Gerwig has fun in Barbie Land, and in her role as a friendly playmate, she works hard to ensure you do too. It’s very Palm Springs circa 1960, an aesthetic that could be called bubble-gum midcentury modern. With their flat roofs, clean lines and pink décor - a spherical TV, Eero Saarinen-style tulip table and chairs - the overarching look evokes the era when Barbie first hit the market. There, framed by a painted mountain range, Barbie and a diverse group of other Barbies rule, living in homes with few exterior walls. Written by Gerwig and her partner, Noah Baumbach, the movie introduces Barbie on yet another perfect day in Barbie Land, in which dolls played by humans exist in what resembles a toyland gated community. The Mattel brand looms large here, but Gerwig, whose directorial command is so fluent she seems born to filmmaking, is announcing that she’s in control. There, Gerwig sets the scene and tone with Barbie (Margot Robbie) - who calls herself stereotypical Barbie - soon floating out of her Dreamhouse, as if she were being lifted by a giant invisible hand. The movie opens with a prelude that parodies the “dawn of man” sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (with girls, not ape-men), and then shifts to Barbie Land, a kaleidoscopic wonderland. These imaginers first and foremost include Gerwig herself. In “Barbie,” by contrast, it’s the imaginations of the girls and women who play with the doll that give it something like life, a fitting shift for a movie that takes sisterhood as a starting point. In the original, a male sculptor creates and falls in love with a beautiful statue in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” and in the Lerner-Loewe musical “My Fair Lady,” she’s a Cockney flower girl. In outline, the movie offers a savvy, updated riff on the Greek myth of Pygmalion, which has inspired myriad stories about men and the women they invent. Gerwig carves a comic pathway into these representational thickets partly by means of mythology.
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