Barbie - Directed by Greta Gerwig
In 1959, Mattel released Barbie upon the world. The doll was created by Mattel’s co-founder Ruth Handler, pulling inspiration from a German doll named Bild Lilli, as a way to empower girls like her daughter Barbara (Barbie’s namesake) to create limitless world’s where they can be and do anything they want. This was a big bang moment in the way little girls played as it was one of the first times that a popular toy offered more to young women than the idea of playacting motherhood and domesticity. Yet at the same time Barbie became a double-edged sword with some seeing her representing an unattainable physical perfection and the doll became a lightning rod for feminist critique.
In the subsequent years Barbie stuck around (nevertheless, she persisted) and developed with our changing world. Mattel diversified her size and skin tone to try and make a more inclusive toy. Greta Gerwig, the film’s director and cowriter, clearly has a love for Barbie because she includes so much of Barbie’s history in the film. Gerwig and her collaborators not only grant Barbie a sparkling personality, and a gorgeously hokey pop art land to live in but also create some genuinely meaningful sentiments around the complexities of modern gender politics.
Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) has the perfect day every day. She wakes to music, eats perfect meals, wears beautiful clothes, and spends all her time with her fellow Barbies and Kens. In the plastic fantastic Malibu-meets-Miami looking Barbieland all jobs are held by women while men exist to frolic on the beach and the dance floor. Life is perfect. That is, until Barbie begins having an existential crisis which manifests itself by rocking her perfect world. Her showers are cold, her breath is bad, and she can’t stop thinking about dying. She’s advised to go to the real world to find the person playing with her in doll form and cheer them up so that life can be normal again. But when Barbie and a stowaway Ken (Ryan Gosling) arrive in southern California they discover a patriarchal world brimming with human dysfunctionality, loss of adolescence and the disillusion that comes with adulthood.
Gerwig and her cowriter Noah Baumbach know that Barbie has been in every kind of woman’s life over the last six decades and they make sure to include plenty of supporting storylines to widen Barbie’s impact. The film’s story is rounded out by a mother daughter story between a tweenager (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mother (America Ferrera) that’s touching and empowering. There’s some great material about artistic creation examined though Barbie’s relationship with her creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman). At the film’s beginning all the other Barbies are defined by their professions but Gerwig gives them all the time and space to grow and acquire a richer sense of internality.
The world building in Barbie is exceptional. Production designer Sarah Greenwood and set designer Katie Spencer created a candy-colored dream world for Barbieland. Everything is covered in pink paint, molded plastics, and even some great tactile backdrops (as opposed to greenscreen) that harken back to classic Hollywood. There’s also a perfect juxtaposition of how the film’s score is used in Barbieland vs the real world. Everything comes together perfectly in the technical sense.
Margot Robbie plays Barbie perfectly, handling the comedic timing of Gerwig and Baumbach’s dialogue with the same skill she applies to the grounded sequences allowing their nuance and vulnerability to really come across. Ryan Gosling threatens to steal the film from Robbie’s mighty performance with his own work as Ken. He plays him as a jealous meathead and Gosling is just so damn funny he nails every joke he’s handed. All the supporting Barbies and Kens do wonderful work as well and make all their sequences a blast to watch and enjoy.
Apart from the internet tidal wave that came out of the marketing strategy of “Barbenheimer” it was difficult to imagine that the Barbie movie would amount to much more than summer fluff. I’m happy to report that the exact opposite is true. Barbie speaks truth about the pressures of living up to an impossible feminine ideal, but it does so while injecting every spare moment with fun. It’s also clearly made by people who respect the medium they’re working in. The first trailer for Barbie played on an infamous scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey not to mention the film’s nods at classics like A Matter Of Life and Death and even more recent greats like The Truman Show. Put all of that together and you wind up with a film you’ll want to pick up and play with again and again.
