BARBIE – Review by Jennifer Green
Barbie, the movie, may be many things to many people. When this viewer attended – in Madrid, Spain, on vacation and traipsing out to the suburbs to find a subtitled (rather than dubbed) version that wasn’t sold out on a Wednesday night – moms and daughters, couples, and groups of all ages packed the cinema, many donning pink.
Less than a week into its release, Barbie was already well on its way to becoming a social phenomenon. That seems fitting for the source material. Director Greta Gerwig is extremely faithful to Barbie’s style, history and various incarnations, and her team has done a dazzling job of creating a life-size world of Dreamhouses, pink convertibles and candy-colored props.
Also like its namesake doll, the movie’s global appeal is reinforced by the simplicity of its messages. There’s nothing subtle about Barbie. We like playing with her without having to think too hard.
International audiences don’t need to interpret narrative nuances to understand this film’s ideas. Even a montage of the “patriarchy” pasting together images of US personalities and presidents will feel familiar to people around the world – something American scriptwriters and directors, despite relying on the international market for ticket sales, seem to take for granted.
The core of the movie’s feminist themes, which have so outraged conservative critics like Elon Musk, are communicated in an impassioned speech by America Ferrera, playing the fed-up mom whose existential angst draws Barbie (Margot Robbie) out of Barbieland. Women can’t be authentic to their true selves and thrive so long as they feel they must constantly please others, an impossible task if ever there was one.
Barbie believes herself to be a meaningful toy representing a diversity of life choices for women, but teen Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) scathingly informs her she’s really just a capitalist, anti-feminist ideal.
Men, meanwhile, have had it easy being in charge. This truth is hilariously revealed to the delight of Ken (Ryan Gosling), disempowered in matriarchal Barbieland, as he encounters the bros of the human world and sees a whole new universe of supremacy and respect for himself and the other Kens. His superficial concept of masculinity is encapsulated in beer and wild horses.
Ken returns post-haste with this new information to transform Barbieland into a patriarchy. The Barbies are so accustomed to following the status quo, they accept the new world order without question. The reversal of gender power comes to a head in a very funny sequence where Kens are distracted (easily) so Barbies can be reminded individually about their actual independence and potential.
Other scenes swap satire for seriousness. In the real world, Barbie is treated horribly by men on the street. She sheds her first real tears as she begins to gain awareness of not just her own complicated image but also the tragic beauty of the human experience as a whole, and the magnificence to be found in imperfection.
Robbie does a wonderful job conveying this awakening of Barbie’s spirit, for example when she is emotionally overwhelmed by trees swaying softly in a breeze or the way an old woman’s face is etched with wrinkles.
Ken has his own crisis, though it’s nowhere near as interesting or ambitious a narrative arc as Barbie gets. Naïve and clingy, Ken never really matures the way Barbie does, despite what his “I am Kenough” tie-dye sweatshirt announces. Male viewers should approach this film with a thick skin. There’s room here for a sequel to give Ken the Barbie treatment.
It may be a Barbie world, but Gosling is the crowd pleaser of Gerwig’s feminist fable. He gets the most entertaining lines, scenes and outfits, and Gosling appears to be having a ball with it all. A beachfront rumble among the weaponless Kens and a snazzy dance-off are two of the film’s most epic sequences.
His rival is embodied with gusto by Simu Liu, while sensitive best buddy Allan is adorably embodied by Michael Cera. Another standout performance is Kate McKinnon as “Weird Barbie,” the doll whose face and hair are ravaged from being played with ‘too hard.’
Gerwig, who co-wrote the script with her husband Noah Baumbach, has tried to stuff a whole lot of ideas into this movie. It’s not entirely clear what the inept Mattel male executives, led by Will Farrell, are meant to symbolize, beyond inept male executives.
The film also drops Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler (played by Rhea Perlman), a little awkwardly into the tale. Barbie was named after Handler’s own daughter Barbara, and Perlman acts as a substitute mother for Robbie’s Barbie in the movie. It’s just one of the key mother-daughter relationships and themes in the film, but her appearance feels overly literal for this fantastical romp.
“Barbie is a box office tsunami,” The Hollywood Reporter gushed after the film’s historic $162m opening weekend domestically, the biggest ever for a female director. Headlines have been tracking ticket sales by the day, predicting more “toy IP movies.” Mattel launched a line of movie collectible dolls and reportedly teamed up with a variety of consumer brands on licensing agreements. It’s a Barbie world, and we’re all just shopping in it.
As the pundits celebrate the contribution to a post-pandemic box office rebound, maybe Barbie’s success has to do with our own collective need to be together again, in a dark movie theater, anywhere in the world. Criticism be damned, it feels good to be out and about among the pink-clad masses. As Gerwig’s Barbie discovers, it feels good to be human.
