual Golden Globe Awards.Credit: AP

“And I think the fact that Ken had exactly zero emotional valence also felt like a story. And for me, as a writer, and as a director, so much of it was trying to figure out how to surround it with both the consciousness I have as an adult and the consciousness I had as a kid. And that was sort of the hat trick of it. But it definitely is not obvious.”

It hasn’t all been rosy – or Barbie’s official colour, Pantone PMS212. She’s been criticised for her unrealistic body shape (researchers at a Finnish university even worked out she wouldn’t be able to get her period if she was real), and for a lack of diversity.

But she has changed. Since 2015, Mattel have completely rethought who Barbie is. She now comes in 175 different body shapes, hair colours, ethnicities and abilities. Yes, there’s Stereotypical Barbie, but there’s also wheelchair, vitiligo and Down Syndrome Barbie. Gloria Estefan gets a Barbie, so does tennis player Naomi Osaka. My daughter’s collection includes two fuller figured Barbies – one with blue hair, freckles and a skateboard and another with the side of her head shaved.

Flat feet? The horror.

That’s what it all comes back to: the dolls. And it’s here that I pull out the total dork move of someone who has loved Barbie a little too hard and, yes, probably a little too long. I pull out of my bag three of my well-loved Barbies that I have brought along: Derek and Dee Dee, bandmates in Barbie and the Rockers (1986); and Day-to-Night Barbie (1985).

“This is a fabulous guy,” she says, holding up Derek and giving him a twirl. “Look at this tuxedo with tails and the print. It’s quite the garment.

“Looking at these dolls, like when you brought these dolls out, I checked back in with the fact that it’s [about] these dolls. And it’s not that I’ve forgotten that, but the movie has been so all encompassing, and then I think, ‘Oh, right. It’s about this’.”

Ryan Gosling as Ken.

Is there a Director Barbie?

“Mattel made Ava DuVernay into a Barbie,” she says. “She’s a very excellent Director Barbie.”

No Greta Gerwig Barbie?

“Well, they did actually make me a limited edition Barbie of myself,” she says. “It’s really beautiful. I mean, it was so moving. They gave it to me the last week of shooting and they dressed it like me; it has my dog in it. It has my director chair, it has my notebook that I carry around. I was very moved by it.”

Is it still in the box?

“Of course it is! It’s beautiful.”

Sounds perfect.

Barbie is released in cinemas on July 20.

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