Barbie

The second part of the motion picture event of the summer

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.

The first thesis of writer-director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (co-written by husband Noah Baumbach), delivered by narrator Helen Mirren, is that women’s liberation and the development of a more just and equitable world requires more than product consumption. Women’s equality, freedom, and safety requires more than toys for girls. Everything else that happens in the movie – its critiques of capitalism and patriarchy, its jokes at the expense of men, the worlds it presents – can be read through that lens.

Barbie demonstrates repeatedly that a simplified reversal of patriarchy, while perhaps initially attractive to the eye (credit to production designer Sarah Greenwood, set decorator Katie Spencer; art directors Dean Clegg and Clara Gomez de Moral; cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto; editor Nick Huoy), would not solve everything either. It is true that the film’s demonstration of feminist concepts and social critiques is simple and, at times, reductive. I first find this acceptable if I consider that it is a family movie about a children’s toy that just happens to be marketed toward adults. I go on to believe there’s more there.

The holes in Barbie’s analysis of how to take down patriarchy are easily rectified not just by saying “oh, it’s only a two-hour movie” but by engaging with the place of these critiques in the text. When Ryan Gosling’s Ken brings patriarchy to Barbie Land, it isn’t because skimming three books gave him a deep understanding of a male-based world order, it is because he lives in a world where he is not respected and wants to change that. Part of the Barbies’ solution to the version of patriarchy is the re-installation of the all-Barbie Supreme Court. I feel confident Gerwig and Baumbach know there are four U.S. Supreme Court justices that are women (including an anti-choice Republican), a woman Vice President (who tried to prevent a transgender women’s surgery as A.G. of California), [until this January] a woman Speaker of the House of Representatives, the oldest active U.S. Senator, and several other mayors, governors, cabinet positions, CIA agents in recruitment commercials, etc. They may know that Arkansas joined Massachusetts last year as the only states to simultaneously elect a woman governor and lieutenant governor. Former Trump White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has achieved internet virality recently for signing a bill that eases restrictions on child labor in Arkansas. Gerwig, Baumbach, and the audience are likely familiar with the fact that oppressive institutions can use people that superficially seem like they might share your goals but are ideologically opposed to your freedom or wellbeing. Barbie even goes so far to point out that not all men are equally served by or interested in maintaining patriarchy, as showcased by Michael Cera’s Allan (who is involved in a fight scene that was breathtakingly funny). Barbie Land is explicitly not an idealized world, but a simplistic fantasy whose brush with real problems have simplistic solutions.

In its ways, Barbie is surprising and deceptive in its complexity. The only problem with that is that it tells its audience several times not to think about it too hard, but that is aimed more at logistical issues than themes. Barbie’s general competence is less surprising. The lauded director of Lady Bird and Little Women presents a rich picture, living up to the pastel and pink expectations the words “live action Barbie movie” conjure. Barbie Land is vivid and mixes media to show the human-analog semi-automaton toy-people interacting with a plastic world full of background gags and narrated by [in addition to Helen Mirren] a song by Lizzo. The version of the real world they interact with is slightly exaggerated (credit to art director Andrew Max Cahn and the LA team; set decorator Ashley Swanson; and of course our writer-director team, cinematographer, and editor), but more captivating and real-feeling than the eye-rolling display of Beau is Afraid. Speaking of eye-rolling, some jokes are low-hanging fruit and some feel a bit bizarre, but none of it is enough to sink this energetic film.

My favorite part of Barbie is the dance numbers. There is a great one in the introduction to the world and a great one at the climax and I would watch a whole movie made out of them. We need song and dance in American cinema without Lin-Manuel Miranda. Simu Liu still feels a bit like a charisma vacuum, but Ryan Gosling is probably going to get a Best Supporting Actor nod for his performance as Ken – he ranges from depressed to enraged to ecstatic; he’s funny and occasionally diabolical. Margot Robbie is terrific as “Stereotypical Barbie” and her line about why she isn’t a fascist is one of the film’s wittiest jokes, but America Ferrera is a great conduit as secondary protagonist Gloria, Mattel executive assistant and the real-world source of Barbie’s existential crisis and cellulite, trapped in a contentious relationship with her angry teen daughter, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). Gloria gives a speech that, while old fashioned in some ways, rings true in others and whose shortcomings do not undercut its general point about the difficulties of women’s lives under patriarchy. That various reprisals and extrapolations from this speech help save the day tie into the larger themes of the faux-simplicity of fixing the world’s problems: they are easier to explain than solve, harder to explain than they seem.

While Barbie’s conclusion is strong and its very final line is tremendous, the mother-daughter storyline’s interaction with Barbie comes to a head with an uneven line that caps a speech by Rhea Perlman as the ghost of Ruth Handler, Mattel co-founder and the inventor of Barbie. While the speech is not terrible, it feels a bit like toy-maker Mattel satirizing a dead woman that helped make their company. There is criticism to be made about the presumption of Barbie’s place in doll history as presented at the film’s outset, but it is beyond my expertise and this review’s scope. Perhaps it is intentional hyperbole tied to the legend that the Barbies believe about themselves. Besides, the visual apex of the denouement is exemplified in a montage about the loveliness of being human which itself transitions out of one of the film’s most beautiful shots.

While I was happy to see a Barbie in a wheelchair (Grace Harvey) center screen during a dance number and the periphery roles of a larger actress (Sharon Rooney) and a transgender actress (Hari Nef) feels inclusive, the cynical might read it as tokenism. They aren’t exactly upending beauty standards, ableism, and transphobia, but it can be generously read as a challenge to aesthetic status quo. Black Barbies shine, such as Issa Rae, whose wide beaming smile and sometimes creative line delivery are terrific in the role of President Barbie, from end to end of the film. Kate McKinnon is typically funny as the appropriately-named Weird Barbie.

Will Ferrell is not at his most complex or interesting as the Mattel CEO, head of an all-male board of directors, but he is a funny secondary antagonist. It is nonetheless a have cake and eat it too situation for the company to profit while making fun of their own corporate culture. Warner, who released the film, have cast themselves as antagonists in at least two recent films (Space Jam: A New Legacy and Matrix: Resurrections). This can feel cheap at times, especially because besides the movie being based around a toyline, it features product placement from GM/Chevrolet (which anyone who’s ever watched a movie focused on cars will probably be attuned and used to) and Duolingo (which feels benign if not benevolent, given its deployment and the product’s real-world use). Still, this is hardly as egregious as the product placement and nostalgia bait of a film like Air. Altogether, the sometimes flat or rote feeling of the patriarchal-capitalist critique ties into the larger point that these systems and structures cannot be defeated for us in a simple movie because they must be faced down in complicated real life. If the movie has one message, that’s it.

Having written my review, I am now free to read those of the many newsletters I have subscribed to, and the publications I read that I do and do not write for (off the top of my head/starred in my inbox, looking forward to June Martin, Madeline Blondeaux, and Max Covill on Substack, Gretchen Felker-Martin on Patreon, and Anna Govert at Paste; Lindsay Lee Wallace at Blood Knife). I will be writing something more about the state of criticism soon. And still have a final note on Across the Spider-Verse.