Life in Barbie Land, the utopian pink paradise that’s dwelling to life-size variations of each Barbie doll that has ever existed, is one lengthy occasion. Barbie (performed by Margot Robbie) wakes up in her dream home each morning, hangs on the seashore all day with the opposite Barbies and lots of admiring Kens, then hosts a ladies’ night time 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 flawed and Barbie’s completely arched heels are by no means allowed to the touch the ground. Which is what makes it significantly humorous when she, mid-dance, asks aloud, “Do you guys ever take into consideration dying?” Report scratch.
So begins the motion of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, a blockbuster journey that bakes an enormous 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 isn’t any straightforward job, however Barbie is a really charming success, an odyssey of self-improvement for a plastic idol whose purpose for being is to by no means change, to all the time be the identical excellent ideally suited. As with Gerwig’s earlier two motion pictures—the wildly profitable Girl Hen and Little Girls—it’s a intelligent meditation on the nightmarish puzzle of merely making an attempt to exist as a lady in society, solely with extra Day-Glo outfits.
Initially, evidently Barbie might be following a system set by different motion pictures about manufacturers, reminiscent of 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 title is Stereotypical Barbie, to tell apart herself from the Barbies with jobs like Physician or President) is made to wrestle together with her existential angst by means of a sequence of dramatic occasions, she is tasked with a quest to the true world to determine what’s flawed together with her.
Barbie’s favourite Ken (Ryan Gosling) tags alongside, partly in assist, partly as a result of his solely perform in life is to be close to her. Whereas Barbie is the article that Barbie Land revolves round, Ken is distinctly missing in goal, repeatedly remarking that his job is designated merely as “Seashore”—not lifeguard, not even swimmer. He’s simply Seashore Ken, perpetually 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 form 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).
In case you have even a tiny query in regards to the guidelines of Barbie Land and the way it coexists with our actuality, please drop them. Gerwig, who co-wrote the movie together with her companion and frequent collaborator, Noah Baumbach, will not be too hung up on the foundations of transit between universes—simply know that it’s someway doable for Barbie and Ken to hop between environments with ease. What’s extra essential is that, when confronted with our world, Barbie should take care of twin horrors: the belief that life for girls will not be the manicured, you-can-do-anything dream marketed by Mattel’s merchandise, and that many real-world girls the truth is resent her for representing an unimaginable commonplace.
It could be very straightforward for this self-referential gambit to fall flat on its face: Barbie’s limits as an icon of feminism have been extensively mentioned since her launch, in 1959. Mattel’s deep involvement with the movie additionally looks like a artistic sinkhole that’d be tough for Gerwig to beat, irrespective of how exhausting she strives to wink on the viewers. However by putting Barbie on our glum planet and forcing her to reckon together with her goal, Gerwig does someway dig up some actual profundity. Take away Stereotypical Barbie from Barbie Land and plonk her into Los Angeles, and he or she’s simply one other girl struggling to search out that 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 related doubts about Twenty first-century womanhood.
Ken, in the meantime, encounters a world that affirms and helps him (or at the least 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 well 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 closing showdown; it simply reckons with the other ways self-image will get bought to us, the weary, prepared shopper, even because the world grows savvier and extra cynical. That it does so by means of vibrant musical numbers, acidic quips, and the fitting scoop of sentimentalism is all of the extra spectacular. Barbie is understanding, nevertheless it nonetheless has an optimistic twinkle in its eye about how its protagonist would possibly transfer previous different individuals’s projections of her. In spite of everything, there’s no disaster that may’t be solved with a very good dance occasion.
