Greta Gerwig – Baltimore Magazine

Was ‘Barbie’ Snubbed…By the Patriarchy?

Max Weiss — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 16:59:19 +0000

Oscar nominations were announced yesterday and the Academy sent what can best be described as mixed messages when it came to the smash hit Barbie.

On the one hand, the film was nominated for Best Picture (yay!). Additionally, Ryan Gosling was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his funny (and oddly touching) depiction of Ken and, in a bit of a surprise, America Ferrera, who gave that memorable speech about the double standards women must navigate in this life, was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. All told, Barbie managed eight nominations, including two for Best Song and one for Production Design.

But there were two rather glaring omissions. Greta Gerwig, the woman who directed and co-wrote the film (with her husband, Noah Baumbach), was not nominated for Best Director. And Margot Robbie, who gave a pitch-perfect turn as Barbie, was snubbed in the Best Actress category.

Reaction on X (formerly Twitter) was fast and furious—as reactions on X tend to be.

“Ryan getting a nomination but Margot [not getting one] just proves the plot of Barbie,” wrote user @phobicgay, echoing the sentiment of many online.

“So the plot of Barbie 2 is going to start with today?” quipped Elie Mystal, justice reporter at The Nation.

“Greta Gerwig being snubbed at the Oscars despite Barbie being the only $1 billion movie solely directed by a woman feels very sus to me…” said user @zacidk.

Even Gosling himself weighed in, releasing a statement in which he expressed his gratitude for the nomination, but added how sad he was that his colleagues weren’t similarly honored. “To say I’m disappointed…would be an understatement,” Gosling wrote.

So what gives? Were Gerwig and Robbie snubbed? And is the patriarchy to blame?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is that it’s complicated.

Let’s start with Robbie’s “snub” first. One thing you have to know about the Oscars is that it’s very hard for a comedic performance to land in one of those two “Best Lead” categories. This has to do with a flawed belief that dramatic acting is the only true form of acting and comedic performances are somehow unworthy of Oscar’s highest honors.

It’s a ridiculous notion, one that should be lambasted as much as possible, but it’s pretty entrenched in Oscar’s DNA. Supporting acting awards are where comedy performances can occasionally (albeit rarely) sneak in—see Melissa McCarthy’s nod for Bridesmaids or Robert Downey Jr.’s for Tropic Thunder. Which might explain why Gosling and Ferrera got nominated, but not Robbie. (Also, tellingly, Ferrera gives a pretty straight performance in that film. She’s giving us emotional realism, not broad, physical comedy.)

Gerwig’s “snub” is a little more complicated. Many have noted that Justine Triet—a woman—was nominated for Best Director for Anatomy of a Fall (my second favorite film of the year)—and since she got the nod it proves that THE ACADEMY CAN’T BE SEXIST!

I think that’s a bit facile. Here’s my take on Gerwig’s omission: I think if she were a man, say Gary Gerwig, who had taken a completely amorphous concept—a film about G.I. Joe acknowledging his own role in the patriarchy, for example—and turned it into the cinematic event of the year, a certain mythology would’ve formed around him. The Great Man Theory would’ve taken root and Gary Gerwig would be seen as an auteur of the highest order, a mastermind, a colossus. Obviously, I can’t say for sure that Gary Gerwig would’ve gotten nominated for G.I. Joe, but I have a hunch he might have.

On the other hand, directors of comedic films have often fallen into the same trap that actors have. Their work, no matter how masterful, is seen as trivial compared to those who make films about atomic bombs and the Holocaust.

So, in short, I’d say that those who believe Gerwig and crew were wrongly snubbed and those who say “jeez, not everything is about the patriarchy!” are both right.

Long live nuance.

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Movie Review: Barbie

Max Weiss — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 21:23:10 +0000

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is packed with ingenious ideas and imagery wherever you turn. It starts with a play on 2001: A Space Odyssey, where little girls bash their baby dolls on rocks in favor of the beautiful new grown-up doll with long hair and breasts. And we’re off.

From there, we jump cut to Barbieland, a matriarchal society filled with Barbies of all sorts—President Barbie and Supreme Court justice Barbie and Nobel Prize-winning Barbie. The Barbies have arched toes and feet that never touch the ground, all the better to wear stiletto heels. They don’t so much move as glide through Barbieland, as though being steered by the invisible hand of a young girl. Kens are around, too, with no discernible purpose beyond competing for the attention of the Barbies. It’s there that we meet Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), whose favorite Ken (Ryan Gosling)—he of rock hard abs, cartoonishly blond hair, and a fondness for wearing headbands like he’s a member of Cobra Kai—says his job is “beach.”(Not lifeguard or surfer, mind you. Just beach.) We also meet “Just Allan” (Michael Cera), a bit scrawny compared to the Kens, who has no idea how he got there. (He is, of course, based on an actual doll. The film is nothing if not historically accurate.)

Robbie, who excels at playing wide-eyed naifs, is predictably wonderful here—never losing Barbie’s touching sweetness even as she learns some harsh realities about the real world. But the real secret weapon is Gosling, who leans into the over-the-top goofiness of his peacocking and dim character. It’s a master class in finding truth in broad comedy.

One day, after a typical “best day ever!” of riding her dream car, not kissing Ken (although their faces nearly touch), and frolicking with her fellow Barbies, Stereotypical Barbie suddenly blurts out: “Do you guys ever think about death?”

Record scratch.

Barbie nervously laughs it off and the party continues.

The next morning, she wakes up with…bad breath! Her perfect (waterless) shower feels cold. Her (fake) waffle is burnt. And, horror of horrors, her feet are flat!

She visits with a Barbie guru of sorts, “Weird Barbie”—so named because her girl cut her hair in a choppy, asymmetrical style, put her in weird clothes, painted her face like a clown, and pulled on her so hard her legs are permanently splayed. (Weird Barbie owners basically rule.) As she can no longer join the ranks of Barbieland, Weird Barbie instead dispels advice from a hill, joined by some discontinued Barbies, including pregnant Barbie, “Midge,” and “Growing Up Skipper” whose—wait for it—breasts grow when you rotate her arm. (Gerwig and her writing and life partner Noah Baumbach have loads of fun with the very rich text of Barbie history. Did you know there was once a Sugar Daddy Ken?)

Weird Barbie tells Barbie that there’s been a glitch in the matrix, or some such thing—her human must be thinking of death and sad things and this somehow has translated to her. Her only hope is to enter the “real world” and ease the pain of her owner.

Scared but determined, Barbie hops into her Dream Car and speeds off. As she triumphantly sings Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine”—a bit of a sly joke as it’s not just a female anthem, it’s a lesbian one—Ken’s voice chimes in with her. He’s hidden in the back of the car and he’s going with her, whether she likes it or not.

From there, the art department has a field day as Barbie and Ken travel through a candy-colored dream world—in a convertible, in a rowboat, and eventually on canary yellow rollerblades—until they land in the real world (well, real-ish, at least) of Venice Beach.

Almost instantly, Barbie feels something different. The gaze of men is not benign but vaguely threatening. Ken shrugs, he doesn’t pick up on any menace in the way women are looking at him.

So yes, Barbie and Ken are about to discover that the real world is the opposite of Barbieland. Men wield more of the power. The women are more like, well, the Kens.

Ken goes off to learn more about this world—he seems to think lots of horses are involved—while Barbie tries to find her depressed girl. It’s more complicated than that. There was a girl, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) who had a Barbie, but she outgrew her. She’s in a rebellious phase—scowling at her mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), dressing in baggy clothes, sounding off against corporate greed and the patriarchy. You better believe she wants nothing to do with Barbie now. It was, in fact, Gloria, dissatisfied with her life as an executive assistant at Mattel and feeling unloved by her daughter, who was playing with Barbie again. Her imagination had run a bit wild and she was idly sketching new Barbie concepts: Existential Crisis Barbie and Cellulite Barbie.

Barbie and Ken (but mostly Barbie) are being chased by the dark-clad suits of Mattel, including the CEO (Will Ferrell), who fears that Barbie in the real world will unleash chaos.

Barbie does manage to get back to Barbieland, this time with Gloria and Sasha in tow, only to discover that everything has changed. It’s now something called Ken-dom and instead of a Barbie Dream House there’s Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House. (He doesn’t care if it’s redundant. He likes saying it.) Worse still, the Barbies have been brainwashed and seem to have forgotten that they’re all smart, capable, and independent women. And the final indignity? “Closer to Fine” has been replaced by Matchbox Twenty’s insipid and aggressive “Push” (sample lyric: “I wanna push you around; well I will, well I will”) as the official Ken-dom anthem.

Will Barbie be able to save Barbieland from the patriarchy? Will she and Ken ever really kiss? Will Gloria and Sasha make up? The correct answer is: Who cares when we’re having this much fun?

That said, I do wish the film had tread a bit more lightly in terms of its messaging. There’s one too many speeches about trampling the patriarchy and the maddening double standards that come with being a woman. It’s particularly unnecessary because Barbie already does show us these things—cleverly, slyly, and creatively. I wish Gerwig had felt confident enough in her subtext to leave out the actual text.

The final question: Does Barbie seem like an ad for Barbie? Or, more specifically, how much control does it seem like Mattel exerted over the finished product? I give it pretty high marks on that front. Yes, it celebrates the new evolved version of Barbie. (Over the years, Barbie went from being a feminist nightmare that created an impossible body standard for impressionable young girls to a doll that at least tried to instill girls with confidence by showing different body types and professional achievement.) The Barbies of Barbieland are living in a feminist utopia and believe they’ve accurately reflected the real world. On the other hand, those executives at Mattel? All men. Even if that’s only partly true, it’s pretty damning. And there’s a scene where Sasha tells Barbie off, calling her a corporate tool and a fascist. Not sure that’s part of the Mattel employee handbook. Finally, the film ends with a spectacularly funny and unexpected line suggesting that while Gerwig and co. may not have had total creative control, they had lots of it.

Mostly, Barbie is laugh-out-loud funny and a sheer delight. I’ll be watching it again for sure—but I might fast forward over some of the speechy parts.

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Movie Review: Little Women

Max Weiss — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 12:35:00 +0000

I confess that when I heard that Greta Gerwig was doing a new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, my first reaction was: Why? After all, the Gillian Armstrong adaption with Winona Ryder came out in 1994 which was—la, la, la I can’t hear you—a mere 25 years ago. Okay, so that actually is more than a generation ago, but I loved that adaptation. Winona, at that time the coolest girl in the world, was a sassy and appealing Jo. Claire Danes, the star of my then-favorite show (My So-Called Life), was the beautifully doomed Beth, and the dreamboat du jour Christian Bale (yes, our most method-y of method actors was once a teen idol) was an irresistible Laurie. Heck, I’m even a big enough person to admit that Susan Sarandon made for a warm and wise Marmee.

So I asked myself, is this new adaptation necessary? Turns out, yes. For one thing, it’s clear that Gerwig loves the source material in a bone-deep way. One can practically see the yellowed-with-age, dog-eared, much underlined paperback that Gerwig no doubt carried with her at all times as a young girl. Indeed, she loves it so much, she’s able to mess with its timeline, in a way that feels faithful to the source material and adds new depth and dimension to the plot. Also, the film feels urgent, a word not often associated with the book, without sacrificing any of its lit-by-the-fireplace glow.

It starts, as it always does, with Jo, and I can’t imagine a better Jo than Saoirse Ronan, one of our best actors. Her Jo is smart, loving, quick-tempered, stubborn, and most importantly frustrated—in a visceral sort of way—with the status of women in society. The character of Jo is usually depicted as plucky—and she’s certainly that here—but she’s almost mournful, too, so profoundly aware of life’s inequality that it feels like an ache. As Marmee, Laura Dern portrays motherhood itself as a healing and loving force of nature but she also allows a little of her character’s frustration to bubble to the surface. “I’m angry all the time,” she admits to Jo (who, if not Marmee’s favorite daughter, is certainly the one she understands and empathizes with the most)—and it’s a bit of shock. But, of course, a woman as intelligent and capable as Marmee is would be a little angry. She simply learned to channel that anger into something decent and true.

Rising star Florence Pugh makes for an excellent Amy—funny, bratty, and, as always, smarter than she looks—but I confess I found her a bit ungainly as a 12 year old. I preferred Armstrong’s strategy of casting two actresses as Amy; who can forget a young Kirsten Dunst moaning over her life-ruining lack of limes? Still, Pugh is so amusing as the younger incarnation of Amy it’s hard to really get bent out of shape over this. And Timothée Chalamet is the perfect Laurie. Gerwig had the good sense to expand his role: We see him as a lovesick boy nearly swooning with longing for Jo. (Chalamet, as he proved in Call Me By Your Name, gives good swoon.) And later, he’s convincing as a louche and dissolute young man, heartbroken and in need of saving. The cast is rounded out by an excellent Chris Cooper as the sad Mr. Laurence, whose spirit is rekindled by the joie de vivre emanating from family next door. And, of course, there’s Meryl Streep, who makes for a deliciously unsentimental and prickly Aunt March.

Now about that timeline: Gerwig starts with Jo in New York, pursuing a writing career and having already met the mysterious Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel, too good-looking for the part IMO), then toggles back and forth between her childhood and adulthood. This mostly works famously, especially when she adds a meta device where Jo interacts with an amused and skeptical publisher (the ever welcome Tracy Letts) who will eventually publish her novel. But sometimes the dual timeline can be a bit confusing (pro tip: Pay close attention to Jo’s haircut).

A few more quibbles: As Meg, the bird-like Emma Watson is miscast as Jo’s older sister. And the film indulges in a few too many anachronisms (“You’re on fire,” Bhaer says to Jo, when the edge of her skirt grazes the fireplace. “Thank you,” she replies.) Along those lines, New York-era Jo dresses a bit more like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall than a character in a 19^th century novel.

But mostly, it feels magical, like a Christmas gift. What Gerwig proves is that you don’t need to be slavishly faithful to a text. If you love a book deeply enough, if you’ve truly internalized its spirit and meaning, you can riff on it in such a way that makes it feel fresh without betraying its essence. As Gerwig makes clear, Little Women is almost as relevant today as it was when it was published 150 years ago. What a meaningful tribute to a beloved work of art.

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