The endurance of Robbie’s efficiency made me need to return and watch extra of her, and a theme started to emerge in a few of the newer components she has chosen. Robbie has a traditional Hollywood magnificence — she’s often blond, and he or she has huge blue eyes and a wonderful determine. She broke via enjoying a regular attractive trophy spouse in “The Wolf of Wall Avenue.” (Within the screenplay, the character was known as “the most popular blonde ever.”) However Robbie made the character magnetic and irresistible to look at, and transcended the stereotype.
As soon as Robbie accrued extra energy in Hollywood and have become a producer, she selected roles that usually subverted the expectations of her attractiveness or used them to make some extent in regards to the perils of upholding a sure type of inflexible “perfect” womanhood.
In “I, Tonya,” from 2017, Robbie performs the determine skater Tonya Harding (full disclosure: My husband works for Neon, one of many firms that distributed the movie). No matter you consider Harding and the kneecapping of Nancy Kerrigan, it appears the real-life Harding was punished for her deviation from the fragile ice princess mildew. As a 1994 sports activities commentary from The Instances put it, Harding’s skating persona “was at all times a combative, contrarian model amid the sequins and lace.” Or as Robbie says within the film, the press needed Kerrigan “to be the princess and me to be the pile of crap.” Robbie obscured her glamour for the function and convincingly portrayed a hardscrabble Harding who was extra at residence chopping wooden and searching her dinner than she could be within the costly Vera Wang costumes Nancy Kerrigan famously wore.
The 2019 movie “Bombshell” is one other ripped-from-the-headlines story the place Robbie makes use of her Barbie visage to reveal the best way girls are trapped by slender and conflicting expectations. The film is in regards to the fall of Roger Ailes at Fox Information and the publicity of his decades-long sexual harassment of feminine underlings. Within the film, Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron play Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, whereas Robbie performs a composite character named Kayla Pospisil. Pospisil is younger and impressive, her doe eyes glowing with verve. When she begins dressing the a part of a Fox Information anchor, her extra cynical co-worker (once more, the fantastic Kate McKinnon), says, “Oh, my God, it’s anchor Barbie!”
Manohla Dargis, who additionally reviewed “Bombshell,” described the emotional heft Robbie brings to the function, as a younger girl “brutalized” by Ailes, writing, “it’s Robbie — together with her panicked, darting eyes and tensely resistant, then capitulating physicality — who conveys the horror of sexual harassment, a degradation that seeps into physique and soul.”
