Barbie (2023, Dir. Greta Gerwig):
I’m not saying I’m Shakespeare. But I do think Shakespeare was a maximalist. There wasn’t anything that was too far or too crazy that couldn’t be worked through, and then there’d be something in the middle that felt quite human. I was thinking about it in those terms: a heightened theatricality that allows you to deal with big ideas in the midst of anarchic play.
Greta Gerwig
I’m a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world
“Barbie Girl” by Aqua
Life in plastic, it’s fantastic
You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere
Imagination, life is your creation
As a brand, Barbie has become so ubiquitous that you don’t need to own her to know what she’s all about: fashionable accessories, Cupid-bow lips, slim and stylish, the life of the party, forever perfect. More recently, add “inclusive” to the list, as Mattel has expanded its line of dolls to accommodate wheelchair Barbies, ethnically diverse Barbies, gender-neutral Barbies, plus-size Barbies, sign-language Barbies, and Down Syndrome Barbies. And yet the original model—blond, blue-eyed, airbrushed to southern-Cali perfection, immortalized in the Aqua song quoted above—remains the dominant Barbie in our psyches, for better or worse.
According to Gloria Steinem in the documentary Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie, it’s for the worse: “Barbie was everything we didn’t want to be and were told to be…everything the feminist movement was trying to escape.” It’s a point further driven home by the Malibu Stacy episode from the Simpsons TV show, which skewers the Barbie ethos with devastating effect.
To address those critics (and reassure consumers that Barbie is indeed a forward-thinking, twenty-first century woman), Mattel has bankrolled a Barbie movie. The result: $1+ billion in box-office grosses. And while Barbie may not be as clever and subversive as it strives to be, and is more an assemblage of ideas and riffs than a cohesive product, it shouldn’t be underestimated—much like sunny, guileless Barbie (Margot Robbie) herself.
Visually, at least, the film is perfectly calibrated. Sarah Greenwood’s cheeky production designs for Barbieland literally pop, as dream houses unfold to reveal their occupants, while Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography bathes every actress and outfit with a day-glo gloss. But look just under the surface and it’s clear that this picture isn’t just aimed at the kiddies. Within the first five minutes we get a visual homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and an arch narrator (Helen Mirren) who proclaims, “Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved.”
Needless to say, that’s not true at all, and it’s the point and driving force behind director Greta Gerwig’s take on the Barbie universe, which honors the Barbie aesthetic while ladling meta-commentary (and satire) on top of it. Like Pixar’s Toy Story, toys and their owners have very personal connections, but where Toy Story mined this conceit for heart-warming snuggles, Barbie uses it to inject dissonance. Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie is the twisted result of her owner’s rough-house play, while the angst-ridden owner of Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” ends up afflicting her with doubt and fatalism. (“You guys ever think about dying?” she asks her fellow Barbies with the widest of smiles, only to receive horrified stares in return.)
Soon Barbie’s world is all out of joint, as she contends with hangovers, burned waffles, expired milk and cellulite for the first time. Worst of all, her perfectly arched feet have gone flat. (The horror!) Weird Barbie sums up the predicament: “You’re going to start getting sad and mushy and complicated.” Desperate to patch things up with her owner and return to her previous care-free, consequence-free lifestyle, Barbie enters the real-world with her almost-not-quite-boyfriend Ken (Ryan Gosling) in tow; cue fish-out-of-water hijinks.
What follows is the thinnest of narratives, as Barbie happens upon her old owner Gloria (America Ferrera) and her more jaded, militant daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who represent the dueling perspectives the public at large have about Barbie: aspirational ideal or tool of a domineering patriarchy (or as Sasha puts it, “You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented…sexualized capitalism, unrealistic physical ideals”). From that point on, the movie settles into a prickly meditation about self-determination, the Way Things Really Are and Should Be, and the odd friction between art and commerce. Playing characters that are mouthpieces, Ferrera and Greenblatt are likeable enough; they certainly come off better than a braying Will Ferrell (essentially reprising his role from The Lego Movie) as Mattel’s CEO and the embodiment of smothering paternalism run amuck. “Women are the freaking foundation of this very long phallic building!” he insists.
I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.
Gloria, “Barbie”
Meanwhile, Gosling’s Ken is having an epiphany of his own: seduced by the patriarchy on display in the real world (“Men on horses run everything!” he says rapturously), he sets about restyling Barbieland into “Kendom,” in which every Barbie dream house is now a “Mojo Dojo Casa House” man cave, every night is boys’ night, and Barbies are assigned new roles: to be “the long-term-distance casual-low-commitment girlfriends” of Kens. How to combat this insidiousness? Speak truth to power, of course. Or to quote Robbie’s Barbie: “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power!”
This is heady and heavy stuff, and while the screenplay (written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach) has a strong grip on the ideas at play, it’s not very elegant at communicating them. Instead, the film relies on winking asides. When Barbie wails, “I’m not stereotypically Barbie pretty!” Mirren’s narrator interjects: “Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point.” As her Barbie sinks further into despair, a new “Depression Barbie” based on her mood hits the shelves—a doll who watches “Pride and Prejudice” on loop (the BBC Colin Firth version, naturally), with “anxiety, panic attacks and OCD sold separately.” When a Barbie who has been brainwashed by the patriarchy snaps out of it, her first words are: “It’s like I was in a dream in which I was really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League.” Jokes like these will elicit chuckles from enlightened folks (not to mention Marvel and DC fanboys), but in their self-satisfaction, they demonstrate the movie is more interested in conveying themes and scoring easy points than having fun with its characters.
It’s left to Robbie and Gosling to supply a sense of play amid the messaging and sermonizing. Fortunately, they do. Robbie has become the patron saint of playing party girls on the edge (a triple bill of this film with Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and Babylon would be an eye-opener indeed); with her mile-wide smile and chic costume changes, she’s about as real (and realistic) as you could expect a doll-come-to-life to be. But behind the dazzling exterior, real emotions lurk—a fleeting look of bewilderment, a flash of misery behind the chipper attitude. It’s to her credit that that she makes Barbie’s spiritual crisis (and ultimate conversion) palatable, if not soul-stirring, even as the film sometimes sidelines her.
Gosling’s Ken provides the film’s comic ballast, proving that while good intentions are admirable, delusion (and cartoonish toxic masculinity) are more fun. Plagued by urges he can’t comprehend (what’s a doll with just a “blob” for private parts to do?), fit to bursting with loneliness, alienation and resentment, forever second fiddle to Barbie, he takes over for the film’s high point, the musical number “I’m Just Ken.” A true existential cry for help (“Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility?…What will it take for her to see the man behind the tan and fight for me?”) that’s both hilarious and nimbly stage-managed, it hints at what Barbie might have been with a bit more freedom and a little less polemics.
Barbie is ultimately about image rehabilitation, which isn’t surprising given Mattel’s name in the credits. Wanting to have its cake and eat it too, the movie luxuriates in the artificiality of the Barbie lifestyle even as it trots out Barbie’s original inventor Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman) to offer spiritual advice (like every good mother should do) and usher Barbie towards self-actualization. What that self-actualization entails (besides a closing joke at a doctor’s office and the acknowledgment that not every night needs to be “girls’ night”) is unclear. Still, it’s not every day that a toy gets to interrogate its reason for being, and if Barbie is characterized more by astringency, smart-aleck pontifications and neurotic behavior than outright entertainment, it at least sets itself apart by these very attributes, staking a claim to be something more than just a canny exercise in repackaging. It’s very unlikely that future entries in the Mattel Cinematic Universe will be able to say the same. ■
