What’s tall and blonde and plastic all over? The subject of what’s shaping up to be the movie of the summer, of course. Barbie is a hyper-femme roller-coaster ride full of twists and turns as emotional as they are entertaining. Greta Gerwig’s triumphant take on the statuesque icon is a poignant picture of the rocky transition from girlhood to womanhood. It’s a powerful celebration of femininity, one that recognizes its contradictions, its joys, its frustrations, its limitations, and its freedoms.
Gerwig brings a nuance to the script (co-written with her personal and professional partner, Noah Baumbach), which both reveres our pretty-in-pink Vitruvian woman while remaining critical of what she’s come to symbolize. Under Gerwig’s direction, Barbies and Kens frolic beneath the sunlit skies of Barbieland. It’s the ultimate dollhouse, the dream Mattel (Barbie’s on- and off-screen manufacturer) has pedaled to children for generations. And, oh, is it pink. Name a shade and expect to find it. Salmon? Check. Rose? You got it. Hot? Just ask that Barbie sun. Millennial? Well what would this movie be without it? But while it brims with possibility and excitement, Barbie’s everyday life is a pattern on repeat – a perfect cycle complete with Lizzo’s earworm of a sitcom-y showtune “Pink.” It’s an illusion of choice where the only option is uniform perfection.
This is the crux of Barbieland. Things are simply as they should be. Women are doctors, reporters, construction workers, Supreme Court justices, the president. And Ken meanwhile is, well, really just Ken. Sarah Greenwood’s production design is stellar, mixing fully functional props with sets more akin to the fantasy of a dollhouse.
Each Barbie and Ken shines in their childlike optimism and enthusiasm, playing to the audience with a charming lack of sophistication. The ensemble cast is brilliant: Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Simu Liu, Ncuti Gatwa, Alexandra Shipp, and their castmates bring enough distinctions to their Barbies and Kens to keep Barbieland from becoming a realm of mindless clones. Like a child’s game of dolls, this is a rollicking society full of personality and interpersonal relationships. Ryan Gosling especially stands out, somehow managing to make a subplot that boils down to “Ken Discovers Sexism” into something that lets us feel for Barbie’s eternal sidekick. His airheaded harmlessness inspires a sort of puppy-dog sympathy that made me agonize over his introduction to the dogmatic misogyny that plagues society.
Robbie is the star of the show, of course. It’s the role she was born for, her megawatt charisma brilliantly matched to the world’s most famous doll. Robbie imbues her performance with a layer of naive optimism that’s slowly torn away by the realities of the Real World (a setting treated as a proper noun in the script and on a prop billboard). It’s heartbreaking to watch. As with Ken, I desperately wanted Barbie to remain ignorant to the social woes of the real world, and watched with dread as she uncovers new layers of self-consciousness. There’s no doubt that Robbie deserves award attention for the awe-inspiring balancing act she nails as the film’s veneer of silliness peels back to reveal something much deeper.
Like Gosling and Margot Robbie, America Ferrera is unquestionably perfect in her role. Growing up an awkward Latina, Ferrera was as much a childhood icon to me as Barbie ever was and it’s thrilling to watch the woman who helped shape my adolescence drive home the most pivotal themes of the movie. As Gloria, a Mattel employee living in the Real World, Ferrera commands gravity as our POV character. She serves as the ultimate reminder that it is our mothers who experienced the complex contradictions of womanhood before us. Beneath the trappings of adulthood remains the child we were, unsure and anxious but moving forward anyway.
Barbie’s choice to allow its fantasy to seep into the real world is inspired. Yes, this is the reality we know – full of catcallers and cruelty and corporate suits – but it’s not so grittily real that it stifles the fun. The labyrinthine offices of Mattel exemplifies this, and a zany CEO character (Will Ferrell) highlights it. Even the “portal” from the real world to Barbieland commits to this playfulness, introducing a nebulous method of reaching either realm that’s comically childlike but accepted by those in the Real World as a matter of course.
Cycles of life and age act as an important theme in the film. In a stirring moment, Barbie encounters an elderly woman at a bus stop and simply says: “you’re beautiful.” She whispers it with such reverence, as if uttering a cosmic truth about the miracle of aging. To live a life of experience not defined by the number of jobs you’ve had but by the mark of every single day you wake up. It’s a reminder that Barbie is both eternally young and yet also older than many of us.
This is Gerwig’s power: to take an ageless icon of femininity and remind us that as much as she as she defined us, we will forever continue to define her. There’s a deeply held understanding in this film that the capitalist feminism Barbie represents is inherently flawed – women will not find liberation through professional excellence alone, not when entire systems thrive upon our subjugation. Likewise, Gerwig’s film calls into question the limitations of “representation” as a means of social progress. Sure, the Barbies of Barbieland have every job one could possibly imagine. But who sits in the boardroom making every decision about her? If I had one wish, it’s only that we got to dive a little deeper into Barbie’s impact on beauty standards – even if we do get a fun, fourth-wall-breaking joke about it.
That said, there’s such an incisive understanding here of what it means to go from girl to woman. As Barbie “matures,” so to speak, it’s both fraught and wonderful. There’s an insightful beauty in the ending of this film, anchoring Barbie’s mark of growth not in necessarily landing a career, but in, for instance, comfortably accessing women’s healthcare for the very first time.
Brimming with love for a long-standing cultural cornerstone, Barbie reminds us that there’s a safety in childhood we will always inevitably lose. It’s nostalgic and therefore bittersweet. It asks an important question: If the woman society looks to as a guiding example has fears too, why do we put such pressure on ourselves to live without anxieties or regrets? Embrace the unknown, Barbie tells us, and feel comfort in knowing you’re not the first to feel scared.
