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‘Barbie’ Review: Out of the Box and On the Road
She’s in the driver’s seat, headed for uncharted territory (flat feet!). But there are limits to how much dimension even Greta Gerwig can give this branded material.
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By Manohla Dargis
Can a doll with an ingratiating smile, impossible curves and boobs ready for liftoff be a feminist icon? That’s a question that swirls through Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a live-action, you-go-girl fantasia about the world’s most famous doll. For more than half a century, Barbie has been, by turns, celebrated as a font of girlhood pleasure and play, and rebuked as an instrument of toxic gender norms and consumerist ideals of femininity. If Barbie has been a culture-war hot spot for about as long as it’s been on the shelves, it’s because the doll perfectly encapsulates changing ideas about girls and women: our Barbies, ourselves.
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Gerwig carves a comic pathway into these representational thickets partly by means of mythology. In outline, the movie offers a savvy, updated riff on the Greek myth of Pygmalion, which has inspired myriad stories about men and the women they invent. In the original, a male sculptor creates and falls in love with a beautiful statue; in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” and in the Lerner-Loewe musical “My Fair Lady,” she’s a Cockney flower girl. In “Barbie,” by contrast, it’s the imaginations of the girls and women who play with the doll that give it something like life, a fitting shift for a movie that takes sisterhood as a starting point.
These imaginers first and foremost include Gerwig herself. The movie opens with a prelude that parodies the “dawn of man” sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (with girls, not ape-men), and then shifts to Barbie Land, a kaleidoscopic wonderland. There, Gerwig sets the scene and tone with Barbie (Margot Robbie) — who calls herself stereotypical Barbie — soon floating out of her Dreamhouse, as if she were being lifted by a giant invisible hand. It’s a witty auteurist flourish. The Mattel brand looms large here, but Gerwig, whose directorial command is so fluent she seems born to filmmaking, is announcing that she’s in control.
‘Barbie’ | Anatomy of a Scene
Greta gerwig, the co-writer and director of “barbie,” narrates this musical sequence, including ryan gosling’s performance of the song “i’m just ken.”.
“My name is Greta Gerwig, and I am the co-writer and director of ‘Barbie.’” “(SINGING) I’m just Ken. Anywhere else, I’d be a ten.” “The thing that I can say most about this sequence is that this was the thing that I most knew what I wanted it to be, and no one else knew what I wanted it to be. Every time I look at this, it’s just the ridiculousness of how we did it, which is they’re obviously arriving on these pedalos on a beach that has no water. It’s a solid mass with these waves that are sculptures. And I had everyone in this scene pretend to be moving in slow motion except for Ryan, who’s singing. And I think I got four takes into it, and I thought, this just — is this so ridiculous that I’m doing pretend slow motion? But then I thought, I think I just have to commit. Now I’ve done it. There’s nothing else I can do. My stunt coordinator, Roy Taylor, who’s a brilliant, brilliant person, and he worked with my choreographer, Jenny White, because I wanted all the fighting to be somewhere between dancing and a kind of vaudevillian ridiculousness of a Buster Keaton or a Charlie Chaplin. I love that kind of physical comedy. So you see men tangoing in the background in addition to fighting. Because they’re Kens, they’re children. It all sort of goes together.” “Ah!” “Ah! Ah!” “Then we have our Barbies, who are sort of watching with their pink boilersuits, which I think Jacqueline Durran, who is the costume designer, she did the pink boilersuits because I wore boilersuits every day. And she was like, I’ve decided what the Barbies will wear when they’re taking back Barbieland. And I cried when I saw it because I was like, oh, it’s a tribute to me. So much of this sequence is the song that Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt wrote, which was not in the script. But I did ask them because they were writing the song that became Dua Lipa’s ‘Dance the Night.’ I said we need a Ken song, and I think it goes in the battle. And then they wrote this song from the perspective of Ken. And then I said, Ryan, are you up for singing this? And he said yes, ultimately. But initially, I don’t know. I think he was like, you never said anything about this at the beginning. But I think they sent me 30 seconds of an idea for the song, that I just loved. And then I was like, Can you make it 11 minutes long? Because I want it to go through this whole sequence. And then this part, this dream ballet part, Sarah Greenwood, who is a production designer, and Katie Spencer built this stage to echo the dream ballet stage from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ because I love that movie. And that has one of the best dream ballets of all time because they have a dream ballet that is inside of another dream ballet, which, I think, when people are like, will anyone understand this? I was like, yes. There is a context for this. They’ll grasp it. And every Ken, every Barbie, is a dancer the whole time. And then I chose all the actors, too, because they were good dancers. Jenny White, who was my choreographer, she and I looked at a lot of different musicals, different dream ballets. But Busby Berkeley was a huge reference.” “(SINGING) I’m just Ken. Anywhere else, I’d be a ten.” “I kind of love that ‘we’re putting on a show’ element of this movie, which is very connected to theater and also the pleasure of making something in a childlike way. And we started with dance rehearsals, and I think it was a good way to put everybody in that mindset of it’s not about perfection. It’s about this joy. And they obviously embodied that. In a way, you want the audience to walk out and say, I’d like to go make something. I want to go play. I want to go set something up. I want to do a performance. And that’s how I felt when I watched a lot of movies when I was a kid, or theater. I instantly was like, I’m going to organize my own version of ‘Starlight Express’ right now.” “(SINGING) Nobody else Nobody else I’m just Ken.”
Written by Gerwig and her partner, Noah Baumbach, the movie introduces Barbie on yet another perfect day in Barbie Land, in which dolls played by humans exist in what resembles a toyland gated community. There, framed by a painted mountain range, Barbie and a diverse group of other Barbies rule, living in homes with few exterior walls. With their flat roofs, clean lines and pink décor — a spherical TV, Eero Saarinen-style tulip table and chairs — the overarching look evokes the era when Barbie first hit the market. It’s very Palm Springs circa 1960, an aesthetic that could be called bubble-gum midcentury modern.
Gerwig has fun in Barbie Land, and in her role as a friendly playmate, she works hard to ensure you do too. She takes you for a leisurely spin, cranks the tunes, stages some old-school, Hollywood-style musical numbers and brings in those eternal sidekicks, the Kens (with a scene-stealing Ryan Gosling chief among them). The production design (Sarah Greenwood) and costumes (Jacqueline Durran) offer ticklish pleasure but also underscore this place’s artificiality. Barbie, et al., are of our world and not, existing in a plasticky paradise that proves less hospitable when she begins having un-Barbie thoughts and experiences: She thinks of death, and then her feet, which are molded to fit high heels, go flat.
This change to Barbie’s body is played for laughs — the other Barbies are horrified — but it’s crucial to the plot and to Gerwig’s intentions. Once Barbie’s feet touch the ground, she seeks advice from a misfit version of the doll (the invaluable Kate McKinnon), who prescribes Birkenstocks and a trip to the real world. Soon, Barbie — with Ken riding shotgun — journeys into something like reality; that they land in Los Angeles reads like a puckish joke. There, Barbie is astonished to discover sexism, and Ken is delighted to discover patriarchy, contrapuntal revelations that generate further comedy and something like enlightenment.
Gerwig handles the transition between realms smoothly, but even in this bouncy, happy movie, reality proves a bummer. It’s amusing when Barbie points out a billboard filled with women, mistaking them for the Supreme Court because that’s what the court looks like in Barbie Land, just with more pink. She learns how wrong she was, which is to Gerwig’s point. But the weight of our world, emblematized at least for this viewer by the real Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade , proves unbearably heavy. However politically sharp, the gag is an unpleasant reminder of all the profoundly unfunny ways in which this world, with its visible and invisible hands, tries to control women, putting them into little boxes.
Mattel has long tried to reconcile Barbie with the real world. The toy’s origins lie with Ruth Handler, a founder of Mattel who wanted to make a doll for girls like her daughter, Barbara. Handler found her inspiration in Europe with an adult-looking German doll called Bild Lilli that Mattel reconfigured. Some buyers pushed back: “The idea of a doll with breasts was not received well,” Handler said in a 1994 Lilith magazine interview.
Barbie’s breasts and the rest of her continued to generate criticism, including from physicians who treat body dysmorphia . In recent years, Mattel has tried to make the doll more culturally relevant, adding careers and not just new merch to its product portfolio. “When a girl plays with Barbie she imagines everything she can become,” a 2015 Mattel ad promised during a period of sluggish sales. Its Fashionistas line introduced new facial shapes, eye colors and skin tones, followed by petite, curvy and tall versions, a diversity that has paid off . In 2019, Mattel announced that this Barbie movie was going forward with Robbie as the star.
As a performer, Robbie always pops onscreen, and her turn here as a classic blond bombshell who has more going on than that sexist stereotype suggests is charming and subtly phased; you can see the light turn on gradually behind her eyes. Like America Ferrera’s sympathetic Mattel employee, Robbie warms the movie, expanding and deepening its emotions. That’s particularly necessary because Ken’s comic obtuseness and arc — as well as Gosling’s deadpan and boy-band dance moves — recurrently draw attention away from the actress and her character. However narratively motivated, this upstaging of Barbie effectively suggests that only the Kens of the world need their consciousness raised.
The real world may initially bewilder Barbie, but she figures it out. That’s just what you’d expect given that Mattel partnered with Warner Bros. for this movie and is banking big on it . For her part, Gerwig figures it out by vibing on joy, tapping into nostalgia, showcasing her large cast (Will Ferrell, Issa Rae, Simu Liu, Dua Lipa, Helen Mirren, Michael Cera, etc.) and, for the most part, dodging the thorny contradictions and the criticisms that cling to the doll. And while Gerwig does slip in a few glints of critique — as when a teenage girl accuses Barbie of promoting consumerism, shortly before she pals up with our heroine — these feel more like mere winks at the adults in the audience than anything else.
Like “Air,” Ben Affleck’s recent movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan, as well as other entertainments tethered to their consumer subjects, “Barbie” can only push so hard. These movies can’t damage the goods, though I’m not sure most viewers would want that; our brands, ourselves, after all. That said, Gerwig does much within the material’s inherently commercial parameters, though it isn’t until the finale — capped by a sharply funny, philosophically expansive last line — that you see the “Barbie” that could have been. Gerwig’s talents are one of this movie’s pleasures, and I expect that they’ll be wholly on display in her next one — I just hope that this time it will be a house of her own wildest dreams.
Barbie Rated PG-13 for playful fighting and peril. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters.
Audio produced by Kate Winslett .
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis
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Barbie Reviews
With an overload of pink (not that we’re complaining), the film took over theatres globally with its timely and heartfelt messaging.
Full Review | Sep 20, 2024
Greta Gerwig's film blazes its way into a strange and bold future where adapting a film from a corporate toy franchise doesn’t immediately feel ugly and anti-art.
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 18, 2024
The world’s most famous doll turns her thoughts to more existential, philosophical matters in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a jazzy and infectiously vibrant summer blockbuster.
Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 3, 2024
Gerwig and Baumbach offer thoughtful commentary not only on Barbie herself and everything she represents, but also on womanhood, feminism, and growing up.
Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024
Add it all up and we get an enchanting explosion of pink cotton candy fun, all of which conceals a deceptively nutritious sociopolitical core.
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 19, 2024
Can we all just “Beach”?
Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 6, 2024
Barbie is equal parts a feminist rallying cry, an educational film, a reaffirmation of healthy matriarchal values, a musical, a comedy, and the kind of movie that everyone, especially young men, should see.
Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 3, 2024
Beneath all the laughs at the expense of men and women is the sad truth that this brand of essentialism itself, of separating Barbies from Kens, of emphasizing their differences, is the thing that damages us the most.
Full Review | Apr 5, 2024
Before she hits the road, being in Barbie Land is just as pleasurable for the viewer as it is for these toys. The depiction of this world is a triumph of imaginative design and skilful craftsmanship.
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 7, 2024
That Gerwig was able to essentially hijack a two-hour toy commercial (and a magnificently visualized one at that), one that cost $150 million, and deliver something approximating a progressive message, is just short of miraculous.
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 25, 2024
Throw in Billie Eilish’s melancholic tear-jerker and an intentionally butchered pronunciation of The Godfather and the movie was bound to be an instant classic. And you, too, have the power to take your Birkenstocks out of the closet in 2024.
Full Review | Jan 13, 2024
One of the main keys to Barbie’s success is commitment to the Barbieland authenticity and Gerwig’s willingness to undercut both Barbie and Ken leads, only to build them back up again.
Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 1, 2024
Barbie’s highs more than make up for its shaky third act. The game cast’s commitment to the tone, dazzling visuals and spirited direction prove it’s not a bad thing visiting Barbie’s World even if it’s just a break from the real one.
Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 31, 2023
One of the most thought-provoking social commentaries and empowering mainstream comedies in recent years. The “I’m Just Ken” scene should be playing on a loop in the Louvre.
Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 30, 2023
Gerwig had given no indication she (or anybody, really) could produce such a hot-pink masterpiece of goofball humor, winsome Jacques Tati alienation, and low-key patriarchy seminar.
Full Review | Dec 28, 2023
Barbie is very entertaining and despite the apparent artificiality, it questions social mandates. Throughout the film, a successful sense of humor is maintained regarding the struggle of the sexes and its cultural implications, without being offensive.
Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Dec 28, 2023
In Greta we trust.
Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Dec 27, 2023
With a stellar cast of actors, Barbie focuses all the energy of its first half hour on running through this insular version of things. [Full Review in Spanish]
Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Dec 26, 2023
Barbie is a brand extension exercise, but it's an audacious, hilarious, and artistically crafted one, raising the bar considerably for big-budget intellectual property ventures to come.
Full Review | Dec 22, 2023
"Barbie" is to feminism as a wrench is to a cat. Extermination of rational thought is this commercial's goal. Toxic. "Barbie" is a chunky diarrhea stain on humanity. Greta Gerwig is a hack screenwriter, and a remedial filmmaker at best.
Full Review | Original Score: LESS THAN ZERO STARS | Dec 22, 2023
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