How well does this year’s biggest film utilize the automotive members of its cast?
During production of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Hollywood paint supplier Rosco essentially ran out of pink. Amidst a quotable script and stellar performances by the cast, Barbie’s toylike production design stands out, yes for its color, but also for its tangibility; you can practically feel the molding lines on Ken and Barbie’s roller skates or the unsandiness of the hard plastic beach set. Does that same reverence for the Barbie toy and attention to detail extend to Barbie’s wheels?
To start, every vehicle in Barbie (save for brief shots of a VW Camper van) is a GM product. That’s mostly Chevrolets and one Hummer. To see product placement in a film whose existence is product placement hardly surprises, but it is disappointing to see an avenue for further creativity (this film is awash with it, despite the summer blockbuster context) restricted.
Let’s begin in the middle, when Barbie (Robbie) ends up in the real world running from Mattel suits (led by Will Farrell) who are trying to send her back to Barbieland. The Mattel executives (not really bad guys, per se, but something adjacent to that) ride around in classic baddie black Suburbans, driven in tight formation. The good guys use a pristine Chevrolet Blazer EV that looks fresh out of a press photo. It belongs to Gloria (America Ferrera), a mom who loved her own Barbies (including Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie) but who struggles to connect with her Barbie-skeptical daughter (Ariana Greenblatt). Gloria is kind of a nerd, and her blue Blazer with funky orange interior accents suits both mom Gloria’s basic responsibilities as a real world person (its still just an SUV) and the complex, confused, but creative Gloria who draws pictures of Thoughts of Depression and Cellulite Barbies. And yet despite Chevy’s best efforts, the Blazer still isn’t cool, and neither is Gloria, who is just trying her best.
And so the Blazer gets chased by the Suburbans through Los Angeles in a fairly pedestrian and yet still partly CGI’d chase, choreographed like a Chevy commercial. It features no crashes or particularly challenging manuevers, and yet the whole affair is rendered jarringly sterile admist an otherwise visually rich film. At one stage of the chase Gloria makes a sudden freeway exit and leaps a curb, getting several feet of air in her CGI Blazer that briefly appears to defy all laws of physics and suspension. Weirdly, the two chasing Suburbans do something similar a moment later and yet that looks to have been done practically, albeit not in a way which raises adrenaline levels. Where elsewhere Gerwig and her team display such creative verve and exert near-total visual control, this scene stands out as lazy. In a film that could be criticized for functioning like one large commercial for Mattel, it’s the three-minute commercial for Chevrolet shoved in the middle that’s disappointing.
In Barbieland things are better than in the real world, and that extends to the car casting. GM obligations mean Ken (Ryan Gosling) drives a big Hummer EV with blue lighting bolt graphics, inadvertently a superb character fit if you think about what kind of person would ever buy a six-figure, 19-foot long electric Hummer in dull silver. Ken’s struggle during the course of Barbie is that he’s trying to be a man, or even just trying to be himself, but he doesn’t really know what that means. In fact, he only gets the Hummer after he sees one in the real world filled with men. That’s as far as his thought process goes after he’s become mistakenly infatuated, over the course of his real world sojourn, with the idea of patriarchy and horses.
By contrast, Barbie’s pink Corvette is unmistakably hers. It’s a custom-made, smaller copy of a C1 Corvette, made that way to give it a toylike proportion when Robbie sits behind the wheel. Like Stereotypical Barbie, her Corvette is pretty but impractical. It does only what she needs it to: ferry her around Barbieland, look good, and play her favorite songs from the radio (“Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls, mostly). As a C1 Corvette it even connects well to Barbie’s 1960s roots.
If it weren’t for product placement we might have seen how the other Barbie’s choices of car express their own personalities. Maybe we would have seen President Barbie’s Cadillac, Doctor Barbie’s BMW, Mermaid Barbie’s Amphicar, or whatever the hell Weird Barbie might drive. But we do at least get the Corvette, though like Barbie’s other accessories, it can’t follow her through the whole story, which concludes when Barbie chooses not to continue living her life as a doll and instead wants to become a person.
After choosing real womanhood over Barbieland, Barbie doesn’t drive herself to her first gynecologist appointment. The Corvette remains in Barbieland, where it belongs. We don’t see it, but no doubt Chevrolet would have put her in a glossy pink Malibu or, god forbid, a Bolt as her real-world wheels. Like cellulite and flat feet, a boring car might be one of the elements of real womanhood that Barbie accepts and relishes by the end of the film. Still, hopefully her Corvette will have inspired some real world sales of that (almost 90% of ‘Vettes are owned by men!) and other sports cars in pink.
Car Casting Score: 5/10
That dreadful Chevy ad – I mean car chase – prevents an otherwise excellent film from scoring any higher, but Barbie’s Corvette should enter the pantheon of iconic movie cars even if it never exceeds about 10 miles per hour. GM obligations really seem to have prevented the automotive elements of Barbie from matching the rest of its intricately, passionately-designed production. It would have been interesting to see the automotive equivalent to Ken’s Fauxjo Mojo Mink fur coat, for example, instead of an ad for Hummer, even if that choice does match his character surprisingly well. Also, I think Allan deserved a character car. Maybe a ‘60s Fiat 500 convertible in light yellow.