Movie Review: 'Barbie'

Barbie (2023)

Directed by Greta Gerwig

Written by Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig

Starring Margot Robbie, Helen Mirren, Ryan Gosling, Rhea Perlman, Simu Liu, Will Ferrell, America Ferrara

Release Date July 21st, 2023

Published July 23rd 2023

Barbie is some of the most fun that I have had at the movies in 2023. The comedy is rich and thorny and the attitude is all sparkles and pink. It's lively, energetic and innovatively presented by one of our best working storytellers today, Greta Gerwig. I was highly skeptical and a bit perturbed that one of the best directors working today had turned their attention to directing a movie about Barbie. I should not have been. I should have just trusted that Greta Gerwig knew exactly what she was doing. The product of this highly commercial move into blockbuster product placement is a wildly funny meta-comedy about existence, purpose, and the desire to understand oneself.

If any actress was going to be the right choice to deconstruct and uphold the legend of Barbie, it was Margot Robbie. She's the ideal Barbie, an uber-talented, multi-hyphenate, who happens to look like a Barbie doll come to life. She's also among our most talented and versatile actors today so, of course, her take on Barbie is way more complex than anything you are anticipating. And it's that very complexity that brings the biggest laughs as invasive thoughts begin to consume Robbie's 'Stereotypical Barbie,' the version of Barbie you imagine when you think of Barbie Dolls.

Of course, there have been dozens of different Barbies over the years. Barbies of different ethnicities, body types, and professions as vast and wide as Astronaut, Supreme Court Justice, and President Barbie. Each Barbie is played by a murderer's row of the best supporting players working today including Issa Rae, Hari Neff, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey and Sharon Rooney. All of the Barbie's of this unique movie universe live in Barbieland, a magical place adjacent to the real world where Mattel, headed up by Will Ferrell, keeps pumping out market tested new versions of Barbie, as well as several Ken's.

Oh, yeah, O almost forgot about Ken. Ken is played by Ryan Gosling in a scene-stealing performance. He's stereotypical Ken and thus fated to love Barbie. But what happens if she doesn't love him? Meanwhile, several dozen other Ken's follow the lead of either stereotypical Ken or his nemesis, Ken 2 (Simu Liu). Both appear to be vying for Barbie's attention, much to Ken's dismay. Oh, and Alan (Michael Cera), is kicking around somewhere in the background. Alan is a long-discontinued pal of Ken and Barbie, a real Barbie character variation. The jokes about Alan are all hits throughout Barbie, even as Michael Cera portrays him quite sympathetically.

The plot finds Barbie experiencing a crisis. She's had thoughts of dying. Also, her feet, always on tiptoes to match her fancy heels, have now fallen to the ground. And, shock of all shocks, she suddenly has cellulite. After consulting with her fellow Barbie's, our Barbie must go to the home of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), to figure out what to do about her seemingly collapsing personality traits. Weird Barbie, a Barbie that has been deeply damaged by being played with too hard, informs our Barbie that she must go into the real world and find the child that is playing with her. Helping this child is the key to getting things back to normal. Ken joins her on the trip, despite not being invited, and the pair leap to life in the real world, roller blades and Day-Glo outfits on fully display.

In the real world, Barbie meets Gloria (America Ferrara) and her daughter, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). Where that story goes, you need to see the movie. There isn't much to spoil about Barbie, but I think I have gone on about the story and characters long enough. The most important thing is how incredibly funny this all is. Montages of Barbie in the real world repeatedly being arrested for not understanding money or punching a guy who touched her butt have big laughs wedged in everywhere. Weird clothing choices, and a vision of the Mattel Corporation as a place where men work to market the Barbie fantasy that has unfortunately become pretty stale over the past half a century, provide wonderful targets for satire as Barbie innocently questions how she fits into the modern world.

Barbie is sneakily smart, on top of being wildly funny. Barbie is undergoing an existential crisis and as that crisis bleeds back into Barbieland, a new complication adds even more broad, silly, and quite funny satire into play. Midway through the movie, Ryan Gosling's Ken begins to fully form as a comic character and Ryan Gosling's deeply committed performance is an absolute joy. Gosling appears to relish the chance to flex his comic muscles, as well as his super-toned ab muscles, to get big, big laughs at his own expense. There is nothing Gosling won't do to get a big laugh and most of the time, he smashes it.

Forced into a role as a foil for Ken's antics, Barbie becomes further unmoored and Margot Robbie's performance grows in more and more unexpected places. Robbie is living for the little corners and byways that she can take Barbie into, playing a very funny conflict between Barbie's desire to go back to being basic stereotypical Barbie, and the intrusive thoughts that are both challenging and exciting. A scene wherein Barbie cries over seeing a mother and daughter losing connection to each other also includes Barbie discovering the cathartic, healing quality of feeling your emotions.

Having never had broad emotions before, Robbie as Barbie doesn't go for something childlike, as you might expect, but rather for something more realistically confused and curious. Robbie's wonderful performance finds her Barbie fearful of these intrusive thoughts but also curious about their nature and what they say about who she really is. That's a lovely idea that Greta Gerwig allows to drive a good deal of the story of Barbie. Barbie working through a crisis around her very nature and existence while also trying to foil an evil plot that you probably won't see coming.

The production design of Barbie is, unsurprisingly, top notch. The film looks incredible, it's bright, it's vibrant, it's unapologetically pink. It's a gorgeous movie to look at, a dazzling bit of candy color in Barbieland is met with not so much a grimy real world, as a real world that mirrors what we see everyday. I would expect a movie like this to try and make the real world even more gross and dark but that's not what Barbie is about. Barbie is an examination of our modern life through the eyes of an iconic piece of pop culture brought to life.

Barbie embodies numerous contradictions between girl-power feminism, market tested forms of 'empowerment' and a real world where women struggle with a myriad of complications that make them hurt, heal, nurture, thrive, and have to fight for their lives and families. Barbie, the doll, is a simplification of femininity to its most basic elements. This makes the character a perfect foil for real world women with real world problems. Marketers have tried for years to find a way to make Barbie relevant in our modern culture. The movie recognizes and homes in on that idea as the perfect juxtaposition of the easy mode life of Barbie and the real-life struggles women have every single day. Barbie as the prism to reflect those challenges turns out to be a great explainer for anyone needing a lesson in how to empathize with women.

It also helps to have someone as brilliantly talented as America Ferrara give breath to these ideas. Ferrara gets a monologue in the movie that is her at her absolute best. The perfect marriage of ideas, empathy, and actor. Normally, having a character so directly express a thesis statement in a movie might undermine the point, but it felt right here to have someone say these things out loud, passionately and with purpose. The staging of this moment is perfect, the reaction shots from the other characters, the moment is also pivotal for this moment in the plot, so this is not superfluous speechifying, it's necessary. It's just a terrific scene.

I won't spoil how Barbie ends but I wanted to mention how great the ending is. The final moment is such a wonderfully funny swerve. You expect one thing and what you get is entirely unexpected, weird, and pointed. I don't quite know what to say about it, I just love that Gerwig went to this place and forced us all to ponder the question and come to our own conclusions. It's a moment that as I write this, I feel uncomfortable engaging with it and yet, I appreciate the joke and where the joke leads to discourse that may or may not be worth having. It's a taunt and a challenge and I love that.

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