Greta Gerwig

BARBIE: a marriage of the intelligent and the silly

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Photo caption: Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in BARBIE. Courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Thanks to a brilliant screenplay by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Barbie is a spectacular marriage of the intelligent and the silly, and manages to celebrate a commercial brand amid pointed social satire. It’s delightfully funny throughout, and the third act is a crescendo of hilarity.

Gerwig and Baumbach have imagined a world in which the various versions of Barbie dolls, including Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), live in Barbie land, a female-centered but naïve, utopia. Developments force Barbie to leave Barbie Land on a mission to the human-populated Real World, and Ken (Ryan Gosling) stows away on her quest; because they live in a fantasy world, the two are unprepared for the harshness and ambiguity of the Real World, and their return to Barbie Land sparks disharmony. Will Barbie and Ken figure out their respective places in the universe?

Gerwig and Baumbach have somehow crafted a film that will satisfy those who treasure their Barbie doll, memories, those who are disturbed by Barbie’s impact on women’s body images and sexual objectification, and those who just dismiss the Barbie silliness. (I came to Barbie with one indelibly painful Barbie memory – from my bare feet stepping on Barbie shoes.) The biggest laughs come from Barbie’s relentless skewering of toxic masculinity.

America Ferrera in BARBIE. Courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Robbie and Gosling are both excellent, and there’s a huge cast of familiar stars playing various Barbies and Kens. I think that the real star of Barbie is America Ferrera, who plays Gloria, an actual human woman who befriends Barbie in the Real World. Gloria is a workaday Every Woman struggling to navigate life under the withering scorn of her teenage daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). Both Ferrera and Greenblatt deliver superlative performances, and Ferrara gets to deliver the pivotal monologue in the film.

Because much of the humor derives from surprising the audience, I am being very careful to avoid spoilers, but I can say that Barbie’s many highlights include:

  • an inspired use of the Indigo Girls’ song Closer to Fine; it’s very funny to hear Barbie characters singing it, and it has the lyrics of existential inquiry, which is what Barbie is engaged in, as silly as that sounds.
  • the performance of Kate McKinnon, perfectly cast as Weird Barbie.
  • a hilarious turn by Michael Cera as Ken’s Friend Allen;
  • a breaking-the-fourth-wall aside by narrator Helen Mirren that brings down the house.
  • one of the funniest final lines of any movie comedy.
  • closing credits with real Barbie toys, including the discontinued ones: Growing Up Skipper, pregnant Midge, etc.

It’s been a while since a movie made me laugh until I cried, but that happened when i watched the campfire guitar serenades and the “battle of the Kens”.

I rarely complement capitalists, but I am grateful to Warner Brothers for assigning a project that could have been simplistic, exploitative schlock to an artist like director Greta Gerwig. And Mattel is a very good corporate sport to have have its corporate culture, its CEO (Will Ferrell) and even its headquarters building thoroughly mocked.

At a minimum, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach certainly deserve Oscar nominations for Original Screenplay and America Ferrara should get an Oscar nod for Supporting Actress. Barbie is one seriously funny movie.

LADY BIRD: genuine and entirely fresh

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Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf in LADY BIRD

In Greta Gerwig’s triumphant debut as a writer-director, Lady Bird, Saoirse Ronan plays Christine, a Sacramento teen in her final year of high school. I’ve seen lots of good coming of age movies and lots of high school movies, but rarely one as fresh and original as Lady Bird. Gerwig is an insightful observer of human behavior, and she gets every moment of Christine’s journey, with all of her aspirations and impulses, exactly right.

Movies rarely explore the mother-daughter relationship, but this is the biggest thread in Lady Bird.  Christine and her mother (Laurie Metcalf) deeply need each other but just can’t get out of each other’s way, perpetually on each other’s very last nerve. Christine insists on being called “Lady Bird”, rejecting even the name her mother gave her.  From the very first scene to the last, Lady Bird probes how this most complex relationship evolves.

A girl’s relationship with her father is also pretty central, and the great writer Tracy Letts’ understated performance as the dad is extraordinary.  Letts can play a despicable character so well (Andrew Lockhart in Homeland), I hardly recognized him as Christine’s weakened but profoundly decent father.  The dad is a man whose career defeats have cost him his authority in the family and he is suffering silently from depression.  Yet he remains clear-eyed about the most important things in his children’s lives and is able to step up when he has to.  It’s not a showy role, but Letts is almost unbearably authentic.

There isn’t a bad performance in Lady Bird.  Ronan soars, of course.  The actors playing her high school peers nail their roles, too, especially Beanie Feldstein as her bestie.

Lady Bird’s soundtrack evokes the era especially well. Thanks to Sheila O’Malley for sharing Gerwig’s letter to Justin Timberlake, asking to license Cry Me a River. It’s a gem.

Visually, Gerwig is clearly fond of her hometown, and fills her film with local landmarks. It’s not my favorite California city (and I’ve worked in the Capitol), but Sacramento has never looked more appealing than in Lady Bird.  I did really love the shots of the deco Tower Bridge and the Tower Theater sign.

I don’t care for Gerwig’s performances as an actress, and, in writing about them, I have not been kind. As a director, she is very promising, eliciting such honest and singular performances from her actors and making so many perfect filmmaking choices.  As a writer, she’s already top-notch.  Write another movie, Greta.

MISTRESS AMERICA: another self-absorbed misfire

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Lola Kirke (right) with the always annoying Greta Gerwig
Lola Kirke (right) with the always annoying Greta Gerwig in MISTRESS AMERICA

In director Noah Baumbach’s failed comedy Mistress America, an insecure young college student meets her step-sister-to-be (Greta Gerwig), who turns out to be a human whirlwind, dancing on the razor’s edge between frantic excitement and chaos.  The premise of an unsure young person becoming captivated by a high energy and charismatic personality is an interesting one.  Unfortunately, the movie fizzles because of the shipwreck of a screenplay (co-written by Baumbach and Gerwig) and another aggravating performance by Gerwig.

In the first half of the film NOT ONE WORD seems genuine, like a real character would have uttered it.  Mistress America’s worst misfire is the extended screwball sequence at a house in Connecticut – the cast is just flinging the lines as if in a high school play (until a really good actor, Michael Chernus, shows up as a real character).

No actor could save this screenplay, but Greta Gerwig has the gift of making any movie worse and she does here, too.  Gerwig plays the same character in every move because she thinks it’s Cute Kooky like Annie Hall.  But she’s neither cute nor kooky – just annoying to the point of loathsomeness.  Here, her character is a goofy-clumsy social loser, but just so Smart and Wonderful that she uses words like “autodidact” and “my nemesis”.  Gerwig tries to be knowing and ironic, but she’s just cringeworthy, the most embarrassing moment coming when her character explains her own jokey “pretend rewind” gesture.

After the screening, another audience member said that Gerwig’s character is obviously not functional because of a bipolar disorder.  Well, I’ll bet that Gerwig didn’t think that her character was ill – just charmingly idiosyncratic.

The other lead is played by Lola Kirke, who is pretty engaging; I’d like to see her acting with a real script.  There’s also excellent acting by the veteran Chernus (Higher Ground, Men in Black 3, Captain Phillips, The Messenger, Love & Other Drugs).  Jasmine Cephas Jones is stuck in a one-dimensional role as a hyper-jealous girlfriend, but she pulls it off with distinction. Rebecca Henderson is excellent as the bitter woman from Gerwig’s past.

I’m not the audience for Mistress America since I avoid Baumbach and especially Gerwig; I only saw Mistress America because I went to a mystery screening. Now I haven’t liked any Baumbach movie since his initial indie hit The Squid and the Whale in 2005.  I have nothing against a naval-gazing filmmaker filling his movie with neurotic New Yorkers.  Woody Allen has made over thirty of those and seven or eight are masterpieces.  But – as sharp as Woody’s lines are crafted – you believe that this characters have thought them up on their own, not so with Baumbach.

One scene in Mistress America is inspired and true to the characters – a bitter woman confronts the clueless Gerwig character with a grudge from high school.  But that wonderful moment isn’t worth the nails-on-the-chalkboard experience of the film as a whole.  Skip Mistress America (and any upcoming Baumbach/Gerwig project, too, for that matter).

Damsels in Distress: say it ain’t so, Whit

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What writer-director Whit Stillman does really well is bring us unto the world of old money Eastern preppies with their refined manners and their odd customs like debutante balls.  His well-educated characters have earnest late-night existential conversations in complete sentences.  Nobody else does this, and Stillman’s dialogue has always kept me wholly absorbed.  That’s why I liked his films Metropolitan and Barcelona so much.

What Stillman does not do well is absurdist film, like his current entry, Damsels in Distress, set in a Northeastern liberal arts college that is decidedly non-Ivy.  Indie film darling Greta Gerwig plays the seriously off-kilter leader of some coeds who are intent on rescuing fellow students from depression, fashion mistakes and bad hygiene, whether they want it or not.

While his earlier films were earnestly realistic, Damsels is way over the top.  The girls’ boyfriends are so stupid that one does not yet know his colors.  Gerwig’s character is so obviously disturbed that anyone, even a horny college male, would run the other way.

That means that the patter of Stillman’s dialogue must carry the day, and it fails him.  Gerwig’s two friends are one-note jokes – one profoundly stupid, the other profoundly suspicious – that aren’t that funny the first time.  There are lame body odor jokes.  The fraternity system uses Roman, rather than Greek letters – which is not the sidesplitter that Stillman may imagine.

For sure, there are some funny moments.  At the campus Suicide Prevention Center (the word “Prevention” keeps falling off the sign)  Gerwig offers a fellow student a doughnut, but then snatches it back after one bite when she discovers that he isn’t the suicidal one.  One student has adopted the Cathar religion, which he associates with a certain sexual practice.  But, over all, the movie is not funny.  Worst of all, it’s not engaging.

Analeigh Tipton, who was very good as the smitten babysitter in Crazy Stupid Love, does especially well again as a transfer student who falls under Gerwig’s wing.

My recommendations:  1) Stillman should leave the absurdism to Bunuel and 2) the rest of us can skip Damsels to watch Metropolitan and Barcelona.