Will Barbie go down as one of the greatest toys and movies of all time?
THE TOP 5 ABOUT “BARBIE”
5. Barbieland
Barbie, as a film, is so succinctly and entirely Greta Gerwig’s own. It explores themes near and dear to her heart as a filmmaker (if you haven’t seen Gerwig’s prior films, Lady Bird and Little Women, do yourself a favor and watch those modern masterpieces). The movie is rooted in side-splitting and thought-provoking emotional storytelling, the kind she’s cut her teeth on, and it utilizes her own favorite films as key references for stylistic and tonal choices. Nowhere are Gerwig’s creative influences more palpable than in the Barbieland sequences.
The production design, curated by Sarah Greenwood, and set decoration by Katie Spencer, are captivatingly captured by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (who shot Scorsese’s The Irishman, for God’s sake). Barbieland is a primary color-fueled fever dream that cultivates cinematic cues from the likes of The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Gone With the Wind, and beyond. While Barbie may not be a full-tilt musical, it is certainly a very musically-driven film. Gerwig’s embracing of classical soundstage musical techniques, such as the implementation of matte paintings and miniatures, is absolutely wonderful and only strengthens the film as a whole.
4. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Script
Listen, it’s pretty simple: if you’re not down with a Barbie movie that opens with a shot-by-shot recreation of the unforgettable ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’m not sure you know what joy is. This insane opening of Barbie sets the tone, making it crystal clear that this is not going to be a surface-level take on the material.
The script, written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (acclaimed filmmaker in his own right, but here very much the Ken to Gerwig’s Barbie, if you will), feels driven by sheer delirious, infectious creative joy alone. There’s a real sense of indulgence and a lack of inhibition in the story structuring that works as a monumental strength here, taking the fierce creativity of childhood imagination, which is so core to Barbie’s story, and making it a pillar of the scripting itself.
Simultaneously, it’s also a relentlessly subversive and ambitiously thematic work. The results are hysterical and often deeply moving in some surprisingly articulate ways.
3. Ryan Gosling as Ken
Ryan Gosling is one of the best actors of his generation. Whether he’s delivering startlingly reserved and emotionally understated work (Drive, Blade Runner 2049, First Man), big, broad, and hammy performances (Crazy, Stupid, Love, The Nice Guys), or something in-between (La La Land), Gosling has proven himself a more-than-adept and ever-versatile performer. But to paraphrase the film itself, Ken in Barbie is the role Gosling was made for.
Completely unhinged, free-wheeling, bombastic, and ludicrously entertaining for every single second of time that he spends on-screen, Gosling is immaculate as the empty-headed doll who does beach. From the moment he’s introduced, Gosling is a scene-stealer, but as the film escalates and Ken gets an unexpected and absolutely hysterical character arc all his own, Gosling only digs deeper into the lunacy.
Gosling is never not in perfect synchrony with Greta Gerwig’s direction in Barbie, and it is a phenomenal performance to witness.
2. Margot Robbie as Barbie
Margot Robbie’s performance as the titular Barbie in Barbie is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Much like Gosling, I would argue that Robbie is similarly one of the boldest and most exciting performers of her time. Not only has she made meals out of morsels in comic-book blockbusters of varying quality, but she has routinely taken on challenging roles that push beyond convention in exciting ways, with her performances in auteur-driven films like Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood and Chazelle’s Babylon serving as wonderful encapsulations of just how left-of-center she’s willing to push in service of the larger story and film as a whole.
Barbie is a film whose protagonist shouldn’t work as a main character. Robbie’s Barbie has no ‘I want’ moment in the first act because she wants for nothing. And brilliantly, Gerwig sews this into the very fabric of the story and ultimately makes it a tale of a character fighting against the tides of a changing world. Robbie’s Barbie ultimately realizes that while she didn’t want anything to change, she needed things to change more than she could have known.
In executing this arc, audiences get to witness Margot Robbie whittle her performance away to an insanely open and vulnerable degree. She begins Barbie as an unfaltering ideal and ends it very much as an infallibly faulty human, and Robbie brings the audience with her every step of the way in stunningly affecting fashion.
1. Greta Gerwig, the Imaginer
Margot Robbie’s performance as the titular Barbie in Barbie is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Much like Gosling, I would argue that Robbie is similarly one of the boldest and most exciting performers of her time. Not only has she made meals out of morsels in comic-book blockbusters of varying quality, but she has routinely taken on challenging roles that push beyond convention in exciting ways, with her performances in auteur-driven films like Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood and Chazelle’s Babylon serving as wonderful encapsulations of just how left-of-center she’s willing to push in service of the larger story and film as a whole.
Barbie is a film whose protagonist shouldn’t work as a main character. Robbie’s Barbie has no ‘I want’ moment in the first act because she wants for nothing. And brilliantly, Gerwig sews this into the very fabric of the story and ultimately makes it a tale of a character fighting against the tides of a changing world. Robbie’s Barbie ultimately realizes that while she didn’t want anything to change, she needed things to change more than she could have known.
In executing this arc, audiences get to witness Margot Robbie whittle her performance away to an insanely open and vulnerable degree. She begins Barbie as an unfaltering ideal and ends it very much as an infallibly faulty human, and Robbie brings the audience with her every step of the way in stunningly affecting fashion.
RGM RATING
(B+)
Since her inception back in 1959, Barbie has become a near-constant fixture in pop culture. Created by Ruth Handler and manufactured and distributed by Mattel, the Barbie fashion doll has been both influencing American pop culture and being influenced by it for the better part of a century. Much has changed since 1959, and yet, much has stayed the same. Generations of children have grown up with Barbie serving as a fundamental figure of both their innocence and their first feelings of embarrassment or self-consciousness. In 2023, Barbie is both a politically and emotionally-loaded figure unto herself.
Now, it isn’t hard to imagine a Barbie film that doesn’t even touch any of that larger context with a ten-foot pole. Hell, Mattel has made dozens of animated Barbie films over the years which do exactly that, engaging solely with the pristine porcelain plastic of Barbie at face value. But Greta Gerwig’s new live-action Barbie film does something decidedly different: not only does Gerwig embrace the larger metatext inherent to the character and her existence, she turns what could have so easily been a corporate-mandated piece of I.P. synergy into a bona fide expression of self through the medium of cinema, in glorious fashion. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie absolutely rules.
In many ways, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie gets to have its cake and eat it too. It is both a decadent visual delight and a heady exploration of the very themes and ideas inherent to the creation and sustainment of such decadence. It’s a film about the relationship between an artist, their art, and their audience and the evolution of that relationship over the course of decades. What it may occasionally lack in narrative focus or concentration, it more than makes up for with infectious joy and gargantuan thematic swings that it is breathlessly intent on exploring in engaging ways.
In a way not dissimilar to its release-day double-bill partner Oppenheimer, Barbie is an exploration of how culture shifts and how even works created with the best of intentions can be bastardized by the world receiving them. But where Oppenheimer ends on a fatalistic meditation, Barbie ends with an altogether inspiring affirmation: that so long as the artist imbues themselves into the art, the art will find its own way through the world.
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