Ever since it was announced that Barbie, the venerable fashion doll that has racked up over a billion sales (not counting accessories) for Mattel since being introduced in 1959, was going to make the leap from toy boxes to the silver screen via a feature film, it has been the focus of intense speculation among moviegoers as to what the hell it could possibly be. Granted, it wouldn’t be the first toy to serve as the inspiration for a film but unlike such previous examples as He-Man, G.I. Joe and those goddamned Transformers, there is not really a grand narrative or mythos surrounding the character that could really be explored cinematically. Adding to the confusion was the announcement that, after a number of false starts, the project would be directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, the former mumblecore icon who would make perhaps the most surprisingly effective transition behind the camera since Sofia Coppola with her semi-autobiographical debut Lady Bird and followed that up with her equally effective and sweetly revisionist take on the literary warhorse Little Women. Having amassed all that good will over the course of those earlier works, why would she choose to make her leap into large-budget studio filmmaking with a project that at first glance appeared to be little more than a big-screen commercial for a toy line, one that still raises hackles among some today for the way that supposedly promotes unrealistic and unhealthy body image ideas to the little girls that play with them?
Finally, Barbie is arriving in theaters riding a bright pink wave of hype and genuine audience curiosity about what it might be. Having seen it, I think I can safely say that whatever you may think it might be, it isn’t that. Here is a film that is trying to work as both a wild candy-colored summertime spectacle and as a sweetly subversive satire that takes on everything from gender issues to the very idea of the existence of a Barbie movie and does so smashingly. God only knows how such a nutty project managed to slip through the studio system—an apparatus designed to ensure that projects like this never make it before the cameras without having the odder elements removed beforehand—but it did and the result is an absolute delight in pretty much every area that reveals Gerwig as one of the few American filmmakers in recent years to make the leap from low-budget indies to massive undertakings without losing their distinctive voice in the process.
After beginning with a dead-on spoof of the “Dawn of Man” sequence from 2001 with a Barbie doll standing in for the monolith as the kickstarter for human evolution, the scene soon shifts to Barbie Land, a gleefully gaudy paradise of the sort that is always promised on the toy boxes that always prove more impressive than the actual contents. Barbie Land, as it transpires, is a matriarchal society in which all of the Barbies are accomplished in some way or another—there is a President Barbie (Issa Rae), Doctor Barbie (Hari Nef), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Mermaid Barbie (Dua Lipa), Nobel Prize Winner Barbie (Alexandria Shipp) and even an all-Barbie Supreme Court. Of course, there are males in this world as well in the form of Kens but they are of little import—they spend their days at the Beach trading oddly homoerotic banter and are essentially banished to parts unknown at night so that the Barbies can have an endless string of super-positive girls nights.
Our focus is Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), who is essentially the Platonic ideal of Barbiedom—blonde, beautiful and eternally chipper towards her friends and her life. The closest thing to a hiccups in her seemingly perfect life is that her Ken (Ryan Gosling) at times seems a little too desperate for her attention, though it is also evident that neither of them has any cogent idea of what would result if she gave it too him. And yet, something odd and unsettling is brewing within Barbie and it finally comes out when she brings an exuberant dance party to a brief but sudden halt when she offhandedly inquires if any of the others have ever thought about death. Clearly, something is off with her and when further oddities occur—her eternally pointed feet (all the better for wearing high heels) drop fully to the ground and a bit of cellulite seems to have developed as well—and this forces her to visit Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who bears the scars of having been played with too much and who seems to harbor the secrets of Barbiedom.
It seems that the cause of Barbie’s existential crisis is a rift in the space-time continuum between Barbie Land and our world and the only way for her to fix it requires her to make the journey over there. Even though Ken decides to tag along—after all, what is Ken without Barbie—she is still somewhat excited to see our world, which she imagines to be a utopia akin to Barbie Land filled with people grateful for the positive influence that she and the other Barbies have had over the years. Suffice it to say, when they arrive, Barbie is distressed to discover that our world is like the Bizarro Barbie Land in which sexism is rampant and she is treated like an. . .well, an object. Ken, on the other hand, feels oddly comforted by these new surroundings, especially when he learns about a little thing called “patriarchy.” Eventually, Barbie crosses paths with Mattel office drone Gloria (America Ferrara) and her sullen teenaged daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who try to help her evade the clutches of the all-male executive board of the corporation, whose CEO (Will Ferrell) literally wants to stick her in a box and send her back to Barbie Land to stop the craziness before there is a repeat of the dreaded “Skipper Incident.”
The conceit of the line between reality and fantasy blurring to the point where fictional characters can come to our world on a journey of self-awareness and vice-versa is nothing particularly new or unique—Woody Allen did it brilliantly in his masterpiece The Purple Rose of Cairo and it has become a popular trope for screenwriters trying to bring brand-name products and properties to the screen in films ranging from The Lego Movie to that dreadful version of Fat Albert that you forgot existed. Had the film just been a series of jokes involving Barbie trying to make sense of the real world, it probably would have grown fairly tiresome pretty quickly but Gerwig wisely does not go down that path. Instead, she, along with co-writer Noah Baumbach, uses the conceit—not to mention the enormous audience that a live-action Barbie movie is all but certain to attract—as a launchpad for a head-spinning melange of goofy jokes, arcane film references and meditations on feminism, gender issues, sexism and the power of imagination and the importance of self-acceptance.
Now, to be perfectly honest, the film’s musings along these lines, while definitely progressive in tone, are hardly radical by any stretch, though I am sure that they will lead to charges that the film is, as the dumb kids say, “woke.” And yet, when was the last time you recall any discussions along these lines in the middle of a enormously expensive summer tent pole film like this? Some older viewers may think that it pulls its punches in this regard but honestly, does anyone really expect a completely nuanced and detailed examination of modern-day feminism in the midst of a Barbie movie? No, but as an introductory course to such ideas aimed at the younger audience members, it gets the job done as it explains to them that without understanding those notions, the girl power ethos espoused by the Barbies is ultimately as disposal as the various outfits and professions they have sported over the years. The balance isn’t always quite successful—the shift in Sasha’s attitude from anti to pro-Barbie is a little abrupt and awkward—but at least it is trying to say something of value and interest and most of the time, it pulls it off.
With Barbie, Gerwig is essentially trying to move between a celebration of all the good feelings that the doll has brought to so many kids over the years and a critique of the awful things that it has come to symbolize to so many others during that time. This is a tricky needle to thread, especially considering that Mattel is one of the film’s producers, but damned if she doesn’t pull it off. The film does makes a number of striking points about the ways that Barbie has failed little girls over the years in terms of perpetuating unrealistic body and beauty images, the best of which comes via a perfectly timed bit of voice-over by narrator Helen Mirren that is easily the funniest thing I have heard in a movie in a while. At the same time, she also acknowledges the positive things that Barbie represents, especially in regards to developing one’s imagination. After all, without some prescribed narrative structure, Barbie users have to use their own minds to create their playtime narratives without any rules or boundaries follow and the results can be absolutely enchanting.
That is certainly the case with the movie. Gerwig is working on a much grander scale than anything that she has ever attempted before. Unlike the Marvel movies, which, with a couple of exceptions, tend to feel like the creations of corporations executing a marketing plan rather than of storytellers, Barbie finds her expanding her horizons without losing sight of what made her previous directorial efforts so interesting. The film’s production design from Sarah Greenwood is legitimately stunning throughout. She brings Barbie Land to vivid life in all its hot pink glory but also brings a subtly stylized look to the real world sequences as well—I especially liked how the Mattel corporate headquarters suggest what Jacques Tati’s Playtime might have looked like if he had been into brutalist architecture. Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography is equally inspired in the way that evokes the dream world of an especially vivid and colorful imagination without ever tripping over to pure cartoonishness. The film is also blessed with a killer soundtrack consisting of fun new songs from the likes of Lizzo, Dua Lipa and Billie Eilish to a couple of especially inspired needle drops to Ken’s hilarious lament “I’m Just Ken,” which Gosling delivers brilliantly.
Even when he isn’t singing, Gosling is incredible and incredibly funny here in one of his very best performances to date—he throws himself into the part of Ken completely and manages to inspire a lot of laughs and even a certain amount of sympathy along the way without ever winking to the audience to let them know he is in on the joke. Robbie, who is fast becoming one of the more adventurous actresses working today (I hated Babylon with a passion but am willing to concede that she was pretty great there), is just as good in a part that eventually reveals itself to be far more tricky and complex than it might seem at first. As Barbie’s key human contact, America Ferrara is quite good as well (especially in delivering a monologue expressing many of the film’s themes that is sure to be one of the most talked-about moments) and she and Greenblatt do a good job of helping to explore the mother-daughter dynamic that has been a running theme in Gerwig’s films to date. The rest of the sitar-studded cast is fun—hell, even Will Ferrell scores some big laughs here (even though he is admittedly playing a part similar to the one he did in The Lego Movie).
A film like Barbie could have gone wrong in so many ways and turned out to be little more than a soulless extended toy commercial along the lines of most of the Transformers movie. Instead, Gerwig has given us the kind of cinematic high wire act that somehow never loses its footing for a moment. More than that, it is the rare summer blockbuster that actually has things to say, both about the cultural impact that Barbie has left, for good and ill, over the past few decades and about what is going on in the world today (with a key plot point involving a vote regarding a possible new constitution for Barbie Land). Admittedly, some of the more satirical commentary may fly over the heads of younger viewers but there is still enough action, color and good cheer to keep them involved (though adults should probably prepare to answer questions they may have about this whole patriarchy thing). This is a work of real imagination and inspiration and while its blockbuster status is all but assured, it is also destined to go down as some kind of genuine classic—the sort of film that one could see getting equal play at film societies and slumber parties alike.