Life in Barbie Land, the utopian pink paradise that’s residence to life-size variations of each Barbie doll that has ever existed, is one lengthy celebration. Barbie (performed by Margot Robbie) wakes up in her dream home each morning, hangs on the seashore all day with the opposite Barbies and plenty of admiring Kens, then hosts a women’ evening that’s one lengthy choreographed dance sequence. It’s a lifetime of prescribed pleasure, a brand-managed universe the place nothing is ever allowed to go unsuitable and Barbie’s completely arched heels are by no means allowed to the touch the ground. Which is what makes it notably humorous when she, mid-dance, asks aloud, “Do you guys ever take into consideration dying?” File scratch.
So begins the motion of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a blockbuster journey that bakes a giant Mattel-branded cake and tries to eat it too, poking enjoyable on the political limitations of America’s most well-known doll whereas additionally giving her a plausible hero’s journey. Combining the meta jokiness with a heap of motivational sincerity is not any straightforward job, however Barbie is a really charming success, an odyssey of self-improvement for a plastic idol whose motive for being is to by no means change, to all the time be the identical excellent best. As with Gerwig’s earlier two films—the wildly profitable Girl Hen and Little Ladies—it’s a intelligent meditation on the nightmarish puzzle of merely making an attempt to exist as a girl in society, solely with extra Day-Glo outfits.
Initially, it appears that evidently Barbie will likely be following a method set by different films about manufacturers, corresponding to The Lego Film and Sonic the Hedgehog, the place a personality from the model world crosses some dimensional barrier into our personal, blunders round, and tries to reckon with the miserable mundanity of actuality. As Robbie’s Barbie (her full identify is Stereotypical Barbie, to tell apart herself from the Barbies with jobs like Physician or President) is made to wrestle along with her existential angst via a sequence of dramatic occasions, she is tasked with a quest to the actual world to determine what’s unsuitable along with her.
Barbie’s favourite Ken (Ryan Gosling) tags alongside, partly in help, partly as a result of his solely perform in life is to be close to her. Whereas Barbie is the thing that Barbie Land revolves round, Ken is distinctly missing in function, repeatedly remarking that his job is designated merely as “Seaside”—not lifeguard, not even swimmer. He’s simply Seaside Ken, ceaselessly standing on the sand in his board shorts, a smile frozen on his face. Gosling’s efficiency hilariously illuminates the shallow however intense anguish of the purposeless motion determine, a type of Toy Story psychodrama given flesh and blood (although Barbie does make it clear that she and all her mates have solely featureless bumps the place their genitals can be).
If in case you have even a tiny query concerning the guidelines of Barbie Land and the way it coexists with our actuality, please drop them. Gerwig, who co-wrote the movie along with her companion and frequent collaborator, Noah Baumbach, is just not too hung up on the principles of transit between universes—simply know that it’s one way or the other doable for Barbie and Ken to hop between environments with ease. What’s extra essential is that, when confronted with our world, Barbie should deal with twin horrors: the belief that life for ladies is just not the manicured, you-can-do-anything dream marketed by Mattel’s merchandise, and that many real-world girls in truth resent her for representing an unimaginable commonplace.
It might be very straightforward for this self-referential gambit to fall flat on its face: Barbie’s limits as an icon of feminism have been broadly mentioned since her launch, in 1959. Mattel’s deep involvement with the movie additionally looks like a artistic sinkhole that’d be troublesome for Gerwig to beat, irrespective of how onerous she strives to wink on the viewers. However by inserting Barbie on our glum planet and forcing her to reckon along with her function, Gerwig does one way or the other dig up some actual profundity. Take away Stereotypical Barbie from Barbie Land and plonk her into Los Angeles, and she or he’s simply one other girl struggling to search out which means in a world that’s inherently hostile to her very presence. Her real-life avatar seems to be Gloria (a beautiful efficiency from America Ferrera), a Mattel worker who’s racked with comparable doubts about Twenty first-century womanhood.
Ken, in the meantime, encounters a world that affirms and helps him (or not less than the hunky male physique he occupies), which fills him with a radioactive sense of empowerment. That is the place Barbie’s meta cleverness really intersects with actual plot stakes: Gerwig neatly realizes that whereas a real-life Barbie would face solely skepticism and critique, Ken is the final word empty vessel simply ready to be crammed up with nonsense. However Barbie by no means descends into an affordable girls-versus-boys ultimate showdown; it simply reckons with the other ways self-image will get offered to us, the weary, prepared client, even because the world grows savvier and extra cynical. That it does so via brilliant musical numbers, acidic quips, and the fitting scoop of sentimentalism is all of the extra spectacular. Barbie is figuring out, but it surely nonetheless has an optimistic twinkle in its eye about how its protagonist may transfer previous different folks’s projections of her. In spite of everything, there’s no disaster that may’t be solved with a superb dance celebration.
