Director: Greta Gerwig
Writers: Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach
Starring: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Issa Rae
Runtime: 114 mins
MPAA Rating: PG-13
As one of the two movies that came out in 2023 (the other being Oppenheimer), Barbie had significant expectations to meet. Not only did it have to reconnect women with their childhoods past while not feeling like a glorified but hollow consumer advertisement, the film also had to make a profound feminist statement as is required in 2023. What ended up happening is that the filmmakers decided to depict a caricature of unbridled masculinity to contrast feminist utopia. In so doing, they made unbridled masculinity look really cool and fun.
In pink plastic Barbieland where every day is eerily similar to the last, Barbie (Margot Robbie) inexplicably begins to have physical imperfections and starts questioning her mortality causing her to leave Barbieland for the real world to find the child who plays with her and come to a solution. Ken (Ryan Gosling) tags along, leaving behind the matriarchal Barbieland where all the Barbies hold esteemed occupations and run society while the Kens play at the beach. While Barbie searches for the child who plays with her in order to find a solution to her problems, Ken ends up learning about masculinity and finding self-respect and a will to power. In response, he returns to Barbieland and institutes a patriarchy with all the other Kens. Horrifically, the Kens now have respect, purpose, and power with submissive Barbies by their sides. Will Barbie succeed in solving her own problems and in defeating the patriarchy when she returns to Barbieland?
Outside of its aesthetics, Barbie has few positive elements. Every performance is forgettable. Barbie and Ken are one-note personalities despite going through dynamic arcs. Robbie and Gosling are both serviceable yet boring in their performances though Gosling appears to be the one having more fun. Will Ferrell and Kate McKinnon are especially annoying in supporting roles. A lot of effort clearly went into the production design, and the film certainly has a memorable look to it. Thinking about it, nice aesthetics atop a hollow core is fitting for a movie about Barbie.
Writer-director Greta Gerwig demonstrated considerable skill as a solo director with her first two feature-length efforts Ladybird (2017) and Little Women (2019) earning her high praise. Ironically enough, excessive feminist messaging does not naturally flow out of either of those two movies due to the subjects in both cases being female and having to deal with natural feminine issues rather than manufactured social commentary. Additionally, her husband Noah Baumbach is a co-writer of the screenplay for Barbie while her previous efforts were solo writing credits. I despise nearly everything his name has ever been attached to as writer or director, finding his work to be insufferably pretentious, cynical, and self-serving. Barbie does not help my perception of him to say the least. Both filmmakers appear to have dumbed down their writing for a big budget effort with greater accessibility to general audiences in mind. The script is not clever and the comedy is generally cringe-worthy. However, a notable exception is Ken thinking masculinity and love of horses are intricately tied together. The culmination of the script is a real-world woman giving a long-winded complaint about how hard life is for women that comes across humorously delusional, angst-ridden, and childish when it clearly is intended to be profound.
Barbie is ostensibly about the importance of living in the real-world, being your authentic self, and why hyper-individualism, especially for women, is the highest of guiding principles. Incidentally, Barbie is an unintentional demonstration of how ridiculous gender egalitarianism is in society. The issue is that when your worldview requires decades of social engineering to keep from derailing you cannot even ironically depict conflicting visions of society more in line with natural law and hierarchy. In doing so, you risk the average moviegoer seeing a depiction of society that makes more intrinsic sense to him or her. Ken is the most likeable character in the film and undergoes the most entertaining arc before it is abruptly cut off to shore up the main agenda.
Too much commentary exists about this film already so I will refrain from proceeding at length. At core, this film is exceptionally silly and has little transcendent staying power. Unfortunately, Barbie attained notoriety and maintains relevance due to hostilities between the sexes being at an all-time high. Barbie provides no coherent resolution to such issues but does provide two extreme depictions of opposing visions of reality, and one looks a lot more natural and appealing than the other. That is all I am saying.
RATING: ★★½