Barbie

If Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” is inherently a two-hour commercial for a toy given its eponymous subject, the famous fashion doll manufactured by Mattel, Inc., then it calls to mind so many Renaissance masters working on commission. Their paintings or sculptures might have specifically been intended to reflect the interests of a Royal patron, or perhaps literally reflect the Patron himself, but that didn’t mean these works of art couldn’t be just that – works of art. And though “Barbie” is perhaps not a full-fledged work of art, it is one hell of a movie, nevertheless, bursting with creativity and spirit. Indeed, Gerwig’s “Barbie” teems with self-awareness, didactic dialogue, and droll comedy bits, including Will Ferrell playing the CEO of Mattel as a self-important, faux-enlightened dimwit, impudently evocative of how Renaissance painters often included likenesses of their patrons within the canvas. But what makes “Barbie” stand out is how Gerwig blends that story of self-awareness with her titular character essentially becoming self-aware, both of them bursting to life.

“Barbie” begins with an ingenious parody of the beginning to “2001: Space Odyssey” by reimagining an ape smashing a bone to evoke The Dawn of Man by having several little girls smash outmoded baby dolls as Barbie looms over them to evoke how Gerwig is both smashing the idea once so hilariously satirized by The Onion that mass market entertainment and feminism cannot co-exist while also illuminating how Barbie gave little girls permission to dream of themselves in terms beyond motherhood. Of course, when the sequence’s narrator (Helen Mirren) notes how this realization cured all ills, her cheeky tone lets us know this isn’t true, setting up “Barbie” as taking place at the intersection of paradise and reality, site of eternal struggle.

Margot Robbie stars as Barbie, though not the Barbie, even if she is referred to as Stereotypical Barbie, but one of many Barbies, all the different models of Mattel’s chief commodity through the years, even the discontinued ones, living and working in a place called Barbieland. Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach imagine Barbieland as a kind of perpetual movie musical, the Barbies waking up by singing and ending the day with disco dance parties, while Ken (Ryan Gosling) only exists in the context of Barbie, as if at the end of each night he gets put back up on an invisible hook until Barbie wakes up again. It is a fuchsia infused female utopia without pesky subtext, underlined in the comically literal dialogue, if ominously so, portended by the imaginary milk Barbie drinks and the fake waffles she eats. Life in plastic, to paraphrase Aqua, it’s fantastic, until it’s not, which occurs during one of those dance parties when Barbie suddenly wonders if anyone else thinks about death, triggering an age-old journey of self-discovery.

Endlessly inventive, Gerwig utilizes Barbie’s myriad history and characteristics, like a recurring joke involving the doll’s flat feet, to dissect their deeper meaning by turning them inside-out. She goes even further by embedding the innate anti-feminism of Barbie into the plot by rendering it so that all Barbies in Barbieland are essentially manifestations of the little girls playing with them in the real world, meaning Stereotypical Barbie exists as a kind of reflection of the societal perfection expected in women. So-called Weird Barbie (an impeccably cast Kate McKinnon), whose real-world counterpart has fashioned her as being eternally in the splits, her very existence a rebellion against such perfectionism, explains that Barbie’s fears can only be quelled by traveling to the real world and finding the person playing with her. Desperate to prove himself, Ken tags along.

The cold hues of actual reality cast Barbie’s omnipresent pink in a whole new light, transforming her into a confused and complicated individual, a figure to be objectified but also a person who in one scene with the Mattel execs trying to wrangle her literally refuses to be put in a box. At one point, Barbie sits on a bench next to an older woman, and Gerwig frames them as virtual reflections of one another, quietly kicking the notion that women cease to exist in the eyes of society at a certain age square in the teeth. Ken, meanwhile, becomes less a fish out of water than a duck taking to it, discovering the concept of patriarchy and bringing it back to Barbieland to calamitous effect, his vision for a new world order manifested in a hysterical montage that’s like an Esquire-produced version of the recruitment video in “The Parallax View.”

It is tempting to decree that Gosling steals the movie, so amusing is he, playing a kind of Cobra Kai instructor in an MGM-ish musical, all vain if clueless swagger, so desperate not to appear ridiculous, he comes across that much more ridiculous, ultimately as fragile as, well, a doll. But “Barbie” belongs to Robbie. For one thing, it’s an astonishing physical turn, embodying the rigid movement of a plastic doll to great comic effect. What she does in a mid-movie chase scene, I’m not sure I can even explain, evincing a loose-limbed slow-motion recounted by the camera in real time, as close to a real-life Looney Tune as I can recall. Yet, delicately and incrementally she lets dollops of humanity seep in, especially in her smile, progressing from frozen solid to shining it on to something real and wondering, her whole turn eventually landing at the same nexus as the movie. As it concludes, it becomes almost too talkative because what needs to be said is being conveyed entirely by Robbie, the drama of her impending leap of faith playing out right on her face, so that you can virtually see the moment when Barbie passes into being a human - strike that - a woman.

Maggie's Plan

Watching Rebecca Miller’s “Maggie’s Plan” is a unique experience. Though in some respects the film is a fairly formulaic rom com with a happy ending, its overriding mission is to plunk three intellectuals with cerebral tendencies into a situation that, whether they know it or not, is considerably quixotic. It’s like watching 1980s Woody Allen remake “Serendipity.” The titular character (Greta Gerwig) might claim she believes in destiny, given her conception by divorced parents who hooked up and told their daughter fairytales about this merely meant she “had to be born”, but her behavior suggests that she, in fact, believes she controls her own destiny. Her plan, however, intent on doing just that doesn’t quite work out, until it does, at which point she’s made to realize she was never driving this car at all. Take as many wrong exits as you want, men, women and children, but the modern moirai are guiding us all.

Maggie’s plan involves having a child with a sperm donor, a guy named Guy (Travis Fimmel), a pickle briner, which intrinsically betrays the film’s setting (New York City). Yet the plan begins to crack when she meets John (Ethan Hawke), a part-time professor at the New School where she works as a counselor. He tantalizes her intellect by asking her opinion of the novel he’s writing and she surrenders to erudite passion, bringing about an unplanned marriage and an unplanned kid that, of course, was planned, just planned with the other guy. Alas, Maggie & John's marriage quickly founders as she comes to realize many of his charms equate to negatives. She wonders if he was meant to be with his first wife, Georgette (Julianne Moore), whose broad accent, outrageous costumes and fearsome disposition belie a semi-generous spirit, all along, and hatches a new plan to get the exes back together.

That’s a plot that sounds readymade for a screwball comedy, and while there is some barbed dialogue, Miller forgoes the seemingly innate mania for something breezier instead, noticeably muting even the story’s most sensational twists. This means that you can see Miller’s screenplay telegraphing the conclusion, one that comes back around to the beginning, which despite the myriad of complications the characters endure still makes it seem as if nothing substantial has changed, as if everything in-between was an interruption. And if that eliminates suspense as to what will happen, well, “Maggie’s Plan” was never seeking to unload a surprise on us. It’s an academic’s fable.

As one character observes in relation to writing a paper, sometimes your opening paragraph says the same thing as your concluding paragraph, and this is because your conclusion is merely repeating your thesis in a more developed form. This is essentially what Miller does; the way the world in “Maggie’s Plan” is lined up as it opens is the way it is lined up as it concludes, just in a more developed form, with all sorts of entanglements yielding enlightenment. That illumination relates to destiny, which, it turns out, cannot be altered, not by our best laid plans and not by our whims either, suggesting that in spite of all human idiocy on display in this film, the fates always have our backs.

Mistress America

The American Dream, that anciently glorious idiom, presumes that any one person in this vast nation is entitled to transforming into whoever they want to be and striking it big. The individualism inherent in this notion is what makes it entirely apropos that the American Dream in director Noah Baumbach’s masterpiece “Mistress America” takes root in Brooke Cardenas (Greta Gerwig), a narcissist stricken by the willful delusion that because you say something that automatically means it is. (“That’s why I’m not in therapy. I know everything about myself.”)

Baumbach has always leaned on dyspeptic egotists, from Ben Stiller’s Greenberg to Nicole Kidman’s Margot, but Brooke is in a league all her own. There is an early scene where a former high school classmate confronts Brooke over her cold, cold heart. It’s familiar, the moment when we are made to understand Brooke has always been like this. But rather than simply letting this revelation lie there, Baumbach and Gerwig (who wrote the screenplay together), turn it around, forcing Brooke to forgo self-actualization and act as if she’s the victim. It’s like putting the character’s last shred of potential empathy on the pyre. It’s like she’s “All About Eve’s” Marilyn Monroe crossed with Bette Davis; miraculously innocent in her cruelty.

As the film opens, Tracy (Lola Kirke) has just gone away to Barnard College. A la “Frances Ha”, Baumbach constructs these scenes as a fast-moving series of vignettes, effectively demonstrating the alacrity with which a freshman can be overwhelmed when her utopian ideals of the collegiate experience crumble in the face of the real thing. Adrift and friendless for what in teenage years feels like months, her mother Stevie (Kathryn Erbe) suggests she contact Brooke, the thirtysomething daughter of Stevie’s fiancé.

Though Brooke is intentionally unlikable, Gerwig’s genuine marvel of a performance is not, often playing like she’s only in the room with herself, listening only in so much as she’s thinking of what she can say next, yet still tuning into her semi-protégé’s frequency just not enough to acutely convey that she understands Tracy just as far as Tracy wants to be understood. You may see right through Brooke’s obvious veneer, but you also see how initially Tracy does not, swept away in Brooke’s almost bullish charisma that Gerwig so ably captures, amplified by the quick-cut whoosh of filmmaking, as if it’s all happening so fast Tracy never has time to stop and consider her mentor’s cosmopolitan aura is just a put-on.

Brooke relentlessly concocts plans and schemes, none of which amount anything tangible, emblemized by her Greek boyfriend we never see. He’s funding her latest harebrained capitalist reverie, a restaurant called Mom’s, not as much an eatery as a community center with food, a cultural Shangri-La. She talks it up likes it’s the best place in the world, less concerned with brass tacks than the ivory tower at the end of the rainbow; that’s why she lives in Times Square, right off Broadway, consumed by a land of make believe.

Eventually Tracy seizes on Brooke as a creative invention in a story that could gain her entrance to the snobbish literary society in which she wants so desperately. And if art is a working through then Tracy uses this short story to work through Brooke, to see both sides of her potential stepsister, allowing the film to strike an incredible juxtaposition, seeing something extremely earnest in the ersatz, a complexly poignant admiration for the way this faux-socialite leverages everything on her dreams.

Those dreams are brought to the edge in the film’s lengthiest and most virtuoso sequence, one in which Baumbach acutely maintains a firm and humorous visual handle on a multitude of mobile characters, triggered when the necessary funding for Mom’s goes belly up which transforms “Mistress America” into a drawing room farce as Brooke and Tracy and journey north to the wealthy hamlet of Greenwich, Connecticut to visit Brooke’s old flame, Dylan (Michael Chernus) now married to an ice princess, Mamie Claire (Heather Lind), guilty of stealing Brooke’s long-ago brilliant t-shirt idea, and convince them to invest in Mom’s.

To make her pitch, Dylan forces Brooke to ascend his “media stage”, like it’s a makeshift infomercial, a laugh-out-loud reminder that the American Dream has been transformed from a goal you pursue to a brand you pitch while hoping that the precious few with money to burn will actually back it. And even as Brooke rises to the occasion, her desperation comes through loud and clear, and her moment of triumph doubles as the moment she realizes all her grand planning is just playing pretend.

“Mistress America” is built off screwball comedies of the past, loaded with brisk action and manically witty repartee and infused with insightful, hilarious and caustic social commentary relevant to the present. Yet just as much it comes to resemble a zanier update of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterwork, “The Great Gatsby”, imagining Tracy and Brooke as a modernistic feminine spin on Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. What is Brooke, after all, if not a self-made star-gazer, a larger-than-life fabrication, one as easy to dismiss as to admire. Her incessant vaingloriousness is all in the name of chowing down on that pie in American airspace, a ridiculous belief in the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes her throughout “Mistress America”, sure, but that’s no matter—tomorrow she will run faster, stretch out her arms farther.

The American Dream probably was never much more than a huckster’s slogan to begin with considering that F. Scott was taking it apart way back in 1925. Yet its myth survives because for so much cynicism inundating culture we nonetheless remain inherently romantic, the dueling notions at play in Brooke. She is introduced descending the staircase at the TKTS stand in Times Square, arms spread wide to greet Tracy, exclaiming in the manner of a New World tour guide “Welcome to the great white way!” Alas, she’s misjudged the number of stairs and with several still to go is forced to wobbly maintain her starlet facade. And she does. She never relents; she never gives up on the persona; she will grin and bear it in the face of all obstacles. And in that moment, in Gerwig’s immaculate visage, we see The American Dream itself laid bare. She’s wholly sincere; she’s also full of shit.

Frances Ha

Midway through director Noah Baumbach's latest ode to early-to-mid life angst our heroine Frances (Greta Gerwig) has gone home for Christmas and/or to briefly stay with her parents in Sacramento. It is shot, as is the rest of the film, in that French New Wave style (it is also in black and white) littered with quick cuts. This gives the impression that the film is - as in, life - going by much too quickly, but this Sacramento sequence really goes by fast. It goes so fast that you barely have time to register who was who or what was happening. The faces of her parents barely linger in my mind. The holiday lights are strung up, things happen, the holiday lights are struck, and Frances is on an escalator at the airport. This is how I feel every Christmas when I go home - gone with an escalator ride at the airport.

But this sequence you hardly remember actually contains the film's most critical line, a line which threatens to skip right on by, a self-help ship passing in the night. Frances, as characters in stasis are wont to do, lays in the tub. Her mother batters the door. She needs to get in. Frances rebuffs her attempts. Finally, her mother cries: "How long is it going to take?"

I have been a fairly studious Greta Gerwig fan ever since I took the Mumblecore plunge, the talky, low-budget genre wherein Gerwig got her start before branching off into the pseudo-mainstream. Even if her films have not always worked for me, her performances, generally daring and quirkily inventive, have left me impressed. (In particular, her portrayal of an untraditional mental breakdown in last year's "The Dish and the Spoon.") Still, I often found myself wondering, how long would it take for Gerwig to find the perfect role that specifically employed her unique off-centeredness as an actress - mannerisms, scattered line readings, cheekiness - to fully inform the character she was playing?

Well, as is the tragic case in Hollywood, or off-Hollywood (?), often females have to take upon themselves to author that character. So Gerwig teamed with her significant other, Baumbach, to imagine Frances, 27 years old, so poor she cannot afford to live in Tribeca (egads!), couch-surfing, apprenticing as a dancer, which is what she wants to "do". Except the film, both delicately and obviously, hints that this dream is down to last its embers.

Gerwig is a little wonky, immature and uncertain, drifting, perhaps dangerously, but without comprehension (or the urge?) of how to find resolve. She and her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner), adorned with oversized glasses that don't suggest a hipster as much as an adolescent by way of an adult, still seem to reside in a make-believe world of sleepovers and girl talk even as Sophie drifts toward possible marriage with a baseball cap wearing bro.

That last one is key. Sophie has someone, Frances does not. In fact, Frances and one of her part-time roommates - who is writing a spec screenplay for "Gremlins 3" - deem her "undatable." She seems okay with it. This does not, gratefully, turn into Frances needing to find a man to become a woman. In a way, it is not even about Frances becoming a woman - rather, her character trajectory is more like chicken scratches than a classical arc.

I have been a fairly studious Noah Baumbach fan ever since a few of my best friends introduced me to his "Kicking and Screaming" and I fell smack-dab into its cult, incessantly quoting it to anyone who cares (or does not) to listen. I have, more or less, enjoyed all his films, and yet in all his films - even in the sound "Squid and the Whale" - you could sense him struggling to put it all together. I wondered, how long will it take? Will it ever happen?

Here, at last, it does, exhibiting a focus and tightness absent in his other work but still coming across so airy and free-wheeling. The quick cuts never play as artifice, more as the miscellaneous pieces of a life puzzle, one which Frances struggles mightily to put together. A side trip to Paris that is as hilarious as it is sad (which is the movie as a whole) employs the mandatory shot of The Eiffel Tower to excellent effect. Frances tries to light a cigarette. It just won't take. Angered she pushes off the rail she has been leaning against and walks away, revealing that infamous iron lattice tower behind, as if her back is turned to what is typical.

Frances is atypical, even if this whole early midlife crisis is not. The overarching argument, however, is not that Frances needs to find herself, but find her way in life. Her core temperature, so to speak, is intact, and she needs to find her bearings. Any bearings, any bearings at all.

The last shot is strangely, sweetly perfect. I will not reveal it but it seems to suggest she has not completely owned who she is yet. She remains a work in progress. Aren't we all?