The “Barbie” movie could have been alright if it weren’t directed by Greta Gerwig, who until this point we have had no reason to distrust.
Her film “Lady Bird” is an offbeat coming-of-age story for an oft-infuriating character whose emotional proximity to the viewer makes her impossible not to love. Gerwig’s take on “Little Women” could make any viewer’s childhood look bleak by comparison. The March sisters’ bonds and individual journeys are innovative despite the age of their source material. Even “Frances Ha,” which Gerwig wrote and in which she stars, while not as polished, is an intimate portrait of a love- and life-affirming character.
So “Barbie” didn’t just have whatever expectations one might have of a live-action Barbie movie. It had the expectations of a Gerwig film — something personal, something moving, a tight and sensical script. We might not expect a “live-action Barbie movie” to be flawless. In fact, had Gerwig not raised expectations, the movie might have exceeded them. There are some quite catchy musical numbers. It’s kind of like “Grease” with even more outfit changes, a pastel and pink color scheme, blonder hair and the polish of a blockbuster production budget.
As is, any flaws are glaring. Instead of thinking “Wow, I didn’t think I would like a Barbie movie, but that was quite enjoyable for the most part,” I feel betrayed. The colors, the music, the production value all feel like an admittedly well-constructed mask for a mediocre-at-best script. Where is Gerwig in all this? I trusted her. I came into that theater confident I would walk out emotionally altered, at the least. Why am I leaving mildly confused that the greatest emotional response I had was the desire for Ken’s fluffy, rainbow “I am Kenough” hoodie?
Yes, there are some good jokes. The film starts with the reference to “2001: A Space Odyssey” seen in early trailers: Little girls play with baby dolls in a desert, only to shatter them against the rocks when Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie, “Babylon”) enters the scene. The film’s inciting incident is funny because of how out of character it seems: Barbie starts having irrepressible thoughts of death, a pivot from her joyous, pink demeanor. Ken’s (Ryan Gosling, “Drive”) entire arc is a joke. When he and Stereotypical Barbie travel — by car, boat, spaceship, tandem bike, camper van, snowmobile and roller skates — from Barbie Land to the real world, Ken discovers that despite what the Barbies in Barbie Land believe, “men rule the world.” He is enchanted by patriarchy, at least his limited understanding of it — men and horses. He boasts to Barbie that a woman asked him for the time. Ken’s friend Allan (Michael Cera, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”) has been to the real world many times and claims that all of *NSYNC was composed of escaped Allans. Later, the film is interrupted by an ad for “Depression Barbie,” who bears a perpetual frown and mascara-stained under eyes, eats Starbursts until her jaw hurts and keeps watching reruns of BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
For any adults watching, the jokes are the best part of the movie, and they’re enough to make it fun. The story itself feels directed at children. Who is this movie for? It seems Gerwig and co-writer and romantic partner Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story”) didn’t want to rob the children who actually play with Barbies of a Barbie movie but also wanted to make something suitable for the audience who have enjoyed her films to this point — the adults who might never have expected to be fighting for tickets to see a Barbie movie on opening weekend.
The film wants to reach everyone — the trailer states “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.” But it’s disjointed, and because it reaches for an audience larger than the viewers who already trust Gerwig, she seems uncertain whether she can trust this wider audience to understand what she’s saying. The film does that infuriating if not downright insulting thing of explaining everything to the viewer as if they can’t pick up on subtext or subtlety, as if they have as shaky and infrequent an understanding of reality as the film’s protagonist. When Robbie is stripped of makeup to deliver lines about feeling ugly, the narrator (Helen Mirren, “Fast X”) interrupts to give a “note to the director” that Robbie was the wrong person to cast if they wanted to make this point. It’s funny, and it’s true, but weren’t we all thinking that already? Can we come to no conclusions on our own? The whole film is desperate to make us aware how self-aware it is.
This is never truer than with the bizarre and unnecessary inclusion of Mattel as an antagonist who changes nothing. We’re meant to wonder how Gerwig convinced the company to let her make fun of it. But she offers little criticism. It’s far from an exposé. Mattel is portrayed as a company run entirely by men (Will Ferrell, (“Megamind”) as CEO) who … don’t want Barbie and Ken to mess with things in the real world? It’s not a concern tied to any that we could hold against the real Mattel. The consequences of an escaped Barbie aren’t even clear. The only real-world effect of these characters’ actions is to change which Mattel products are selling best.
Mattel, whose inclusion changes nothing, can hardly be considered a suitable antagonist. Ken might as well be the villain, turning Barbie Land into a male utopia, but his personality is 100% stupidity and his arc is 100% humor — it’s hard to feel seriously threatened by a character who doesn’t feel even tangentially realistic.
Maybe I was setting myself up for disappointment by hoping that a movie about dolls would feel human. But if nothing else, even after Gerwig said she wants to make big, blockbuster movies, I trusted her to give us something personal. This is where Gerwig is great. Any larger points her films make are grown from personal moments and introspective discoveries. Any “Little Women” fan knows Jo’s (Saoirse Ronan, “Lady Bird”) “I’m so lonely” monologue. She feels this loneliness despite being “sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for.” It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it resonates because we watch Jo, this character we care deeply about, discover it. She’s not trying to tell us something new so much as she’s figuring out her own frustrating, complex feelings, and that emotional intimacy makes what she says feel like something new. We think yes, I’ve felt that too. Gerwig didn’t write this screenplay alone, unlike the screenplays for her previous two films, but regardless of how she and Baumbach share the responsibility for its flaws, it remains disappointing. And the emotional chasm between the characters and the viewer, which Gerwig usually bridges, is a directorial issue as much as it stems from the writing.
There’s a monologue in “Barbie” from Gloria (America Ferrera, “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”), the real-world woman who played with Barbie and whom Barbie brings back to Barbie Land. When nearly all the Barbies have been brainwashed into complying with Ken’s patriarchy, Gloria breaks their anti-feminist hypnosis with a speech about the impossibly-conflicting societal expectations of women. They are supposed to be career women but also spend time with their children but also not talk about their children all the time. They have to be thin but not too thin, and they have to be pretty but not too provocative. Gloria monologues on, listing more contradictions, showing the audience that this is a Feminist Movie.
But … yes, and? We know everything she’s saying. We know being a woman is hard. We know about these conflicting expectations. Maybe this is new information to the Barbies who thought all feminist issues were solved by the 21st century, but we’re not living in Barbie Land. I’m truly happy for the Barbies’ social progress, but we can’t pretend stating problems we’re already well aware of says something valuable about how to pursue our own.
Gloria’s monologue falls flat because it’s directed at us. She’s been thinking this for ages, it seems. There’s no personal discovery there. It’s one hardly developed character who exists purely as a messenger. She, alongside the Barbies, is part of capital-w Women, the film’s central monolithic noncharacter whose lack of specificity is itself degrading. Her speech is not introspective or character-focused because she doesn’t matter, so the potential power of the monologue rests on her saying something new, which she doesn’t. And then we’re expected to clap.
The film wants to be feminist. It starts with a joke about Barbie having solved all feminist issues. Isn’t it funny how untrue that is?, we laugh. There are still so many issues. Then Gloria comes in to reiterate these issues and the fact that they exist. Ken has his whole stint with patriarchy. Yep, that’s a thing. For sure, Ken.
The film’s take on feminism is tied up with motherhood, a theme common in Gerwig’s work. Like all of its themes, it is clearly present — here is your allotment of scenes related to motherhood — but is minimally explored. Gloria and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt, “Stuck in the Middle”) have few moments together (Gloria is too busy giving speeches), the most emotional of which is when Sasha sets her petulance aside and convinces her mother to drive back to Barbie Land to help the Barbies overthrow the Kens’ regime. It’s a sweet moment, but it’s unclear what changed Sasha’s mind. Their relationship looks complicated, but we only get this impression as outside viewers. Their lack of characterization keeps us too far away to actually understand it, and the fact that the film removes them from their usual circumstances and lets their mother-daughter interactions play out in a parallel world doesn’t help.
What are we supposed to do about any of it? We never get that far. The film is too busy throwing out additional themes in case we’re let down by all the failed feminism and performative self-awareness. If Gerwig and Baumbach can’t solve sexism, maybe they can at least make some bland statement about what it means to be human? Life is hard, yes, but here’s a montage of Small Moments that make humanity worth coveting anyway. What does that have to do with anything? Well, Stereotypical Barbie needs an ending, doesn’t she? And at the end of the film, she doesn’t have one, so … let’s make her mortal and give her a vagina.
The end of the film feels like a line-up to end each character’s arc, one after the other, in largely unsatisfying ways. Because it’s not personal, it’s not emotional. Because it’s not personal, it can’t make any of the points at which it grasps. If you go in with few expectations, it’s a fun movie. You’ll see where all the world’s pink paint went. There’s a Charlie XCX song that I’ll be listening to for months. But inside the fantasy world, the dance sequences, the wrapping paper of jokes, the film’s heart is weak, beating against half-formulated themes and so afraid of not making a big enough point that it freezes and pushes its characters away, as if forgetting in its paralysis that they are the only way it could have made even a small point.
Daily Arts Writer Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.