Tony Kushner praises ‘Barbie’: ‘I think it’s a masterpiece’

Count Tony Kushner among the “Barbie” faithful.

As the awards campaign for Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster hit continues apace, Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach sat down for a long conversation on Thursday night in Brooklyn with the Oscar-nominated screenwriter, who wasted little time in expressing his love for the project.

“I think this movie is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” Kushner told the filmmakers after a special screening of “Barbie” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “I think it’s a terrible thing to say to people to their faces, but I think it’s a masterpiece.”

Kushner, a double Oscar nominee earlier this year for co-writing and producing “The Fabelmans,” had previously conveyed his deep love and respect for “Barbie” to Gerwig and Baumbach via email. “He did write the most beautiful email and Noah read it to me out loud and I said, ‘Frame it. Frame the computer,’” Gerwig said.

“It’s a work of really profound – it seems to me… like it’s so hard to talk about this because it’s ‘Barbie,’” Kushner said as part of his admitted “gushing” toward the filmmakers. “But it seems to be a really important work, a very important work of political art, and something that actually rewards repeated viewings and studies. And I feel like I’m working on my own private set of ‘Barbie’ theses. And I tried to make this evening not about that. So thank you. Really, you guys, I think what you’ve done is just absolutely astonishing.”

“Can I say, not to spend the whole time gushing back, but… you know what you’ve made,” Gerwig said in response.

Beyond the mutual admiration club that formed underneath the auditorium’s silver screen, Kushner, Gerwig, and Baumbach also discussed the project’s origins — particularly how the fact that Barbie is an iconic toy allowed them great leeway with which to interrogate numerous themes and ideas.

“The concept of Barbie – whatever that is – is very fraught in all directions. And really, it was something that I didn’t know how we were going to approach at all. There’s no character, there’s not a story. It’s an object. And an object is what you make of it,” Gerwig said.

As Baumbach has said previously during the early stages of his awards campaign appearances for “Barbie,” it was Gerwig who had signed up the real-life couple for the screenwriting job. “I kept thinking that it probably was never gonna happen. And I sort of blocked it out for a while. And then I think it got announced,” Baumbach said. “Apparently, we are writing it.”

The “Marriage Story” filmmaker said he wasn’t especially convinced “Barbie” would work at all until Gerwig showed him an early scene she wrote where Barbie confronts a dying woman and begins to understand the concept of death. (The sequence did not end up in the final screenplay.) 

“I saw those pages, and I thought, ‘Well if we’re gonna write this Barbie movie, I’m totally into this. But this can probably never be in this Barbie movie.’ The essence of that, however, is in the movie,” Baumbach said. “And then what was so exciting about it is that wherever you took it, there was all these it was like alive with ideas. I mean, we had a lot of ideas, and we were just putting everything in there.”

During the nearly 40-minute conversation, Gerwig and Baumbach discussed specific scenes from the film – including one key line uttered by “Barbie” creator Ruth Handler (played by Rhea Perlman) in the film’s final moments: “We mothers stand still so that our daughters can look back and see how far they’ve come.”

“I always think about that in two ways,” Gerwig said of the line, which sparked a healthy discourse online after the film was released. “I was thinking, first of all – I don’t know how many people are playing with kids, but they love to do that thing where you time them. They run away from you and they’re like, ‘How far did I get?’ Or they want to see you – they look back and they’re like, ‘I got this far.’ So I was thinking about that game that kids play.

“And then I was thinking about just how everyone is bound by their time,” Gerwig added. “And that whatever my grandmother thought was possible, it was just bounded by a certain amount of time. And then the next, and then you just don’t know what the baton that gets picked up to be the next thing is. Part of that is this kind of change and death and progression, but it allows for it. Whereas, the idea of creating a brand that subsists through time is unchangeable. That’s like the thing that you want it to be is not changing. And so, how to bring that in?”

Released in July, “Barbie” is the year’s top hit at the box office with more than $1.4 billion in worldwide grosses. The film is also a strong contender in numerous Oscar categories according to the Gold Derby odds, including Best Picture, Best Director for Gerwig, Best Actress for Margot Robbie (who plays Barbie), and Best Supporting Actor for Ryan Gosling (who stars as Ken).

Speaking on Thursday, Gerwig explained they wrote Ken specifically for Gosling because “he’s such a great actor.”

“He’s very funny, but we also knew he’d take it so seriously. So that would be part of what was so funny about it – that he wouldn’t take it lightly, that he would allow himself to kind of go through whatever this transformation is, and the kind of complications of what Ken wants from her and why,” Gerwig said of Gosling.

As Kushner noted, there’s real nuance to the way the Barbies and Kens in the film are presented – with neither group adhering to stereotypical ideas of good and evil. 

“There are many things that they both do that I find extraordinary but when he says, ‘But it’s Barbie and Ken, there is no just Ken.’ He’s destroyed. And he’s correct,” Gerwig said of Gosling and his approach to Ken’s arc. “Ken really was created as an accessory to her. You can play it for laughs and the first half, and then you suddenly realize when it’s flipped around [and the Barbies are the accessories], it’s different. And you think, ‘Oh, no, this is something else.’ Because of the actors and because we tried to – as much as it was anything it was like, it had to be true for the characters. And if it was true for the characters, then everything would flow through that in a way that didn’t feel didactic or like something that felt like we’re imposing something. It felt like it was coming from them.”

Kushner closed the conversation by asking Gerwig and Baumbach about the film’s last line, where Barbie – now fully human – approaches the front desk at an office and proudly proclaims, “I’m here to see my gynecologist.”

“I have a little collection, a little gallery of the greatest last lines,” Kushner said to Gerwig and Baumbach, before providing “I’m finished” from “There Will Be Blood” as an example. The “West Side Story” writer told the filmmakers the “Barbie” closer was now part of the grouping.

“I felt like like when we wrote that, I was like, ‘That’s a gift,’” Gerwig said. “It didn’t feel written, it felt sort of given.”

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