You’ve gotta hand it to writer-director Greta Gerwig: she found a smart initial approach to her subject in Barbie. The opening of her film about Mattel’s famously/infamously boobacious doll — brought to you by Mattel partnering with Warner Brothers — is clever and funny. It borrows its ironically grandiose scope from 2001: A Space Odyssey, plus the opening line of ten trillion bad student essays, “Since the beginning of time,” to establish that, before the coming of Barbie, little girls through the ages were stuck with primitive baby dolls with which they could do little but play at mothering. And whereas being a mother can be fun “for a while,” intones narrator Helen Mirren, it soon palls.

“Just ask your mother,” she says severely.

Then a gigantic Original Barbie appears before a gaggle of slack-jawed little girls, tall and iconic as an Easter Island moai statue in her dynamic strapless black-and-white-striped bathing suit accessorized with white cat-eye sunglasses and those perpetual high heels. Glamorous, minxy adult fun is the promise of Original Barbie, the phenomenally popular 1959 version designed by Ruth Handler, one of three cofounders of Mattel along with her husband and business partner, Elliot, and Harold “Matt” Matson. (Note the combo of “Matt” and “Elliot” to create the company name, with no room for Ruth’s.)