Review: Barbie (2023)
A pink world where women rule is not necessarily feminist
Barbie (2023)
Directed by Greta Gerwig
Written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach
As a summer blockbuster, this movie comes with great expectations. First, everyone's aware of the hype, and anyone who's been to a cinema in the last few months has seen at least one of the trailers. The film's already been the subject of hundreds of reviews, interviews, and think pieces.
So many viewers will be familiar with the film's high-level concept: Barbie -- all of the Barbies, played by real actors — lives in a Barbieland that required a world-record quantity of a certain shade of pink paint to realize. Her life and that of the other female dolls is perfect, though Ken and other male dolls live a decidedly second-rate existence, literally only existing as an object of the female gaze. Women perform all jobs in a society that is a sort of anarchy-with-a-government (an anarchocracy?); the men are merely decorative.
This world is threatened when Main Character Barbie (an extraordinary performance by Margot Robbie) starts to experience a defect: her feet flatten from the en pointe pose that typifies Barbie dolls, she spots a patch of cellulite, and she experiences an existential crisis. To solve this, she must first visit “weird Barbie” (Cate McKinnon, great as always) who sends her on a quest to the world of reality -- where you and I live -- to meet and comfort the human girl who possesses her, because this girl is sad. Barbie will cheer her up and encourage her and that will make everything OK.
Because this is a movie for adults and not children, that doesn't make everything OK. She's rejected by the girl, Sasha (teenaged Ariana Greenblatt who, in a marvelous bit of casting, looks very convincingly like the daughter of her mother's character Gloria, played by America Ferrera) in a short speech that covers all the second-wave feminist reasons why Barbie dolls were rejected by liberal families during the past 50 years. It turns out that Gloria was the true owner of the Barbie doll that corresponds to Main Character Barbie, and it's her real-world frustrations and fears that have brought on M.C. Barbie's existential crisis. To assuage these feelings, Barbie decides to bring mother and daughter back to Barbieland to inspire them. She wants to show them how perfect the world can be when it's run entirely by and for women.
But Ken (Ryan Gosling), who has stowed away on Barbie's trip to the real world, finds that he very much likes the patriarchy that characterizes it. He returns to Barbieland first and transforms it into Kendom. (This has the hilarious effect in the real world to cause Ken-related Mattel products to start flying off the shelves -- figuratively, I should add, since there is so much literal surreal action in the film, such as when Ken tries to surf and finds that the ocean is just plastic painted a bright blue.) When Barbie arrives with Sasha and Gloria in tow, she finds not only that the Kens have taken over and evicted the Barbies from their dream houses, but has brainwashed the Barbies into becoming their willing servants. The tables are turned!
To resolve the twin problems the film poses -- women's self-doubt and subjugation in the real world, and the revolt of the Kens in Barbieland -- requires Gloria to articulate the difficulties of her lived experience. (You can read the full monologue in the L.A. Times at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-07-23/barbie-america-ferrera-monologue.) This has the effect of waking the Barbies from their brainwashed states, and they are able to restore Barbieland to its female-supremacist roots. Barbie's own existential crisis, however, requires the intervention of Ruth (Rhea Perlman), the ghost of Barbie's creator.
The restoration of Barbieland is problematic. M.C. Barbie alone pines for what used to be, while the other Barbies have been brainwashed into forgetting that they used to be in charge. She doesn't have a vision of making her society better, only restoring exactly what used to be, returning the Kens to their decorative roles. (In fact, since they don't seem to have the right to vote, they can't even be termed second-class citizens.) And this restoration of Barbie supremacy has little effect in the real world. Gloria gains a bit of gumption -- she is merely able to gather the courage to make a suggestion to her boss (Will Ferell in an amusing but shallow performance as the head of Mattel) and have it heard. He rejects the idea, then changes his mind when an aide points out that Gloria's suggestion would be profitable. This is not a feminist film but a reactionary one.
These cavils would spoil the film only for a grump. The pink-and-fluorescent mise-en-scene is fantastic, the performances are exactly what's needed, and the pace of the film moves along quite nicely. Greta Gerwig has achieved something memorable: a beguiling and extremely popular (and profitable) film that contains a critique of patriarchy. It won't be forgotten in Oscar season, and not surpassed until a woman comes along and manages to imbue an extraordinary popular and nuanced film with true feminism.