Barbie is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
This Barbie reviews movies. And after months of buildup, she’s honestly a little relieved to report that the hype is real. Not since Tim Burton’s first crack at the Batman franchise in 1989 has there been such a hotly anticipated release of a movie that was destined to be a cultural phenomenon. Like Batman, Barbie sees Warner Bros taking a risk by turning over a singular icon of American culture to an auteur who’s more than willing to put their own stamp on the project.
Greta Gerwig goes all in on Barbie. She embraces the artifice of Barbieland, the pastel-pink plastic paradise where we first encounter our heroine. Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives in a world that operates on toy logic. Since toys are picked up and placed wherever their owner wants them to go, she can float from the bedroom of her dream house to the seat of her iconic pink Corvette. She and all the other Barbies live in a #girlboss feminist wonderland where they hold all the positions of power and influence. The Kens, meanwhile, are relegated to being their props. Still, this hasn’t deterred Stereotypical Ken (Ryan Gosling) from his attempts to get Barbie’s attention so they can both fulfil their ostensible destiny of being “boyfriend-girlfriend.”
When Barbie starts questioning the meaning of her life in Barbieland, kicking off an existential panic at the disco with one of the most delightfully abrupt tonal shifts seen in recent years, her utopia starts to break down. To restore balance, she must travel to the Real World and find the little girl playing with her, with Ken inviting himself along for the ride.
Barbie is a film that takes on a lot. This premise could have easily resulted in a shallow, mean-spirited parody of family films about toys coming to life or characters from fictional media breaking into reality. But travelling to real-life Los Angeles brings Barbie and Ken face to face with the patriarchy, opening the film up to an exploration of real-life misogyny and an attempt to reconcile with the toy’s complicated cultural legacy. The film owes a thematic debt to The Lego Movie by bringing in Will Ferrell to reprise his role as Lord Business, in all but name, as Mattel’s buffoonish CEO. Barbie goes out of its way to demonstrate that, unlike Emmett, The Lego Movie’s prodigiously generic protagonist, women don’t have the luxury of being blank slates because our survival under the patriarchy depends on negotiating an endless array of double standards. So, what are your options if you live under a system that’s forever trying to force you into the role of an easily controlled object rather than an agent of your own destiny?
The nature of cinematic narratives means that Barbie has to offer some answers to the philosophical questions it raises. By doing that, it will inevitably be regarded as a more divisive film than its lighter-than-air, candy-coated appearance suggests. I have my own issues with the film’s constraints on its protagonist’s growth. Barbie explicitly and unambiguously attains consciousness of real-world misogyny but not of racism or any other prejudices with which misogyny invariably overlaps. This is despite the ensemble cast going out of its way to reflect the diversity of modern-day Barbie doll lines.
On top of that, for all its camp, it’s not as informed by a queer sensibility as certain contingents of its audience might have hoped for. It tries to get cute when Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), an outsider who’s been lovingly if haphazardly customised by a particularly creative owner, plays Morpheus to Stereotypical Barbie’s Neo by offering her a choice between a pink stiletto and Birkenstock. But there’s never a point where any Barbies or Kens realise that compulsory heterosexuality is pervasive in the real world and that it’s present in Barbieland despite its residents having an incomplete understanding of sex. When Ken suggests early on in the film that he spends the night at dream house, he admits he has absolutely no idea what he and Barbie would do together if she agreed to his request.
So, Barbie is not without its flaws. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t grinning from ear to ear throughout. Underneath the sparkle is a tightly written and, at times, profoundly moving comedy that loves its source material and respects its audience.
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Barbie | United States | 2023
Summary
So, Barbie is not without its flaws. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t grinning from ear to ear throughout. Underneath the sparkle is a tightly written and, at times, profoundly moving comedy that loves its source material and respects its audience.
