Barbie: Far more than a plastic toy

Barbie (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, and needlessly, for suggestive references and fleeting profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.4.23

This must be one of the most unusual ideas ever pitched to a Hollywood film studio. 

 

I’d love to have been a bug on the wall during that concept meeting.

 

Total catastrophe! Barbie (Margot Robbie, center) is dismayed to discover that her
perfectly arched feet have become flat. Her fellow Barbies — from left, Ana Cruz Kayne,
Sharon Rooney, Alexandra Shipp, Hari Nef and Emma Mackey — are similarly
horrified.

And yet, defying expectations — of some silly, frilly bit of toy-themed fluff akin to 1986’s My Little Pony — this film is thoughtful, audaciously subversive, and one of the most insightful indictments of gender stereotypes ever unleashed.

It’s also quite funny.

 

And pink. Very, very pink.

 

Director/co-scripter Greta Gerwig — along with writing partner Noah Baumbach — have concocted an immersive “Barbie experience” that playfully honors the iconic Mattel doll’s 64-year legacy, while contrasting her idealized realm with the harsher truths of our real world.

 

Although such progressive thoughts certainly weren’t contemplated when the first Barbie hit store shelves on March 9, 1959 — your choice of blonde or brunette — Mattel soon employed the doll as a subtle means of girl empowerment. Barbie could be anything: a doctor, lawyer or scientist; tennis champ or ace baseball player; astronaut, Supreme Court justice or even president of the United States.

 

(Granted, this was primarily marketing savvy; the actual goal was to make money. But if a little idealism rubbed off along the way, so much the better.)

 

Thus — following a hilarious prologue that lampoons the opening sequence in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — we meet pert, perky “Stereotypical Barbie” (Margot Robbie), as she wakens to enjoy another in an impossibly long line of perfect days.

 

Identically perfect days.

 

She rises, greets the Barbies in adjacent dream houses, showers beneath invisible water, enjoys breakfast while drinking invisible milk, and opens her magic wardrobe to get her outfit for the day: a bit of spin, and poof, it’s on her body. Sarah Greenwood’s production design is as amazing and colorfully inventive as Jacqueline Durran’s costumes. (Who knew pink came in so many shades?)

 

Since Barbie’s dream house has no stairs, and is open at the front, she merely steps off the edge and floats to the ground below. (Newton’s laws don’t exist in Barbie Land, nor does wind, gravity or anything else that might interfere with this realm’s pink perfection.)

 

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain: Heartbreaking study of a tormented artist

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and brief profanity

Available via: Movie theaters and (beginning November 5) Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

One rarely encounters such a Dickensian life, outside of a Charles Dickens novel.

 

Artist Louis Wain’s personal and professional life was just as tragic, as the majority of his vast output was playfully joyous. He remains, to this day, one of the most beloved commercial illustrators in English history; during the Edwardian era, it was the rare home that lacked one of his posters, or many of his children’s books.

 

Louis (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Emily (Claire Foy) are
surprised to find a scruffy, rain-soaked kitten in their
garden. They'll soon be even more surprised by the
degree to which this little feline affects the arc of
Louis' artistic career.

He also deserves credit for helping elevate the humble pussycat into a companion worthy of being a pet, rather than a pesky creature best relegated to the streets.

Author H.G. Wells famously noted — during a radio broadcast reproduced in this biographical drama — that “He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.”

 

Wain also was quite popular on this side of the pond, at the beginning of the 20th century, and then much later, in the 1970s, when his more outré cat paintings were ubiquitous among the, ah, college-age psychedelic set.

 

Director Will Sharpe’s poignant, deeply sensitive film is highlighted by sublime performances from Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy. The script, by Sharpe and Simon Stephenson, is remarkably faithful to Wain’s life and career … the all-too-brief highs and numerous shattering lows of which, are almost too much to bear.

 

Indeed, this saga’s midpoint, highlighted by an intensely intimate scene between Cumberbatch and Foy, surely ranks as one of the saddest, most heartbreaking moments ever captured on film.

 

The story begins in the early 1880s, when — following their father’s unexpected death — 20-year-old Louis (Cumberbatch), as the family’s lone male, is forced to support his mother and five younger sisters. 

 

Fortunately, he has a remarkable — and rapid — facility for drawing and painting, which he’s able to do with both hands simultaneously (which Cumberbatch depicts persuasively). Louis specializes in animals and country scenes, and within a few years is selling work to journals such as the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News and, a bit later, the Illustrated London News.

 

Unfortunately, Louis also suffers from a mental illness — possibly schizophrenia — which would remain undiagnosed throughout his lifetime. Symptoms include an irrational fear of drowning, which strikes unexpectedly. For the most part, he keeps such demons at bay via the manic intensity with which he fills every minute of every hour: sketching, tinkering with useless inventions, “composing” unmelodic musical works, and even sparring uselessly in an amateur boxing ring.

 

Along with a frenzied fascination with the wonders of electricity, which he comes to believe is a defining force in life and the universe.

 

So, yes: Cumberbatch once again is portraying an eccentric and deeply unstable genius, who’s all tics and twitches. But it must be acknowledged that his Louis Wain is completely distinct from his Sherlock Holmes, or his Alan Turing, or his Hamlet.