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Barbie Is a Delight of Improbable Proportions [1]
['Dana Stevens', 'Fred Kaplan']
Date: 2023-07-19 23:23:56+00:00
“If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you,” promises (or threatens) the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. The tag line, like the rest of the film’s inescapable (and, even haters must concede, brilliantly executed) advance marketing campaign, toes the line between sincerity and camp. Are audiences meant to cheer on the empowered girlboss exploits of the live-action embodiment of a now 64-year-old fashion doll? Or, on the contrary, should we be critiquing the male gaze–driven industrial economy that made generations of little girls believe that the highest achievement of adult womanhood was an anatomically impossible waist-hip ratio? And what about those of us who grew up Barbie-indifferent—say, women who never owned the toys as children (perhaps because, as in my household, our second-wave-feminist mothers saw them as tacky and retrograde) but who willingly played with them at friends’ houses, marveling over their high heel–ready arched feet, nipple-free breasts, and mysteriously featureless crotches?
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Yes, yes, and yes, responds Barbie: This movie is for you. You, the fashion-fixated tweenager. You, the stereotype-dismantling student of pop culture. You, the Barbie-neutral film fan just looking to be entertained. But can any one movie be all those things at once? Gerwig’s answer to that conundrum is to serve up a multilayered concoction that’s as busy as a fully accessorized Dreamhouse: an earnest feminist manifesto inside a barbed social satire inside an effervescent musical comedy, all designed in colors and textures so sumptuous they make 1950s Technicolor look desaturated.
Barbie never completely resolves the paradox at its heart: This is a movie that casts a Mattel CEO (played by Will Ferrell) as its nominal villain, yet begins with a prominent display of that very company’s logo. It’s tough to voice a critique of capitalism from the point of view of a piece of merchandise, a fact that, to its credit, the Barbie screenplay (co-written by Gerwig and her partner in life and art, Noah Baumbach) wryly and repeatedly acknowledges.
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After a cold open that riffs on the “Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a towering, swimsuited Barbie replacing Kubrick’s black megalith, Gerwig plonks us straight into the unsettling utopia of Barbie Land, a realm where life-size incarnations of the dolls live in a state of matriarchal harmony. All the women—with the exception of the discontinued pregnant doll Midge—are named Barbie, from the fanciful realm’s president (Issa Rae), to its resident physicist (Emma Mackey), doctor (Hari Nef), and author (Alexandra Shipp). A typical day in Barbie Land begins with a toaster waffle and a glass of milk—held briefly to the mouth, doll-style, rather than actually consumed—a cheerful greeting of the neighbor Barbies glimpsed from the vantage point of one’s wall-free house, and then a trip to the pink-sanded beach. There the Barbies encounter the eager-to-please if abject Kens, surfboard-toting male accessories who, as Helen Mirren observes in a dry opening voice-over, seem to experience joy only when acknowledged by their infinitely more confident female superiors. It’s patriarchy turned on its head, a setup that will be neatly reversed in the film’s second half.
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The incarnation of Barbie who becomes our heroine is known only as Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), an example of the doll at her most conventionally blond, blue-eyed, and symmetrically proportioned. One night, hosting a blowout party at her fuchsia-hued Dreamhouse, this Barbie confesses to her perky line-dancing cohort that she’s been troubled of late by recurring thoughts of death. The music screeches to a halt, and her fellow playthings stare at her in horror—a reaction that’s repeated the next day when Barbie’s permanently arched feet inexplicably go flat.
Confused by these sudden changes, Barbie pays a visit to the angular abode of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), a version of the doll who, as a result of having been played with too roughly in the real world, now has a scribbled-on face, chopped-off hair, and a tendency to hang out around the house in the splits. Weird Barbie, whose traumatic past seems to have given her special insight into the ways of the universe outside Barbie Land, explains that whoever is playing with Stereotypical Barbie’s counterpart in the real world must be distressed and in need of her help. After a complicated journey involving Rollerblades, a motorboat, a camper van, and a tandem bicycle—each method of transportation matched, of course, with its own jaunty travel outfit—Barbie arrives in the human world, specifically the Venice Beach boardwalk. To Barbie’s consternation, accompanying her as a stowaway is the neediest of all the Kens: “Just Ken,” as he refers to himself, played with complete commitment and perfectly judged pathos by a never-funnier Ryan Gosling.
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The real-world situation that needs sorting out ends up involving not a child but a parent: Gloria (America Ferrera), the mother of a surly teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt), has been doodling designs for a depressed Barbie as she endures her dull day job at, of all places, Mattel. Gloria’s disillusionment with the ideal of womanhood she once thought the doll represented has been incepting dark thoughts into Barbie’s head. This situation, while confounding, soon takes second place to a more urgent problem: The executive board of Mattel, made up entirely of men, discovers that a doll has escaped Barbie Land and is at large in the human world. The quasi-feminist babble the Mattel CEO loves to spout—he is, as he smugly points out, “the son of a mother and the nephew of a female aunt”—is at odds with his desire to capture Barbie and send her back home in a pink plastic box, her wrists and ankles bound with the stiff white twist ties any parent who’s ever unpackaged a toy will recognize.
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Barbie’s second hour suffers from a pileup of conflicts. In addition to the tension between Gloria and her daughter, and the Mattel execs’ search for the renegade Barbie, there is trouble afoot back in Barbie Land. The now-returned Ken, having witnessed up close the reality of patriarchal power in the human world, decides to turn the pink-hued paradise into a realm controlled by manly men, which in his limited understanding means plenty of broomstick hobbyhorses, poolside “brewski beers,” and nights by the campfire serenading the unimpressed Barbies by “playing guitar at them.” This plotline resolves itself a little too quickly, though it does include a beachfront battle of the Kens that’s one of the movie’s visual high points, packed with too-funny-to-spoil sight gags.
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The film’s deepest conflict involves neither enraged toy executives nor pouting doll-boys but Stereotypical Barbie’s internal struggle: Like countless fictional toys before her, she yearns to be real, a longing that brings her into conversation with the ghost of Barbie’s original inventor, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), in a scene that recalls such classic Hollywood excursions into the realm of metaphysics as Heaven Can Wait. Though I had experienced Barbie up to that point as a mostly charming, occasionally exhausting riff on the fraught delights of consumerist feminism, something about Robbie’s passionate “yes” as she accepts the complications of being a mortal female human—paired with the strains of the gorgeous ballad Billie Eilish composed for the film, played over a montage of home movies made by families of the film’s cast and crew—had tears starting to my eyes. Just as quickly, those tears were succeeded by a giggle at the movie’s closing joke, a reference to the aforementioned childish fascination with the featureless genital region of the titular doll.
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Gerwig has made two previous films as a solo director, an autobiographical coming-of-age comedy (the sprightly Lady Bird) and an adaptation of a girls’ literary classic (the sublime Little Women). Barbie might be seen as a recasting of elements from those two very different movies. There’s an autobiographical side to Barbie’s story arc, given Gerwig’s own move into directing after a decade spent acting in independent films (quite a few of which she co-wrote). Like Robbie’s authenticity-seeking doll, Gerwig never felt quite at home in the objectifying spotlight of the red carpet. In giving herself over full time to directing, a career she has said she had to consciously grant herself permission to pursue, it’s as if she’s symbolically donning the liberatory Birkenstock sandals that the suddenly flat-footed Barbie first resists and later embraces. As for Little Women, it’s present in the writer-director’s similarly nuanced approach to her complicated source material: There, a classic 19th-century novel ripe for a 21st-century update, and here, a classic 20th-century toy reenvisioned for a different era of female self-invention.
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The fact that an indie director like Gerwig chose, for her third film, to make a lavish blockbuster tied to a major studio’s IP has unsurprisingly caused some to dismiss her as a sellout. But watching her flex her filmmaking skills on this grand a scale, and succeed at creating sparklingly original summer entertainment, has me excited to see whatever Gerwig does next, big or small. Barbie will not single-handedly solve the contradictions facing women in a capitalist society, but nor is it a mere cynical ploy to move toys off shelves—even if the real-life Will Ferrells at Mattel are scheming to do exactly that, not to mention using Barbie as a proof of concept for other toys turned movies to come. Late in the movie, Ferrera’s Gloria delivers a monologue that’s an eloquent rejection of the impossible and frequently conflicting expectations our culture tends to place on women. Barbie, too, can’t be everything to everyone, but it nails the trickiest part of all: finding and maintaining its own distinctive voice.
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[1] Url:
https://slate.com/culture/2023/07/barbie-movie-2023-margot-robbie-ryan-gosling-review.html
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