Now that the entire world has apparently gone to see Barbie, it looks like the key is lastly out. Margot Robbie isn’t the star of Barbie. Sure, she performs the lead. Sure, she produced it. Sure, she will get to spend so much of time working round in good attire. However the star? Heavens, no. When you’ve seen Barbie, you then’ll be totally conscious that the star of the movie is definitely Ryan Gosling.
Gosling performs Ken, Barbie’s superfluous paramour. However whereas Barbie has been the central drive of the movie’s heavy-handed advertising marketing campaign, it seems that the movie is secretly a Ken car. Ken will get the juiciest character arc. He will get all the great jokes. He will get a musical quantity. He will get a couple of musical quantity. He’s self-aware, self-referential and sophisticated. It’d simply qualify as the best function of Ryan Gosling’s life.
It’s certainly an unexpectedly meaty function. Though Ken may have merely been a one-joke character, writers Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach have enriched him with a posh inside turmoil. The movie’s Ken needs so badly to be acknowledged by Barbie that his neediness warps into an unsightly caricature of masculinity that spreads to the opposite Kens, till they’ve contaminated Barbieland with the form of cartoon patriarchy that sees them ship heartfelt sermons in regards to the work of Steven Malkmus.
His reckoning, too, is surprisingly profound. The climax of the movie technically comes when Barbie decides that she needs to be an actual woman, however all of the emotional heft comes ten minutes earlier, as Ken grapples with the idea of inner validation, realising that he can by no means really be glad till he learns who he’s outdoors of his relationship with Barbie. Gosling performs quite a lot of this for comedian impact, however there’s a palpable rawness to it as effectively. Reviewers have in contrast the scene to the heart-wrenching work he did in Blue Valentine for a purpose.
Additionally, although, it’s plain for all to see that Gosling is simply having a whale of a time. He turns in an old style film star efficiency the likes of which we don’t are likely to see a lot of nowadays. He’s Ken, and he’s dedicated to being Ken. However on the identical time, he’s Ryan Gosling, winking and smirking on the viewers like he can’t consider he’s getting away with it. It’s like watching Jack Nicholson proper within the candy spot period between being an intense younger actor and coasting off his self-image. It’s like watching Bruce Willis, earlier than he realized to make use of his smirk to insulate himself in opposition to unhealthy materials.
Greater than something, this can be a signal that Gosling ought to do extra comedy. This isn’t his first comedy by any means, in fact. He was nice, if under-utilised, in Loopy Silly Love. He situated all the correct comedian beats in La La Land. His work on The Good Guys stays criminally underrated. However one thing about Ken suits the person like a glove. If he can discover extra roles that play to his strengths so successfully, there’ll be no stopping him.
And also you sense that Gosling is aware of this too, given the giddy abandon by which he flung himself into selling Barbie earlier than the Sag-aftra strike. Lengthy earlier than the film got here out, he appeared to latch onto the sheer memeability of Ken, speaking grandly of all the varied traits that make a Ken a Ken. He did a GQ necessities video that lapsed out and in of character so seamlessly it’s now unimaginable to establish the place Ryan ends and Ken begins. He reportedly received T-shirts for the forged studying “While you Ken like lightning, you crash like thunder”. He has talked about that he has had hassle shaking his inside Ken post-shooting, hinting that it has lingered inside him like Austin Butler’s Elvis accent. It’s by far essentially the most dedicated piece of film promotion we’ve seen since everybody within the MCU pretended that they had been all greatest associates. If this isn’t his method of tacitly telling Hollywood the lengths he’ll go to for one more good comedian function, I don’t know what’s.
However possibly he gained’t want to attend too lengthy. The Barbie film has been an amazing business success, and everybody is aware of that success begets sequels. However (spoiler alert) Barbie doesn’t depart quite a lot of room for extra, on condition that it ends with Barbie being granted a non secular demise that enables her to ascend to the true world. So what meaning? It signifies that we – and Ryan Gosling – ought to brace ourselves for the prospect of The Ken Film in 2025.
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