Film Review: Barbie
GRETA GERWIG’S BARBIE IS SINCERE AND DELIGHTFUL
Greta Gerwig, through the lens of a massive IP tentpole, goes on a non-stop, pointed charm offensive. Strange, earnest, and quite delightful, Barbie takes a playful sledgehammer to gender, coming-of-age, and the very concept of a brand-driven movie. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling put forth superstar performances. Minor spoilers ahead…
“Come on Barbie, let’s go party.” Every day in Barbieland - Greta Gerwig’s painstakingly manufactured pink paradise - is a party. In her candied dream house, Stereotypical Barbie (a pitch perfect Margot Robbie, and yes, that’s really her character’s name) wakes up in the morning and cheerfully waves to all her fellow Barbies: there’s Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), President Barbie (Issa Rae), and even Mermaid Barbie (Dua Lipa). Aside from its disused and sidelined Kens, Barbieland is a happy-go-lucky utopia, sidestepping all the foibles and tribulations of personhood, and more specifically, womanhood. All confidence, assurance, dance parties, and beach, Barbieland is a dream.
It isn’t before long, though, that a glitch in the Barbieland matrix sends Stereotypical Barbie reeling: her perfectly heel-shaped feet go flat, she gets cellulite, and intrusive thoughts of death and mortality interrupt her dance soirées. Desperate for answers and following the counsel of the sage Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), Barbie ventures into the real world - with Ryan Gosling’s Ken as a stowaway - to find the source of her existential crisis. Once in the human realm, it only takes a short time for Barbie to discover a whole trove of never-before experienced problems: inequality, sexism, body image issues, and an entire spectrum of the human condition Barbieland has been blind to. In man’s world, things are also different for Ken; respected, admired, and inflated for the first time in his life, Barbieland’s blonde himbo decides to free all the Kens with the one thing he perceives to be missing from his home reality: the patriarchy.
“A billion-dollar blockbuster that attempts to bake its Mattel-flavored cake and eat it too, [Barbie] is clever, pointed, and incisive…”
Barbie is likely the best case scenario for a mega-budget tentpole about a toy. A billion-dollar blockbuster that attempts to bake its Mattel-flavored cake and eat it too, the film is clever, pointed, and incisive, turning its titular plastic doll into a sharp meditation on the simple act of existing in today’s society as a woman. Like Little Women and Lady Bird before it, Gerwig’s Barbie is about lost women uncovering painful and enlightening truths, but now with DayGlo rollerblades.
In an interview with the New York Times, Gerwig ruminates about Barbie’s paradox as “giant corporate undertaking and a strange, funny personal project.” The 40 year-old filmmaker, along with husband and writing partner Noah Baumbach, walks a delicate tightrope. “Things can be both/and. I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing,” she explains. Is she successful? For the most part, yes. Toggling seamlessly between hot pink pop sensibility and surprising earnestness, Barbie can be infectiously uproarious, but also affectingly heartfelt. By transplanting Barbie - long criticized for upholding impossible standards for women - into real-life Los Angeles, Gerwig takes a meta sledgehammer to her film’s own raison dêtre. There are plenty of opportunities for Barbie to overreach with its on-the-nose commentary - it isn’t exactly a subtle movie - but it always seems to toe the line precisely enough. A weighty third act speech by Gloria (a wonderful America Ferrera) - Barbie’s real-world tether - transforms what could have been an overlong screed into a barnburner: a rousing, impassioned laundry list of contradictions of 21st-century womanhood, it brought the house down in my theater. Let’s just say there were more than a few seats reaching for the tissues.
“Toggling seamlessly between hot pink pop sensibility and surprising earnestness, Barbie can be infectiously uproarious, but also affectingly heartfelt.”
Barbie capitalizes on an opportunity rarely afforded movies of its size. Where most IP-driven blockbusters are all too eager to strip auteurs of their soul and flavor, Gerwig’s pink, plastic epic is infused with its director’s indie spirit and far more cognizant of the toy’s complicated legacy than you might expect. But as true subversion goes, Barbie is a little wobblier. There’s much hidden by jubilant dance numbers, gut-busting ballads, and Sarah Greenwood’s meticulously colorful production design, but every time it takes aim at Mattel - and in turn, itself - Barbie only highlights the uncomfortable friction at its center. You can take as many potshots as you want with deprecating boardroom satire, hang as many lampshades as you want on consumerist irony, but just by saying you’re doing the thing doesn’t mean you’re not doing the thing.
Barbie has an unsolvable dilemma at its center, but it’s still a better movie than we deserve. More winking, poignant, and self-aware than any of its billion-dollar contemporaries, Gerwig’s cinematic vision of a plastic doll finds the shaky middle ground between a postmodernist riot and a 64 year-old keystone of old-world IP. It might not thread its tricky needles at every turn, but Barbie is something we rarely see anymore: a big movie with big ideas.
