Noah Baumbach

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.

MARRIAGE STORY: the comedy helps us watch the tragedy

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MARRIAGE STORY

Noah Baumbach’s family dramedy Marriage Story, one of the very best films of 2019, traces two good people who care for each other at the end of their marriage.  It’s a heartfelt film about a personal tragedy that has some of the funniest moments on screen this year.

Charlie (Adam Driver) is a theater director and Nicole (Scarlett Johannson) is an actress.   They are married with an eight-year-old son Henry.  Nicole’s career is taking her to California, while Charlie’s is anchored to his beloved New York.  Adults might be able to manage a bicoastal relationship, but the kid needs to have his school and his friends in one place or the other. 

The two try to complete an amicable divorce, but their disagreement over the kid’s primary home unintentionally plunges them into a litigation nightmare, with a cascade of stress added by the lawyers and the courts.  It’s been written elsewhere, but I need to add that Nicole and Charlie are horrified by a system that is working as designed.  There’s a wonderful shot of Charlie and Nicole sitting apart on an near-empty subway car, exhausted, bereft and unable to support each other.

In a masterstroke, Baumbach introduces his lead characters with each spouse’s assessment of what is so lovable about the other.  Then we sober up when we learn what prompted the essays.

We relate to both Charlie and Nicole, and Driver and Johansson perfectly inhabit these good folks, slipping into a deeper nightmare with each step in the process.  Near the end, the two have the raw argument that they had each been too nice to have before.

I think that the reason Marriage Story works is that Johansson and Driver can go through their characters’ pain with complete authenticity while amidst all the funny supporting characters.  

Laura Dern and Ray Liotta play top echelon Divorce Lawyers to the Stars. Alan Alda plays a sage older attorney who has lost something off his fastball.  Dern’s riotously funny performance is a lock for an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.  Dern, Liotta, Alda, Julie Haggerty, Merritt Wever and Wallace Shawn are each hilarious.  Azhy Robertson (Juliet, Naked) is very good as the kid.

At one point, the court appoints a child evaluator to visit Charlie and judge his relationship with his child.  Having any stranger parachute into your home, with your parenting rights at stake, would be stressful.   Martha Kelly is superb as an especially humorless evaluator, an oddball impervious to Charlie’s charms and oblivious to any of his positive attributes.  As things start going wrong, Charlie gets more and more desperate and the scene gets funnier.

Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver in MARRIAGE STORY

Director Noah Baumbach’s screenplay is informed by the end of his own marriage to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. He acknowledges “a connection to the material”, but that it’s not only about his divorce. He is generous enough to write the character of Charlie with self-absorbed cluelessness about his impact to Nicole’s career aspirations.

I liked Baumbach’s first movie The Squid and the Whale, about his own parents’ divorce. But my reaction to all his subsequent work until now has ranged from to indifference to antipathy; “detest” is the adjective that springs to mind. Despite my bias, I gotta admit that Marriage Story is so, so good that it solidifies Baumbach’s place as an American auteur. Baumbach should head into awards season as the favorite for the screenplay Oscar.

A superb screenplay, superbly acted, Marriage Story balances tragedy and comedy with uncommon success. It’s a masterpiece, and among the very best cinema of 2019. It’s a Must See. I saw Marriage Story in early October at the Mill Valley Film Festival.  You can find it theaters now, and it will stream on Netflix beginning on Friday, December 6.

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED): who cares and why?

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Grace Van Patten, Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler in THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED)

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), writer-director Noah Baumbach’s latest family comedy, is entirely character-driven (usually a very good thing). We really don’t see anything on screen that isn’t intended to reveal something about a character – a man’s lack of confidence, his father’s vanity, his daughter’s surprising well-groundedness. The story (not really a plot) moves from set piece to set piece, beginning with a funny (and futile) search for a Manhattan parking space, each depicting the family quirks and tensions.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) is star studded (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Grace Van Patten, Emma Thompson, Judd Hirsch, a cameo by Sigourney Weaver) and very well-acted. The problem is that, once I was introduced to these characters, I really wasn’t interested in what would happen to them next. I only lasted 42 minutes before reaching for the remote.

Baumbach has become somewhat of a brand name for naval-gazing (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, Mistress America), and his work has tended toward the Woody Allen neurotic New Yorker genre, only with less depth and FAR less comedy.

You can stream The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) on Netflix Instant, but I can’t imagine why you would want to.

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).