After a long wait, Greta Gerwig’s much anticipated 3rd movie ‘Barbie’ has been released, and the world has finally got a chance to answer the question — does it live up to its hype?
Very simply — YES. A huge, joyful, exuberant YES from me.
I secured the remaining single seat at a regional cinema (every advanced screening session in the metropolitan and city cinemas sold out) — because I had to be part of what felt like a historic moment for cinema. I can’t remember the last time a movie had this much fanfare. People dressed up! I was surrounded by women and girls in hot pink pants and fairy-floss coloured pyjamas.
The cinema was energised by a collective giddiness I had never felt in its corridors. All because of this movie.
And it’s incredibly entertaining — I don’t remember the last time I laughed so hard, so consistently in a movie.
The opening sequences introducing us to Barbieland plays out like a mesmerising music video — jewelled Barbies of all colours dance in sparkly flash mobs, houses are wall-less and everything is pink. The White House is pink, and the President of the United States is a Black woman (Issa Rae).
All the Nobel-Prize winners are Barbies (aka. Women) and all the Justices of the Supreme Court are Barbies. Barbies rule the world in Barbieland — it’s a delicious and fantastical party-mix for the eyes.
Barbieland is appealing because a woman can say what she wants and a man simply accepts it and doesn’t try to press her to change her mind. When Ken asks to visit Barbie one evening, she says to him “I don’t want you here.” And it’s a safe, uncomplicated command. He leaves. She’d prefer to hang out with her girlfriends, the other Barbies. “Every night is girls’ night!”
All the fun collapses when suddenly, our heroine, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) finds herself verbalising fears of death. Then her permanently arched feet flatten. Cellulite crawls up her thigh. Barbie Doctor can’t do anything. Enter Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon).
We’ve all had the Barbie whose hair ends up chopped, coloured, Texta’d on, legs split into 180 degrees. McKinnon plays this part with her reliable brand of wry, funky humour.
Weird Barbie helps Stereotypical Barbie locate the source of her existential crisis — someone in the Real World is playing with her, and they’re sad, injecting their feelings of loneliness and depression onto Barbie.
Barbie has to go into the Real World to find this person and make her happy again! Gerwig’s writing is clever and adaptive — we encounter elements of “The Matrix” as well as the question of humanity explored in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film “A.I”.
Barbieland and the Real World collide in a hilarious romp — Ken (Ryan Gosling) is nothing without Barbie’s gaze, so he tags along — much to Barbie’s chagrin.
But in the Real World, Ken discovers that he is respected and admired, just for being a man. These are probably the most rib-cracking moments of the film, when Ken discovers how ludicrously male-centred the Real World is. He discovers something called the Patriarchy. And he loves it.
Barbie on the other hand is finding the Real World deeply unpleasant as a woman: “I don’t have a word for it, but I’m conscious that it’s myself that I’m conscious of.” (That’s called the Male Gaze, Barbie).
“There’s no undertone of violence,” Ken says deliriously. “I very much sense an undertone of violence,” Barbie replies dead-pan.
A host of delightfully cast characters dip in and out of the story: Allan (played by Micheal Cera) is a lone anti-Ken, Will Ferrell does what he does best, playing the Head of Mattel; America Ferrera plays a sympathetic mother trying to deal with the growing distance she feels with her teenage daughter.
The movie is unexpectedly emotional — there were moments of sudden tenderness that hit me across the head. By the end of the movie, I found myself sobbing at an especially poignant scene. Of course this movie is meant to make us cry! We all mourn for our childhoods, especially as women. It’s a sorely missed period of innocence and safety we’ll never, ever feel again.
That’s exactly the genius of this movie — it knows how to play with our emotional needs.
As women, it’s deeply satisfying to watch a film that pokes fun at straight masculine energy. I walked out of the cinema with the same feeling I had after I watched Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman” — I felt like my female-humanness and all its complexities and fears were finally depicted back at me.
Sure, the film’s not perfect — maybe at this point, we don’t need it to be?
For instance, in Barbieland – slim women rule the world. By doing so — the film makes Barbieland a flattened version of the “feminist ideal” without intersectionality. We see a few ‘alternate’ Barbies — there is the Pregnant Barbie, and Weird Barbie, but there are no lesbian Barbies here, or queer Barbies, or large-size Barbies, or Barbies with disabilities or neurodivergent Barbies.
Barbieland is not the perfect woman’s world, though in the movie, it’s painted like one, and if you can accept the terms of the movie, you can learn to embrace it.
Gerwig is a clever filmmaker — she knows how to sell a movie, a movie that tries to espouse feminist ideologies while managing to totally divorce itself from its essential objectivity– which is that Barbie is a brand, and its objective is not to turn audiences into feminists. The movie (and Mattel) don’t care if you become a feminist.
Even Gerwig doesn’t care if your politics don’t align with those of her characters. The film wants you to hate the brand less. And it does a spectacularly great job at that. By humanising its most seemingly superficial product (a blonde, slim woman) — it’s basically saying to audiences that you too, can be complex and still play with Barbies. It doesn’t make you any less of a feminist!
The show-stealer is definitely Ryan Gosling, who plays the fragile male boy-child so perfectly, though the movie’s best (and most cathartic lines) are spoken by Ferrera, who tells Barbie, “It kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough.”
Her monologue about the impossible task of being a woman in the real world is so spot on, I’m sure every woman in the cinema felt exactly the same emotional impact of her words:
“We have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. You have to never get old. Never be rude. You never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”
That speech alone (which goes on for longer than I’ve quoted above) is worth spending $25 to see.