THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE.
by Jarrod Jones. Here’s something most people have pondered at least once as they dug through their toyboxes: are these dolls alive? The more cosmically curious might go one further: do these dolls dream? As we’ve seen in various movies, mostly of the Pixar persuasion, our childhood playthings not only live between play sessions, they hope, too. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a different kind of toy story, where the often venerated, sometimes culturally maligned doll-icon awakens from her pink playset paradise and encounters an existential crisis.
I don’t know what a Spiritually Flummoxed Barbie doll might look like — I imagine her accessories would include a couch, a remote, some weed gummies, and a huge pizza — but I’m sure the braintrust at Mattel, whose Barbie brand has been in a perpetual state of revisionism for over 60 years, has probably considered making one.
As for Barbie’s first live-action film (the more with-it will tell you all about her countless straight-to-video animated movies), Gerwig has constructed a vivid and often hilarious confection of summertime fun, assembling an armada of gorgeous people to make aspirational and socially-minded points without rocking the Mattel boat too violently. Its appealing and ludicrously stacked cast — which includes a gleefully antagonistic Simu Liu, as well as Issa Rae, Kingsley Ben-Adir, and almost too many others to list here — is topped off by Margot Robbie’s Barbie and Ryan Gosling, the latter of whom damn near runs off with the whole movie as the appendix in this world-famous pair, Ken.
It’s astonishing what Gerwig pulls off here. Few filmmakers could successfully take on a perennial cultural touchstone like Barbie just to crack wise at her monolithic toymaker’s expense. It’s even more fascinating to see how her screenplay (co-written by Gerwig’s IRL life-partner, Noah Baumbach) lobs a few barbed yuks at the company’s strained efforts to revamp the doll to meet society’s evolving attitudes concerning gender roles and intersectionality without fumbling the point with low-bar Twitter-brained jokes. There’s some of that here — it’s more conspicuous in the moments when Gosling’s Ken winds up grappling with the concept of patriarchy — but Barbie is smarter than it looks.
There are even fewer directors who could keep a visually phosphorescent and tonally stimulated film like Barbie on track with such storytelling goals in mind — what with its topical dives into what feminism means today and how it can/should be applied — while also making sure it, perhaps contractually, conducts frequent blasts of brand management. This is a toy movie, after all. Mattel ain’t here not to make money.
It is a well-made toy movie; Gerwig flexes a sense of comic timing that is exquisite in its construction and sometimes too dweeby for its own good. Because of this, Barbie often feels like it wasn’t made for kids but adults, or at least adult-aged folks; one dig at Zack Snyder midway feels especially calibrated for that pop-minded contingent of viewers who spend far more time on social media than they probably should. The 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice gets a shout. Other strangely aged winks and nudges are more successful, like the acknowledgment that Barbie and Ken have smoothed-out plastic anatomical lumps where their naughty bits ought to be. It’s not a subversive observation (everyone jokes about that), but it is interesting to see Gerwig patrol the perimeter to see what kind of mirth she can get up to before the suits upstairs begin sending back notes.
Gerwig can only take things so far, but it’s not like we’re looking for a Master’s thesis on Barbie’s damaging role in society or anything. (That doesn’t stop one politically-aware-thus-totally-stressed-out character from viciously condemning Barbie as a fascist.) People at my screening often seemed more ecstatic about the movie’s many callbacks to other Mattel products, like Growing Up Skipper or the Barbie Ambulance Playset, than they were about Barbie’s disastrous bid to make sense of her predicament, where she visits a somewhat cracked version of our real world. When the film is really working for audiences, you can almost see Mattel’s trademark materializing on the screen.
As far as Barbie’s transfer from plastic to live-action is concerned, Sarah Greenwood’s set design swims like Esther Williams dived into Singin’ in the Rain, and Jacqueline Durran’s costuming, a neon-Bizarro inversion of her work on Gerwig’s Little Women, pops like Lisa Frank on a caffeine binge. Barbie Land, the home of all the various Barbies, Kens, and, lest we forget, Allan (an underutilized deep cut fleshed out by Michael Cera), is stunning. When Barbie and Ken travel to Los Angeles to seek out a real-life Mattel employee whose private miseries have plagued Barbie with her emotional crisis (America Ferrera), the movie is suddenly less lively and becomes more maudlin.
There’s a point to be made, I’m sure, about the draining energies of our real lives versus the colors that exist only in our imaginations, and how it’s important that we parse this separation for the betterment of our spirits. But when Robbie & Gosling are decked out in the craziest fits amid vibrantly realized but totally fake ocean waves (a great recurring sight gag where John Cena and Dua Lipa hang out), it’s hard not to think that the assertions Gerwig wants to make are just getting in the way of fun. That’s probably the point, too. Growth means casting the exterior distractions aside to find what’s essential in life. There are no accessories for the heart.
8 out of 10
Barbie is in wide release now.
Directed by Greta Gerwig.
Written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
Cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto.
Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Rhea Perlman, and Will Ferrell.
Produced by David Heyman, Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley, and Robbie Brenner.
Rated PG-13 for anatomy yuks and pretend booze sessions.
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