That “2001: A Space Odyssey” allusion in the teaser trailer for “Barbie” was not just a silly gimmick. Without the full context of the film, casting Margot Robbie’s incarnation of the iconic toy doll in the role of a Kubrickian monolith felt like a wink from filmmaker Greta Gerwig that she had not sold her soul entirely to Mattel. But when the reference plays out in totality during the opening scene, it becomes clear this wasn’t just a bit. It’s a statement of purpose.
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Gerwig recasts the proto-human apes of Kubrick’s prehistoric prologue as young girls circa 1959 when Ruth Handler introduced the Barbie doll into the world. Before this, they had no toys in their image and likeness. As Helen Mirren’s wise yet witty narrator informs the audience, baby dolls locked them into playing the role of mothers. There’s no imagination for who they are or what they can become.
Enter Barbie in the role of the bone, a deus ex machina that allows them mastery over tools. From a fragmented representational piece of something that once lived comes the crude, raw power to build a new world. From there, they can exert mastery over their surroundings and unlock the future. With enough sarcasm to elicit a groan and a sigh, the narration suggests that the future Barbie unlocked is one where all the problems of feminism were solved. In an illusory dimension known as “Barbie Land,” a woman can be anything a brand tells her she can be.
That introductory line to Barbie Land is the only time Gerwig permits herself and co-writer Noah Baumbach to glare ironically down at their characters with smug detachment. Not unlike her previous films “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” the filmmaker proves allergic to winking irony that belittles any character in her creation. There’s an affection for the messy, the mundane, and the marvelous that lies inside everyone that shines through her every frame, and “Barbie” proves no different.
In the vibrant pinks and pastels of Barbie Land, Robbie’s so-called “Stereotypical Barbie” gallivants with other Barbies (including Issa Rae, Alexandra Shipp, Hari Nef, and Emma Mackey) in a girl power-fueled paradise where women hold all the levers of societal power. They also have their own money, houses, cars, and careers … all things that were legally off-limits to American women at some point in the “Real World.” Gerwig establishes the practical rules of this fantastical realm early by showing how Barbie interacts with the objects and environment. Her heels don’t touch the ground; there’s no actual water in her home’s plumbing; her mirror lacks any reflective surface.
But the biggest tell to unlock what Gerwig has done is that bodies move through space as if manipulated by a clumsy child’s hand. Barbie Land is one of pure imagination. In this tabula rasa, young girls fill in the blank spaces with candy-colored zeal. Mattel sells a vision for what a world can look like when they can choose any spectacular actualization of their own ambition, and they realize it here without a hint of irony.
A feminist utopia is thus not a naïve fantasy to be undermined in “Barbie.” Rather, it’s just infantile innocence paired with the tools to unleash an indomitable imagination. Barbie Land’s binary thinking and emphasis on the extraordinary is but a pure dream created by those who have yet to grapple with the complications and complexities of reality.
Critic and erstwhile The Playlist contributor Mark Asch has noted on Letterboxd that the hope of the Berlin Wall falling and the fear of the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11 neatly bracket Gerwig’s formative educational years. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that she views childhood as a sanctified stage of life deserving protection and respect. (She quite literally shoots youthful reverie with a golden tint in “Little Women.”) Our common tragedy is that this period of idyllic innocence is one from which all humans must exit – and, once matured by leaving, can never return to again.
Gerwig’s “Barbie” inverts and gender-flips the Garden of Eden myth. A female deity (Rhea Perlman’s Ruth Handler) conjures a woman related to her own image and gives her a companion of the opposite gender (Ryan Gosling’s Ken) defined by their relationship to the first creation. Just as the term “woman” derived from its relationship to “man,” Barbie’s male counterpart was only “& Ken” – never on his own. It’s thus Ken, tempted by the forbidden fruit rendered as patriarchal ideology, who strays and spoils Barbie Land.
But in this creation story, the sanctified text recalls Sondheim more than scripture. Gerwig’s affinity for classical musical theater is no secret, and this is but the latest film where her ability to marry an artificial format with authentic emotion shines through. If “Lady Bird” was her “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Little Women” was her “Company,” then “Barbie” is Gerwig’s tribute to “Into the Woods.”
As Sondheim brought childhood fables into contact with the frightening but fortifying forces of adult consequences, so Gerwig transposes the legendary figures of her own youth – albeit capitalistic totems – into a Real World where they must confront and combat the insidious effects of gender division. While it’s possible to examine “Barbie” with the seriousness of a Sunday School class or a Women’s and Gender Studies seminar, the film never loses its footing in the fizzy fun of a rip-roaring summer blockbuster. She leads with humor, then reveals the potent combination of head and heart powering the enterprise.
Gerwig builds on the irreverent legacy of 2014’s “The LEGO Movie,” the first movie to crack the key of how to make branded entertainment that doesn’t feel like a commercial, to operationalize her ideas. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller discovered beloved consumer products could become cinematic if they functioned as conduits for children to have generation-spanning relationships. Film’s ability to reclaim lost time can produce a rush of nostalgic sentiment, which recreates a bygone mental state within their parents. Some element of this realization appears in the mother-daughter duo of Mattel employee Gloria (America Ferrera), who reconnects with her the knotty matrix of feelings surrounding her old Barbie dolls, and her teenager Sasha (Arianna Greenblatt), who can only see Barbie’s legacy of sexualized capitalism and rampant consumerism.
But Gerwig better balances the merely childish outlook with a more childlike vantage point in “Barbie.” She’s genuinely interested in the interplay between the perspectives, seeing the valor in the strident simplicity of the young while tempering it with the wistful wisdom of the aged. In the mind’s eye of Gerwig, Barbie transcends the status of mere object. Beyond a tool, she is an idea open to both evolution and projection. The comedy and tragedy of Robbie’s Superficial Barbie is that she must personally bear the brunt of this interplay as the receptacle for Gloria’s anxieties.
Barbie’s resultant “malfunction” in her native land forces the people-pleasing figure to abandon her conservative outlook so she can repair the breach between their worlds. Gosling’s Ken, who needs his partner’s gaze to feel any sense of virility in Barbie Land, tags along for her journey to the Real World and quickly finds himself red-pilled by omnipresent projections of patriarchal power. The contrast between complicated femininity and shallow masculinity, while occasionally overly literalized throughout, provides “Barbie” the friction necessary to sustain a feature’s worth of conflict.
The cartoonish misogyny Ken adopts provides Gosling with a long runway on which to camp it up. His ability to convincingly sell the transformation of Barbie Land into the “Kendom” speaks to the persuasive power of his charisma, especially when he’s willing to undermine his smoldering with silliness. The Baumbach co-writing credit feels most obvious in Ken’s storyline and dialogue. Gosling is but the latest in a line of actors, ranging from Josh Hamilton to Adam Driver, through whom Baumbach has explored what it means to be a man in a world that seems to ask more but want less from the gender at large. “Barbie” marks the natural endpoint of a journey for these figures as Ken and his male sidekicks (including Kingsley Ben-Adir, Simu Liu, and Ncuti Gatwa) dabble with constructing an outright Manosphere.
But as infectious as the “Kenergy” might be, this is still Barbie’s movie, both for Gerwig as writer/director and Robbie as star/producer. “Barbie” is a glorious, gigantic canvas onto which they can refract cinematic and cultural imagery to tell their story about what it means to choose an expansive, inclusive vision of womanhood. (Graciously, it’s one that finds space for the otherwise lost boys.) Despair that this comes only at the behest of a benevolent brand dissipates within their boundless joy. Through the enormity of a character that can be everything, they create a permission structure to do anything that serves the story.
With that power, they can stage a balletic dance interlude that might make Gene Kelly blush or choreograph an absurd chase scene with the stylized precision of Jacques Tati. They can poke fun at their corporate overlords with a Mattel sign over a bleeped profanity or a knowing nod to how the most inane idea will inevitably end up commercialized. But more often than not, Gerwig and Robbie amplify the beauty of the everyday and the ordinary. The most moving moment in “Barbie” comes from the protagonist leaning across a bench to tell an older woman that she’s so beautiful … only for the stranger to answer, with neither haughtiness nor false modesty, “I know it.”
“Is it always or?” asks the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods,” another figure of archetypal import. “Is it never and?” In “Barbie,” Gerwig bestows the beauty of the “and” to her characters. Somewhere in the chaos of modern feminist thought lies the double-edged sword of control over one’s destiny. Within fallen humanity lies the tools for the reconstruction of the self. The only way to collapse the paradoxical expectations for women is to first understand their impossibility.
Gerwig amplifies this feeling of liberation through understanding one’s confinement to Messianic lengths by the end of “Barbie.” Yet her and Baumbach’s screenplay foregrounds countless other intimate choices, too. It’s here where characters can opt to see the complexities of their identity as both complementary and independent. This is existentialism for consideration and consumption alike.
In Gerwig’s “Little Women,” the director’s avatar Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) defended how her work bowed to certain conventions of commercial expectations by stating Shakespeare wrote for the masses. The man reviewing her manuscript, professor and potential love interest Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel) doesn’t buy the excuse, reminding her, “He was the greatest poet who ever lived. He smuggled his poetry in popular works.” Jo retorts that she’s no Shakespeare, to which he counters, “Thank goodness, we already have him.”
It’s impossible to speculate at this point how the shadow cast by “Barbie” could hold up against the legacy of the Bard as the years go on. But Gerwig similarly models her guiding ethos in her art, utilizing the imperfect vessel of popular branded entertainment to create a splashy spectacle inquiring about gender and grace. If a recent profile of Mattel is any indication, commerce and content will continue to intermingle. This will present storytelling issues for future generations that no one can imagine.
They’ll have a blueprint for how to finesse the balance. Whether they manage to execute against it or not, they’ll also have what we get to enjoy contemporaneously: the genius of Greta Gerwig. [A-]
“Barbie” will be released in theaters Friday, July 21.
