Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is packed with ingenious ideas and imagery wherever you turn. It starts with a play on 2001: A Space Odyssey, where little girls bash their baby dolls on rocks in favor of the beautiful new grown-up doll with long hair and breasts. And we’re off.
From there, we jump cut to Barbieland, a matriarchal society filled with Barbies of all sorts—President Barbie and Supreme Court justice Barbie and Nobel Prize-winning Barbie. The Barbies have arched toes and feet that never touch the ground, all the better to wear stiletto heels. They don’t so much move as glide through Barbieland, as though being steered by the invisible hand of a young girl. Kens are around, too, with no discernible purpose beyond competing for the attention of the Barbies. It’s there that we meet Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), whose favorite Ken (Ryan Gosling)—he of rock hard abs, cartoonishly blond hair, and a fondness for wearing headbands like he’s a member of Cobra Kai—says his job is “beach.”(Not lifeguard or surfer, mind you. Just beach.) We also meet “Just Allan” (Michael Cera), a bit scrawny compared to the Kens, who has no idea how he got there. (He is, of course, based on an actual doll. The film is nothing if not historically accurate.)
Robbie, who excels at playing wide-eyed naifs, is predictably wonderful here—never losing Barbie’s touching sweetness even as she learns some harsh realities about the real world. But the real secret weapon is Gosling, who leans into the over-the-top goofiness of his peacocking and dim character. It’s a master class in finding truth in broad comedy.
One day, after a typical “best day ever!” of riding her dream car, not kissing Ken (although their faces nearly touch), and frolicking with her fellow Barbies, Stereotypical Barbie suddenly blurts out: “Do you guys ever think about death?”
Record scratch.
Barbie nervously laughs it off and the party continues.
The next morning, she wakes up with…bad breath! Her perfect (waterless) shower feels cold. Her (fake) waffle is burnt. And, horror of horrors, her feet are flat!
She visits with a Barbie guru of sorts, “Weird Barbie”—so named because her girl cut her hair in a choppy, asymmetrical style, put her in weird clothes, painted her face like a clown, and pulled on her so hard her legs are permanently splayed. (Weird Barbie owners basically rule.) As she can no longer join the ranks of Barbieland, Weird Barbie instead dispels advice from a hill, joined by some discontinued Barbies, including pregnant Barbie, “Midge,” and “Growing Up Skipper” whose—wait for it—breasts grow when you rotate her arm. (Gerwig and her writing and life partner Noah Baumbach have loads of fun with the very rich text of Barbie history. Did you know there was once a Sugar Daddy Ken?)
Weird Barbie tells Barbie that there’s been a glitch in the matrix, or some such thing—her human must be thinking of death and sad things and this somehow has translated to her. Her only hope is to enter the “real world” and ease the pain of her owner.
Scared but determined, Barbie hops into her Dream Car and speeds off. As she triumphantly sings Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine”—a bit of a sly joke as it’s not just a female anthem, it’s a lesbian one—Ken’s voice chimes in with her. He’s hidden in the back of the car and he’s going with her, whether she likes it or not.
From there, the art department has a field day as Barbie and Ken travel through a candy-colored dream world—in a convertible, in a rowboat, and eventually on canary yellow rollerblades—until they land in the real world (well, real-ish, at least) of Venice Beach.
Almost instantly, Barbie feels something different. The gaze of men is not benign but vaguely threatening. Ken shrugs, he doesn’t pick up on any menace in the way women are looking at him.
So yes, Barbie and Ken are about to discover that the real world is the opposite of Barbieland. Men wield more of the power. The women are more like, well, the Kens.
Ken goes off to learn more about this world—he seems to think lots of horses are involved—while Barbie tries to find her depressed girl. It’s more complicated than that. There was a girl, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) who had a Barbie, but she outgrew her. She’s in a rebellious phase—scowling at her mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), dressing in baggy clothes, sounding off against corporate greed and the patriarchy. You better believe she wants nothing to do with Barbie now. It was, in fact, Gloria, dissatisfied with her life as an executive assistant at Mattel and feeling unloved by her daughter, who was playing with Barbie again. Her imagination had run a bit wild and she was idly sketching new Barbie concepts: Existential Crisis Barbie and Cellulite Barbie.
Barbie and Ken (but mostly Barbie) are being chased by the dark-clad suits of Mattel, including the CEO (Will Ferrell), who fears that Barbie in the real world will unleash chaos.
Barbie does manage to get back to Barbieland, this time with Gloria and Sasha in tow, only to discover that everything has changed. It’s now something called Ken-dom and instead of a Barbie Dream House there’s Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House. (He doesn’t care if it’s redundant. He likes saying it.) Worse still, the Barbies have been brainwashed and seem to have forgotten that they’re all smart, capable, and independent women. And the final indignity? “Closer to Fine” has been replaced by Matchbox Twenty’s insipid and aggressive “Push” (sample lyric: “I wanna push you around; well I will, well I will”) as the official Ken-dom anthem.
Will Barbie be able to save Barbieland from the patriarchy? Will she and Ken ever really kiss? Will Gloria and Sasha make up? The correct answer is: Who cares when we’re having this much fun?
That said, I do wish the film had tread a bit more lightly in terms of its messaging. There’s one too many speeches about trampling the patriarchy and the maddening double standards that come with being a woman. It’s particularly unnecessary because Barbie already does show us these things—cleverly, slyly, and creatively. I wish Gerwig had felt confident enough in her subtext to leave out the actual text.
The final question: Does Barbie seem like an ad for Barbie? Or, more specifically, how much control does it seem like Mattel exerted over the finished product? I give it pretty high marks on that front. Yes, it celebrates the new evolved version of Barbie. (Over the years, Barbie went from being a feminist nightmare that created an impossible body standard for impressionable young girls to a doll that at least tried to instill girls with confidence by showing different body types and professional achievement.) The Barbies of Barbieland are living in a feminist utopia and believe they’ve accurately reflected the real world. On the other hand, those executives at Mattel? All men. Even if that’s only partly true, it’s pretty damning. And there’s a scene where Sasha tells Barbie off, calling her a corporate tool and a fascist. Not sure that’s part of the Mattel employee handbook. Finally, the film ends with a spectacularly funny and unexpected line suggesting that while Gerwig and co. may not have had total creative control, they had lots of it.
Mostly, Barbie is laugh-out-loud funny and a sheer delight. I’ll be watching it again for sure—but I might fast forward over some of the speechy parts.