The creative ingenuity of Barbie, writer-director Greta Gerwig’s ferociously funny and insightful cultural treatise on gender, commercialism and self-worth, is evident within its evocative prologue as it pays homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, invoking the constructed meaning in life, art and product; one thinks of how Amy told Jo “writing about it will make it important” in Gerwig’s sensational yet searing adaptation of Little Women. In the wondrous world of her and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s Barbie, creation is a vulnerable human act to apply symbolic order to chaos, and the results are just as fallible as their originators, especially when they’re skewed by corporate executives who overhaul the mold for profit. Narrated by a winking Helen Mirren, a group of scraggly little girls in archaic domestic garb despondently play with baby dolls in a desolate desert, their unbridled imagination relegated to the frustratingly narrow role they’re confined to.
The baby dolls, a patriarchal construct, dictates that they can only be mothers, indoctrinating them into a system of servitude. Similar to the appearance of the alien monolith that signaled a new age of enlightenment to the apes, the girls are liberated by the rapturous descension of a glitzy new ideal: a towering, beatific and inconceivably flawless Barbie (a well-cast Margot Robbie) clad in her black-and-white swimsuit and high heels from the original 1959 debut. Exhilarated by this promising (albeit unattainably perfect) embodiment of adult femininity, the girls voraciously shatter their baby dolls and claim a new plaything that allows them to gaze toward the stars of their potential instead of being tethered to Earth. They can be anything because Barbie can be anything. “All issues of feminism have been solved,” Mirren’s snarky voiceover declares, as if it were that easy.
However, they wholeheartedly believe this aspirational yet oblivious sentiment in Barbie Land, a female utopia deluged in pastel pink and forged in plastic where the Barbies hold all dominant positions in society and the Kens are mere set dressing with abs. There’s President Barbie (Issa Rae), Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef) and others that represent physicists (Emma Mackey), lawyers (Sharon Rooney) and authors (Alexandra Shipp), but the focus here is Stereotypical Barbie (Robbie), whose every day is hopelessly fabulous and idyllic in an endearingly naïve way, though she’s unaware of her existence’s artificiality in this adolescent dreamland; to simply put it, every Barbie is everything in a fantasy world manufactured to glorify and commodify the pluck of young girls. A swathe of Kens (Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa and Scott Evans) amble about and cater to the Barbies. They have no distinction: They’re just Ken. Gosling’s Ken, the counterpart to Robbie’s Barbie, endlessly pines for the woman he was literally designed to love, but she remains withdrawn from his desperate advances as she basks in the pleasures of girlhood.
But if every day is the “best day ever,” then are any of them truly? Barbie Land is a space so thoroughly detached from reality, everything so deeply idealized that its rosy splendors aren’t capable of registering beneath the gorgeously manicured plastic veneers. It’s pretty yet superficial, one could even say reductive to the female experience in its intricacies. This particular day culminates in a giddily effervescent dance party, and Gerwig helms this sequence, set to Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night,” with both dazzling flair but also a hyper-precision that underlines how the Barbies are trapped in a uniform state of being as the brand trivializes womanhood to a glittery monolith (see: 2001 homage).
When thoughts of death flood her mind just like cellulite does her thighs and her naturally arched feet flatten, Barbie’s perfect and safe non-reality is suddenly in jeopardy, so she’s sent to the real world by the self-aware Weird Barbie (a scene-stealing Kate McKinnon), who forces her to “find out the truths of the universe” while holding a high heel in one hand and the much more practical Birkenstock sandal in the other. Along her journey on the pink-bricked road and beyond, the lovable himbo simp Ken stows away and discovers his own self-serving delusion, the patriarchy, as Barbie encounters the disingenuous CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell), a staunch supporter of “girl boss” politics as long as he can make a quick buck off them, and her owner in the real world, a disillusioned mother (a luminous America Ferrera) whose friction with her daughter (Arianna Greenblatt) caused this temporal tear. She may even find something thornier but perhaps more worthwhile: her humanity, seen in a breathtaking moment as she quietly sits on a bus stop bench and observes the dignifying minutiae of existence in park inhabitants who exhibit a wide range of emotions. A single tear streams down her face as she realizes that being alive is sad and jubilant and tragic and wonderful.
If that ludicrously dense description was any indication, this isn’t another generic corporate IP movie, but a stiletto-sharp subversion of one. Barbie is a thoughtful and bizarre look into the human experience wrapped in the candy-coated shell of vibrant summer entertainment. All of Gerwig’s films are about the struggle of distilling one’s image into the world as it constantly instills itself back, and she elevates that to an existential level with incisive meta-commentary. If Lady Bird and Little Women play as delicate memories, then Barbie is a manic fever dream that playfully wrestles with the absurdity of living a life of prescribed conformity.
At its core, it’s a whip-smart, kitschy satire of the commercialist culture that often generalizes people to these narrow, often infantalizing gender roles- to take their image, inflate it for appeal and sell it back to them, whether that’s a Barbie doll for girls yearning to become women or the bombastic billboards for what feels like immature boys warped into entitled men that Ken encounters in Los Angeles. As seen in the movie as Ferrell’s greedy CEO literally tries to coax Barbie in one, society often puts people into these boxes, but that’s only the first layer of the commentary: As the twist-ties tighten around her wrists, she feels her agency being confiscated on a molecular level as the impulse to escape these binds mounts, and both the movie and character become a far richer expression of existential yearning and the breathless pursuit for purpose.
In both her world-building and filmmaking approach, the tone Gerwig strikes between cheeky and sincere is nothing short of astonishing, pointedly deconstructing the ideology of Barbie as both inauthentic representation and an instructive force for the self; unlike other directors from indie backgrounds who enter the mainstream movie sphere, Gerwig doesn’t think she’s “too good” for the pop aesthetic, and her humble passion is palpable as she embraces the glossy form and imbues with incredible artistry, including biting original songs that often push the movie into heady musical fantasy. The visual design of the film, especially the immaculate costumes and sets, is stunning, evoking the tangible and painterly artificiality of old technicolor Hollywood films like The Wizard of Oz that also shrewdly serves as simulacrum for characters parsing through the emotional process.
The film vitally emulates how we transpose our messy feelings onto the blank canvas of something like a toy and playset, and Gerwig paints in these big, beautiful broad strokes only to texturize them with something more emotionally nuanced. All of her movies have a richly dialectical relationship with their subjects: the push and pull of one’s hometown in Lady Bird, romanticism in the Little Women canon, or a doll that earnestly simulates womanhood but idealizes it so deeply. The movie goes as far to lampoon Mattel’s male CEO who equates sparkles to female agency while honoring Barbie’s roots with the ghost of her well-intentioned creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), locked away deep in the annals of the company’s phallic-shaped building. All of Gerwig’s films pose how we reconcile ideals imposed upon us, both by others and ourselves, with a decidedly more complicated reality. Upon Barbie telling her that the real world isn’t how she expected, Handler tenderly replies, “It never is, and isn’t that marvelous?”
In every Greta Gerwig movie, there is a gradual metamorphosis as a spunky young girl subtly becomes an astute, self-possessed woman before your very eyes, and Margot Robbie’s sterling performance vividly captures this transformation. Though her character is made from plastic, her work never feels anything less than bone deep. She takes the famous doll on a downright spiritual journey from exuberant adolescent desire to sobering self-actualization, yet Robbie never loses the character’s interior sense of childlike hope and strength; it’s destined to become a defining role of her career, and one of her very best. Gosling undergoes a similar change as Ken, his bravura mixture of punchy comedic timing and tragic dramatic desperation effortlessly shifting from neglected love sidekick to vindictive male ego to emotionally fragile soul straining under the performance of a newfound macho role. A showstopping musical number entitled “I’m Just Ken” smartly uses the framework of ‘80s rock ballads to underscore this.
Before Christine McPherson understood that the only way to grow past her hometown was to accept it as an inextricable part of her being, before Jo March sold her literary heroine into marriage so she wouldn’t have to sell herself into one, Greta Gerwig co-wrote a line in screwball comedy Mistress America that has defined her thematic ethos: “She was the last cowboy, all romance and failure.” Gerwig is classically romantic at heart, focusing on the triumphs and sorrows of the individual, but her work contains a radically modern edge, especially for more contemporary women grappling with the weight of expectation.
As Ken brings the patriarchy to Barbie Land to reclaim hollow male power, Barbie finds herself caught in the crossfire of contradictory political manifestos, one where she is not good enough for the idealistic image of Barbie or the harsh realities of the real world. Ferrera delivers a stirring monologue on the double standards women face late in the second act, and though some may deem this as the movie’s heavy-handed ploy for a definitive statement, Gerwig is more interested in the complicated emotional truth that restores faith in the self, surveying the fraught cultural landscape so her latest heroine can learn the beautifully bittersweet price of identity. She can’t be everything, and that’s okay. Barbie will do something so much more profound: embrace the intrinsic messiness of existence that liberates her as an individual and forge meaning on her own terms. It’s better to be perfectly imperfect than imperfectly perfect.
Through deliriously goofy yet incredibly heartfelt theatrics, constructs are unveiled as arbitrary and inane ways to make sense of a turbulent world, which is precisely why Barbie doesn’t want to be the idea anymore: She wants to do the imagining, to claim the autonomy that is rightfully hers as she jumps into the fray of personhood. While retaining her buoyancy, she can finally bid farewell to the comforts of adolescence and become fully-formed, despite the inherent turmoil of a sphere that stifles the growth of women. Bursting with joy and pathos, Barbie is a balletic fantasia of ideas that miraculously manages to pack a poignant, personal wallop, and Gerwig and company dance it so gracefully.
Grade: A
Barbie is now available in theaters.
Photo Credits/Warner Bros.
