It’s true that Barbie does many of the things we’ve been promised: there is much mocking and loving of Barbie, and plenty of skewering of the suits.

The narrative is that Gerwig has somehow pulled off a coup, by taking Mattel’s money but using it to create real art, or at least just very smart entertainment.

(She and Noah Baumbach co-wrote the script.) For months now there has been loads of online chatter about how “subversive” the movie is-how it loves Barbie but also mocks her slightly, and how it makes fun of Mattel executives even though their real-life counterparts are both bankrolling the whole enterprise and hoping to make a huge profit off it. Gerwig has done a great deal of advance press about the movie, assuring us that even though it’s about a plastic toy, it’s still stuffed with lots of ideas and thought and real feelings. There are inside jokes, riffs on Gene Kelly-style choreography, and many, many one-line zingers or extended soliloquies about modern womanhood-observations about all that’s expected of us, how exhausting it all is, how impossible it is to ever measure up. With Barbie the movie-starring Margot Robbie, also a producer on the film-director Greta Gerwig strives to mine the complexity of Barbie the doll, while also keeping everything clever and fun, with a hot-pink exclamation point added where necessary.

Flat stanley cut out doll