Why we’re excit­ed about Noah Baum­bach and Gre­ta Gerwig’s Bar­bie movie

Yes­ter­day after­noon, the news broke that New York cineaste pow­er cou­ple Gre­ta Ger­wig and Noah Baum­bach are team­ing up to pen a script for Mat­tel and Warn­er Bros’ unti­tled Bar­bie project, with Mar­got Rob­bie moot­ed to star. While the announce­ment might seem like an unam­bigu­ous­ly pos­i­tive devel­op­ment, Ger­wig and Baum­bach devo­tees have faced a seri­ous bout of soul-searching.

The reac­tions have been large­ly split between two schools of thought. The first takes the news at face val­ue, that scor­ing what must be a lucra­tive and high-vis­i­bil­i­ty gig qual­i­fies as grounds for cheers of ​‘good for them!’ Suc­cess is suc­cess, no?

The sec­ond camp argues that no, suc­cess is in actu­al­i­ty not suc­cess when it man­dates the com­pro­mis­ing of your artis­tic integri­ty. Some con­tend that both Baum­bach and Ger­wig could put their time and ener­gy to bet­ter use else­where, on a project geared more to their acer­bic, human-scaled sen­si­bil­i­ties than a big shiny stu­dio pic­ture about a liv­ing piece of plastic.

We’ve already seen too many dis­tinc­tive auteurs flat­tened into homo­gene­ity by the suits at Mar­velD­is­neyMega­Corp. (We weep for you, Tim Bur­ton!)

In our mis­sion to remain cool-head­ed on such occa­sions, we’d like to stake out a patch of ter­ri­to­ry in the mid­dle ground between these two takes. The his­to­ry of Hol­ly­wood is the his­to­ry of cre­ative minds learn­ing to work with­in and some­times even mas­ter a sys­tem dri­ven by cap­i­tal. Why not allow these two tal­ents, both of whom have strong sens­es of vision and names big enough to wield a bit of nego­ti­at­ing pow­er, the chance to cre­ate their ver­sion of the mainstream?

Best-case sce­nario, they make the mul­ti­plex a more inter­est­ing place to be for a few weeks, but even in the worst-case, they’ve fun­neled enough mon­ey from the stu­dio accounts into their per­son­al cof­fers to fund their own endeav­ors mov­ing forward.

It’s the old ​‘one for them, one for me’ prin­ci­ple in action, where even the ​‘one for them’ rep­re­sents an oppor­tu­ni­ty to exper­i­ment with new para­me­ters of writ­ing (and, if Ger­wig accepts the direct­ing job that’s report­ed­ly been offered to her, pro­duc­tion) on a larg­er scale than usual.

After all, why would the film’s pro­duc­ers hire the pair if they didn’t want the clas­sic B&G touch? Famous last words for inde­pen­dent oper­a­tors cast­ing their lot with the big leagues, we know, but hope has a way of spring­ing eter­nal from the moviegoer’s breast.