Barbie (2023)

I was already tired of people’s opinions about Barbie even before the movie opened—they don’t like the color scheme, they don’t understand what it has to do with feminism, they think it’s too woke, etc. (in the latter case, I’m always tired of that opinion now). Director and cowriter Greta Gerwig seems to be on a mission to reclaim the popular and reviled Mattel toy doll world and make it all fun again and also, maybe, righteously feminist. Mattel is on a mission to break open a movie franchise. The 2001 homage / parody / rip-off in the overture basically explains it all, before whipping up Also Sprach Zarathustra. In Barbie, there’s a Barbie world and there’s the real world. The Barbie world is a matriarchy whereas the real world is still a patriarchy. When a portal opens between the two worlds—because reasons reasons—things start to go awry. Barbie (Margot Robbie) loses the high flex of her arches from wearing heels and then starts to show signs of cellulite. These are terrible things and must be set right. Ken (Ryan Gosling) stows away on the expedition to the real world, where he is utterly entranced by patriarchy—thinks it’s a great idea, wonders why no one ever thought of it before, and takes it back to Barbie world, where things go further awry. Barbie is an affable enough mess, trying hard. Gerwig’s humor comes through, most noticeably in the performance of Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie, and Gerwig’s hipster instincts for music as primary signifier remain as detectable as ever: Lizzo, Dua Lipa, Khalid, Cyndi Lauper of course, Aqua’s “Barbie World,” the Spice Girls, Indigo Girls, Tame Impala, etc., etc. They’re all here. Mattel itself is on board and featured heavily. Will Ferrell, for example, is the Mattel CEO. Nice to see a corporation that can laugh at itself (cough-cough), but it’s more plain they’re more interested in raking up dough. There’s a dark side to all this too, though dark in the style of the TV series Wednesday, that is, not really dark. Maybe Barbie addresses depression in a good-humored way when one character works up variations of the doll like Irrepressible-Thoughts-of-Death Barbie and Crippling-Shame Barbie. But you already know what you think of Barbie. Don’t let my opinions annoy you further. Broey Deschanel over at youtube says it a thousand times better than I ever could.