Helping Barbie navigate her topsy-turvy new existence are other women. Some are already embedded in her history: Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman); a mother who used to play with Barbie (America Ferrera); the daughter those Barbies were passed on to (Ariana Greenblatt). But one is a stranger, a woman she notices while she sits on a bench, gathering herself. It’s a type of woman she has never seen before, because there are no old women in Barbieland. This woman is played by the 91-year-old, Oscar-winning costume designer Ann Roth, a friend of Gerwig’s. (“Do you have many friends who are, like, 90? I do, weirdly. I have three real friends, not pretend friends, who are now 91, 90 and 91.”) When Barbie looks at her, she finds her beautiful and tells her so. The woman already knows. Suddenly Barbie, the fraught aspirational figure, has beheld someone she might aspire to be, and it is a radiantly content nonagenarian, reading a newspaper on a Los Angeles bench, who knows what she’s worth.
“The idea of a loving God who’s a mother, a grandmother — who looks at you and says, ‘Honey, you’re doing OK’ — is something I feel like I need and I wanted to give to other people,” Gerwig says. When it was suggested that this scene, which Gerwig calls a “transaction of grace,” might be cut for time, she remembers thinking: “If I cut that scene, I don’t know why I’m making this movie. If I don’t have that scene, I don’t know what it is or what I’ve done.”
Midway through “Barbie,” a Mattel employee receives a phone call from the F.B.I.: A Barbie is on the loose. One thing leads to another, and Barbie finds herself racing, action-comedy style, through Mattel headquarters, with the company’s entire executive corps in hot pursuit, eager to stuff her back into a life-size version of the pink box new Barbies come in.
As much as this set-piece owes to Gerwig and Baumbach’s sly imaginations, it owes something to Mattel too. This is a corporation that has historically been so protective of Barbie that it sued the band Aqua over the pop smash “Barbie Girl.” Now there is a Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice collaboration that samples “Barbie World” on the “Barbie” soundtrack. How does a company go from dispensing cease-and-desist letters to gamely lampooning itself?
As with the great Barbie makeover of 2015, the answer has to do with survival. After Barbie’s pivot, the brand was on better footing, but its parent company was not. In 2018, Mattel lost $533 million. Revenue had plunged $2 billion in five years, and the company had churned through three chief executives. The fourth was Ynon Kreiz, an Israeli-born businessman with a gleaming white smile, total message discipline and a history working in entertainment, not toys. Kreiz had a vision for a turnaround: Mattel would restructure, cut costs and stop being a toy company. “We used to think of ourselves and present ourselves as a manufacturing company,” he told me. “The specialty was: We make items. Now we are an I.P. company that is managing franchises.”
If these are business-speak talking points, they are also the reason “Barbie” exists. Mattel has previously made the kind of predictable entertainments a toy company makes — straightforward pro-Barbie material like successful animated shows for kids. But when Kreiz took charge, that kind of propaganda was not working broadly enough. He and his colleagues now say the same things over and over. That Barbie is not a toy; she is a pop-culture icon. That she does not have customers; she has fans. If you take that seriously, it outlines how to proceed. An icon who wants to stay at the center of the culture can’t keep putting out the same old thing and suing anyone who riffs on it. She has to stay current.
So, six weeks into the job, Kreiz met with Margot Robbie, who had been keeping an eye on the Barbie rights and whose production company had a relationship with Warner Brothers. He also hired a veteran film producer, Robbie Brenner, who had made movies like “Dallas Buyers Club,” to head up Mattel films. Brenner has since assembled a master list of 45 Mattel properties that could be adapted, including Hot Wheels, He-Man, Polly Pocket and Uno; a number are currently in development, with talent including Tom Hanks, Daniel Kaluuya and Lena Dunham.
