Barbie

Scott Hardie: “It ruled.”

Greta Gerwig famously hosted "Movie Church" for the Barbie cast, showing them one classic movie each week during production to communicate ideas that she wanted to bring into her own film. The influence of each of those forerunners is up there on screen, and so it is for two other films in less direct ways. First, Batman Begins changed the modern movie's relationship with intellectual property, treating it with loving respect as if an inviolable contract with the audience mandates that the movie neither change the lore nor condescend to it. (Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films get undeserved praise for this in my opinion; they condescend to the material left and right.) The Barbie movie is not just a cinematic encyclopedia of Barbie lore; it manifests a love and sense of nostalgia for the material that rivals any that a fan could possibly feel for it. Even when the film must inevitably acknowledge the doll's problematic implications in a more progressively feminist world than the one in which she was invented, there's an abiding undercurrent of love for the toy, and for the positivity that Barbie can signify at her best. And second, The Lego Movie wrote a brand new playbook for movies based on toys that lack sufficient mythology of their own to adapt into screenplays, and Barbie follows it closely and shamelessly, even casting the same actor to play the genial but nonetheless malicious "real world" villain who appropriates the children's toy for his own purposes. Thank goodness that The Lego Movie's meta premise turned out so well, because it paved the way for Barbie to use a trip into the "real world" as a way for the doll quite literally to speak for herself. Some interactions with actual girls would have been nice—as Kelly said after we watched it, most girls play with the doll as a fun dress-up activity rather than for the aspirational girls-can-grow-up-to-be-anything message that Mattel markets—but otherwise, the movie successfully dramatizes Barbie's relationship with several important parties who have a claim to her legacy. Had this movie been made a decade ago, it would have been a straight dramatic tale about the character of Barbie trying to achieve some MacGuffin-like goal within her world for plot purposes; today, it gets to be a story about what the doll means, incorporating layers of shifting cultural attitudes and critical interpretations about the Barbie toy phenomenon into a much more interrogative and satisfying meta-story. (Example: There's a brief scene where Barbie compliments an old woman who seems not to need it, having already learned Barbie's lesson. Studio execs wanted to cut the scene, arguing that it could be eliminated without any effect on the rest of the plot. Gerwig refused, saying that if the scene was cut, she wouldn't know what the movie was about.)

If I'm making the movie sound as boring as a college thesis assignment, trust me, it's anything but: The movie gets to the first gut-busting, laugh-out-loud joke within the first few minutes, and packs a surprising number more of them. I haven't seen a movie that made me laugh or think this much since Everything Everywhere All at Once a year and a half ago. It's clearly having a blast playing with multiple levels of reality and meta-commentary at the same time, at one point even contorting into a TV commercial for itself, because why not? Every aspect of the production has been executed with maximum confidence in the movie's approach, and it pays off very well. My only criticism is that America Ferrera's character sort of disappears in the final act and doesn't get an ending (I'd have assigned her to the Mattel C-suite in a meaningful job), but it doesn't matter what I think, any more than it does for the angry men out there review-bombing the movie or idiotically setting toys on fire in protest of the movie's accurate assessment that men like Ken are superfluous to the meaning of Barbie, hilariously proving the movie's points about their impotent anger. As for Ferrera, she gets the best scene in the movie, making a comment about the futility of trying to inhabit society's definition of womanhood that slowly turns into a monologue clearly ported directly from Gerwig's brain to the screenplay. That a summer movie could be this hugely entertaining is a achievement; that it could simultaneously have this much on its mind and communicate it all so well is a triumph.This review contains spoilers. Reveal it.

− July 31, 2023 • more by Scott • log in or register to reply