Barbie (2023)

Apparently it’s been Barbie’s world all along, folks; we just live and dream in it. In this topsy-turvy summer where the pink day-glo sparkle of Barbie can open on the same day as the portentous and sobered Oppenheimer – and both can make a boatload of money – Barbie ends up being an excellent reminder that we can have both. If Barbie can have it all, so can we, and we don’t need to take ourselves too seriously in the process.
 
Things are great in Barbieland, a paradise populated only with Barbies and Kens (and Allan, played by Michael Cera). It’s all good until Barbie (Margot Robbie) begins to experience flat feet, anxiety, and cellulite. At the insistence of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), Barbie ventures out into the real world with Ken (Ryan Gosling) to find out why her worldview has gotten so grim – much to the consternation of the president of Mattel (Will Ferrell).
 
From its earliest trailers and first-looks, it was quite clear that Barbie’s secret weapon was going to be self-awareness. An early trailer cast Barbie in a send-off of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with children gleefully smashing baby dolls, and the hard cuts to the pristine plastic of Barbieland reassured us that director Greta Gerwig knew exactly what we might expect from a corporate Barbie film – and she was steadfastly opposed to creating a two-hour toy commercial. Instead, we get The Lego Movie by way of Enchanted, a film that shouldn’t be this delightful for a movie based on a narrative-less toy. (The antithesis, I suppose, is something like Transformers, a joyless toy commercial mired in its own monastic mythos.)
 
Margot Robbie is perfectly cast as “stereotypical” Barbie, the ur-doll from which all other Barbies (even President Barbie) draw their inspiration. Indeed, so immaculate is Robbie in this role that even the narrator (Helen Mirren) cannot help but comment on the utter absurdity of her lament that she’s not pretty; “Note to filmmakers,” she opines in one of the film’s many terrific jokes, “Margot Robbie is not the actress to get this point across.” Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling is, if it can be imagined, even doofier as Ken than Michael Keaton was in Toy Story 3. Gosling’s Ken is a true buffoon, a self-described accessory and self-insistent “ten” whose job is “beach” despite an apparent inability to perform CPR or even swim to shore on his own. Together, the two have some of the funniest chemistry imaginable, particularly because of the perennial lack of clarity about the precise nature of their relationship.
 
Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach are delightfully cavalier about most of the rules that govern Barbieland. Some of this is due to the logic that governs a child’s play, but more of it is in an embrace of fantasy and dreams at large. In two sequences, Rhea Perlman appears (particularly jarring for someone who, like myself, has binged nearly all of Cheers in about four months), and there’s an explanation provided in a hand-wavey kind of way that rolls over the audience like a wave. In another scene, someone ponders the possible differences between Barbieland and the real world, and in asking which difference is key, he receives a unanimous answer, “Yes.” Whether Barbieland is just down the block, like Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, or whether it is a creation of a child’s fictional dreamscape, is the kind of question that only an adult reviewer would begin to ask – and Gerwig’s response is, “Don’t worry about it.”
 
The film is bracingly unselfconscious, with no one afraid to embarrass themselves or lean into the broad absurdism of playing a plastic doll come to life. Simu Liu is wickedly fun as a Ken consumed with himself (as they all are), a walking/talking competitive vanity incarnate. Similarly, Gerwig is undaunted by the prospect of directing cardboard montages, placing a corporate boardroom on the world’s longest tandem bicycle. It’s peppy and poppy, a little subversive and a little heavy on the ‘message,’ but if anyone’s upset by the film, they’re taking it – or themselves – a little too seriously. It’s a film where Gosling’s Ken is both perplexed and disappointed about the number of horses involved in a “patriarchy,” where Weird Barbie is unapologetic about smelling like a basement. The little nine-year-old boy next to me was as enchanted as his younger sister a few seats over. Their mother, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be enjoying herself, but then again she didn’t seem like a person who enjoyed much of anything. Perhaps she needed a Barbie of her own to inspire her, to remind her that it’s okay to feel joy. 
 
That message is Barbie’s greatest gift – that it’s tough out there, but it’s okay to laugh, to dream, to blaze your own path forward on tippy-toes, wearing so much more pink than any one retina can handle – just as long as you’re you while you’re doing it.
 

Barbie is rated PG-13 for “suggestive references and brief language.” Directed by Greta Gerwig. Written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Based on the Barbie dolls by Mattel. Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Michael Cera, Issa Rae, Rhea Perlman, and Will Ferrell.