"Math is HARD! Let's Study Art as Social Commentary 101, Instead!"
When Greta Gerwig guested on NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" she was asked this by the host, Peter Sagal: "Do you know—one of the things that happens, it seems, is that young, talented independent directors who make a successful movie on a low budget are immediately handed enormous Hollywood blockbusters. Have you picked yours?"
"Oh!" she gasped."A Hollywood blockbuster? No, I have not picked my blockbuster yet. But, when I do...get ready..."
This is not much to base a movie on. And Barbie is, after all, merchandise. My prejudice—and I confess I went in prejudiced—was this: Barbie is as important to the art of cinema as the Transformers series is. As the recent Super Mario Brothers Movie is. As important as the Lego movies are. Bottom-line, it's the bottom-line: Selling product, and Barbie the movie will push kids pushing parents into the toy-aisles at far greater numbers then before its premiere.
I just didn't think it would satiric to the point of seditious, which I must confess warmed my guiltily paternalistic, capitalist-suspicious heart.
Narrator Helen Mirren explains things to us as she relates the relationship between the Real World and the Barbie Merchi-verse. In a sequence that compares to the morning rituals of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Barbie (Margot Robbie) wakes up perfectly in her Dream-House, takes a shower (there's no water, of course, as Dream-Houses didn't), mimes brushing her teeth, has a plasticized breakfast, dresses, and floats down to her car as if being carried by an invisible hand, to greet the day and the many varying Barbies, Skippers and Midge (the discontinued pregnant one), before spending the day at The Beach, where she plays with her friends, under the ever-watchful, ever-worshipful gaze of Ken (Ryan Gosling, in a lighter mood than of late), who, as they say, covets. He has no idea why as he's a toy and has no chromosomes or hormones.
After another in a perpetual string of "girls' nights", Barbie starts noticing that things aren't so perfect: she wakes up with morning breath, the water that still doesn't come out of the shower is cold, the plastic breakfast is burned, and when she steps off her balcony to get to her car, she lands with a splat. No broken parts or joints, but when she gets to the beach, things get really "off the shelf"--taking off her high heels, instead of remaining walking on tippy-toes, her HEELS touch the ground...she has FLAT FEET!
What is happening? Barbie is supposedly perfect—she is, self-admittedly, "the original stereotypical Barbie"—and suddenly things are going wrong—"I feel sad, and mushy, and complicated"—and she even has thoughts about death. The other Barbies (and Kens) are totally grossed-out (totally!) and advise Barbie to go visit "Weird Barbie" (Kate McKinnon)—she's the one that was played with a little too hard and a little too long—because she's seen things...and she might know what is happening to our doll.
She does, of course, speculating that somehow a portal has opened up between Barbieland and the Real World*, and it has (no doubt) been caused by the Real World person playing with this Barbie, after all, "it takes two to rip a portal." Truer words were never said.
She sends Barbie on a mission to the Real World to find the little girl playing with her and existence as she knows it, and fix the rift, while also being showered with thanks by all those women who owe their wonderful lives to Barbie.
Oh, dear, this will not go well. And, she is figuratively and literally in for a world of hurt. To make matters worse, Ken has stowed-away in Barbie's C4 Barbie Corvette for the trip, although he doesn't know why, just that he has to, despite the fact that she is capable and talented and pretty enough to handle the assignment on her own. "You'll just slow me down!" she yells at Ken, without even bothering to mention that he might cause her to "settle" and derail a budding career in just about anything you can imagine for domestic bliss. Barbie's, after all, live in their own little world of accomplishment—and the movie makes the point that they don't even know where the Kens live.
But, it's a different story in The Real World, where men rule everything, can be anything they want—and women can be anything they want...at 60% the pay, and the thermostats in offices are always set for men's comfort, not women's. There's no day-care, and no parental leave, and, heck, women don't even have control of their own bodies in the eyes of the legal system, and heck, it's like they're just dolls whose job it is to please no matter the mood, and have no agency...and wait a minute, Barbie really IS in the real world!
Okay. Enough of the scenario, you might know where this is going. It's a polemic on the aspirational aspects of Barbie's play-world and the ways it differs from the reality into which those playing children will grow up. It's a satire with one eye on the world of imagination and potential and what happens when play-time is over and responsibility and irresponsibility go hand-in-fist, and life is a lot less fun. Just as hedonistic and materialistic, sure, but a lot less fun.
Credit Gerwig and Baumbach for threading the needle to make this laugh-out-loud funny and entertaining, while also making it smart, and almost too smart. There's a lot of talk of existential crises, depression-era Barbies, and prescient flashbacks ("Remember 'Proust Barbie?' Didn't sell well!") that are going to sail right over kids' heads (and some adults'), but hits a lot of sophisticated points. It tells you the Barbie movie is more aspirational in its own goals than your standard kids' movie that gets by with Saturday morning "don't be mean" social lessons. Here, it skewers stereotypical patriarchy and male egotism--which will make some adults and Ron DeSantis squirm--but, the kids will like the bright colors and the fashions and the sparkling gayness of it all (which will also make DeSantis squirm) while the parents worry about questions they'll be asked later ("I'll tell ya when yer older!").
Hey, parents, be glad there's no mention of "Barbie-heads"!
In the same way that "Rocky and Bullwinkle" skewered the Cold War 1960's while mixing in the most childish of jokes, Barbie treads (on tippy-toes!) the highly-charged issues of gender inequities and sexual politics in our "Old Man" Society, and doing it cheekily, with the knowledge that by aiming high, the kids will eventually catch up while giving the oldsters something to chew on during the ride home. Anyone wondering what audience the filmmakers were aiming for can be answered with the simple "Everyone...eventually."
And in so doing, it gives one more aspiration for little girls to fantasize about becoming: block-busting director.
Billie Eilish and Finneas do the final credits song and once again nail it.
Somehow...after the movie, that wink seems a lot more conspiratorial....
* I would point out that there is a natural barrier between Barbie-land and The Real World called the "checkout counter"...with uniformed guards!...but that would only complicate things in an already complicated scenario,
Well, now Kenneth Branagh follows up his version of Murder on the Orient Expresswith his version ofDeath on the Nile (given this route, can Evil Under the Sun be next?), which fixes some things from the earlier version—mostly performance—adds a little tension with a limited time-frame, as well as giving Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh and his mustache again) more of an emotional reason to solve the murder, rather than merely see justice done and the puzzle solved. It has already been well established in the Branagh version of Christie's world that Poirot prefers a tidier world, but, evidently, that is not enough.
Nor is it enough, apparently, that Poirot has a particularly fussy mustache—more than Ms. Christie implied and it was obsessed over in many reviews of Branagh's Murder—now we must know why it is. Necessary? No. But, at least in the opening black and white sequence which shows a particularly glorious and tragic day in Poirot's WWI service, we get to meet Catherine, whose history was hinted at in the previous Murder... Again, none of this is Christie's creation, but if it keeps Branagh engaged, then scripter Michael Green can play with the elements all he wants.
And play he does. Eliminating book characters, substituting others and swapping attributes from one character to another. The basic mystery is the same—a person is murdered on a closed stage—a ship going down the Nile—and no one goes missing and the obvious person with a motive has an airtight, can't-get-by-it alibi, and Poirot must find the killer before the ship docks and they disembark, the culprit possibly to go loose. The only thing helping in determining "whodunnit" is that two of the suspects are also murdered before the issue is solved. Process of elimination had to occur somewhere.
This is it in very general, non-spoilery turns, because the way Branagh and Green set it up, surprises come early and often, whether you've read the book or seen the earlier versions, and they're done in quite inventive ways that would have put Dame Agatha in a dead faint. It is for sure that she would not have approved of the steamy, sweaty dance sequences that open the film proper, not would she have approved of turning one of the passengers from a gossipy (and drunk) romance novelist to an African-American blues chanteuse* (Sophie Okonedo). The socialist on the boat is no longer a radical, but a member of the upper class (Jennifer Saunders), and there are no kleptomaniacs this time, but there is no longer a jewel thief being pursued by a friend and fellow-passenger of Poirot.
That role gets substituted by Poirot pal Bouc (Tom Bateman), back from the Murder... film, and this time accompanied by his mother Euphemia (Annette Bening), who just happens to be a friend of the family on the celebratory but doomed boat trip; in fact, everybody has some relation with the happy couple—they being Linnett and Simon Doyle (Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer), she being the heiress of the super-rich Ridgeway family.
So, why is Poirot there? Well, that's one of those spoilery secrets unique to this version—although I can say that the happy Doyle's have asked Poirot for his assistance, as they are being stalked by Simon's former fiance Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey), who it seems can't let go. They think she's off her nut, and things get dangerous when Simon and Linnett escape being crushed at Abu Simbel. The thing is: "Jackie" hasn't arranged to smuggle herself on the boat yet and crash the party.
The production is lush, and perhaps too much so. The vista is given the full CGI treatment where everything looks so picture-postcard perfect that it feels like it was photographed in Egypt's uncanny valley—there doesn't even appear to be dust in the air, no grit (unusual in a desert environment), no one even sweats in the heat (certainly as much as they do on the dance floor), and there is a distinct difference between underwater shots of the Nile being dragged for clues, and the shots below the boat suggesting the carnivorous nature of life below the surface—there's plenty to show it on the ship, so the pixelated watery detours are completely unnecessary. And the film has a fetish for the Gilded Age right down to the glistening silverware and the sheen on a champagne bottle, lit as carefully as the stars.
And they're good, by the way. Branagh has some moments to flex his acting muscles with both comedy and tragedy masks. Gadot and Hammer are terrific (rumors to the contrary) and Emma Mackey's jilted fiancee simmers to a broil without the full-on hissy-fits that Mia Farrow brought to the 1978 version. Letitia Wright gets to play some drama, instead of playing "the sprite" (and she's great at it), Okonedo pleasantly threatening, Russell Brand just fine without relying on comedy, Jennifer Saunders delightfully brassy along with Dawn French, and Annette Bening a highlight, probably better than is called for.
Branagh direction is a bit stagey and geometric, keeping in mind a proscenium arch throughout as if the curtain just lifted. And the geometry extends to some almost too-perfect tracking shots that would make you suspect Wes Anderson was directing (if you didn't know any better). That being said, his version of a John WooMexican standoff lacks the tension that one should expect, except to wonder why there are so many guns allowed during international travel. Maybe it's movies like this that convinced the cruise lines to ban them.
In fact, the movie is a bit like a cruise trip—superficially opulent, until you realize you're stuck on a boat with people you don't like, and you swear to never do it again. But, then there's the lure to get away. Death on the Nile gets away with a lot.
* Dame Agatha was never afraid to use the "n-word" and in fact one of her most famous works contained the word in the title, before it was changed to something equally racist (in today's terms) at the hands of the publisher's, lest sales were hurt. (And you thought "cancel culture" was a new thing? It's been around as long as evolution).
