Greta Gerwig confuses toys with obnoxious social messaging.
Greta Gerwig’s $145 million Barbie movie from Warner Bros. is not for children. Although founded on the Sixties doll made of vinyl compound and marketed by Mattel (whose rainbow-flag logo introduces the film), it only pretends to be fantasy storytelling. Set in pink-motif Barbieland, home of the iconic doll (played by Margot Robbie), it traverses a sci-fi “rip in the continuum between Barbieland and the real world” to allow Gerwig’s jaded-feminist adult social messaging.
The ideal audience for this movie is not young women who happily grew up playing with Barbies but a later vengeful generation that resents the toy’s suggestion of outdated femininity. Barbie opens with a riff on 2001: A Space Odyssey where sullen little girls smash old-fashioned baby dolls (i.e., the idea of motherhood). Non-maternal Barbie (Robbie) towers over these fitful tykes, shadowing them like Kubrick’s black slab and inspiring violent resistance. Doll babies are tossed in the air, then fall into Barbieland, because the idea of women’s liberation has been weaponized.
Gerwig is unperturbed by the fact that Mattel’s product evolution, by which Barbie dolls endlessly changed, kept up with commercial trends. The many variations are accounted for in a cynical overview (narrated by Helen Mirren — why not Ketanji Brown Jackson?) that dismisses those transformations, whether a pregnant Midge doll or Allan, a second-banana boy doll, as unhip. That’s because Barbie the movie derives from Nineties indie-movie hipsterism, whose ambassador, Gerwig, indulges self-satisfied smugness in the script co-written with her consort Noah Baumbach.
The Gerwig-Baumbach duo disingenuously showcase themselves as Barbie and her male doll-mate Ken (played by Ryan Gosling). But they can’t fake any real interest in the Barbie idea, so they shift the entire enterprise into what hipsters know best: their own private, privileged competition. Gerwig has made it to the Hollywood big time in ways Baumbach has not. She’s a media heroine, touted for Oscars every time she directs a movie.
Barbie/Gerwig and Ken/Baumbach fight for dominance in both Barbieland and the real world — the latter being Hollywood suburb Santa Monica, where Will Ferrell as a Mattel exec evokes the lousy, anti-Christmas movie Elf, a favorite of hipsters and faithless wannabes. Any hope of wonder or enchantment gets lost: Gerwig and Baumbach overdo the pink-playground conceit, visually similar to Olivia Wilde’s rancid Don’t Worry Darling. Yet Gerwig’s artifice defies the special feeling that females might know — the fulfilling, personal escape into free femininity, childbearing, family, homemaking, and romance that should be the essence of a Barbie movie. She ignores the childhood fantasy in which kids dream of being wives, moms, teachers, nurses, etc. — roles essential to the world. As for Baumbach: His usual sour diatribes about gender, class, and ethnic identity erupt in the film’s girl-dolls-vs.-boy-dolls subplot. Where’s the fascinating sexual empowerment found in the proto-feminist Barbarella and Robert Zemeckis’s postfeminist doll movie Welcome to Marwen?
Instead, Gerwig and Baumbach promote querulous sloganeering. The multiple Barbies and Kens (multiethnic, overweight, disabled) are airhead protesters, spoofing the Frankie and Annette beach movies. This satire of corporate manufacturing is odd considering that Gerwig and Baumbach themselves are industry faves. (The humorless team forsake imagination for a horrific episode featuring SNL’s never funny Kate McKinnon as an abused Barbie.) They spout outdated grievances about women’s ability to “hold logic and feeling at the same time,” adding irrational complaints about women not being credited for the “control of trains or the flow of commerce” — this after certain female politicians broke constitutional norms (another subplot) urging the nation’s division. The Barbies protesting for a new female-written constitution exploit resentment, not playfulness.
When Barbie grouses about “sexualized capitalism” and pouts “I’m not pretty,” Mirren interrupts: “Note to filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong actress to cast to make this point.” Fact is, tough-blonde Robbie lacks slim, doll-like fragility. Granted, she achieves one of the film’s only two good moments: pantomiming crestfallen Barbie’s plastic stiffness. But Robbie’s lewd, manic stare (perfect for Suicide Squad) is too scary for Barbie. The film’s other good moment belongs, surprisingly, to Gosling, who lip-synchs Matchbox Twenty’s “Push” in perfect raspy parody of a corporate folk-rock teen idol.
After that, Barbie goes to plasticine hell. Diversity hires America Ferrera and Issa Rae give abominable speeches about Latino and black feminist sacrifice, and Rhea Perlman appears morphing Barbie inventor Ruth Handler into Ruth Bader Ginsburg. New Lizzo and Billie Eilish songs provide feminist equity. Things get more child-unfriendly when Gerwig tosses in terms such as “irrepressible thoughts of death,” “Proustian flashback,” and “patriarchy anxiety.” Most kids will probably be bored by Barbie, and even the cool kids might frown at Baumbach’s name-dropping hipster in-jokes about The Godfather (“Coppola’s aesthetic, the genius of Robert Evans, and the architecture of ’70s Hollywood”).
Worst yet: One of the man-hating Barbies sneers, “Like, I was really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League!” How could any decent industry professional attack another filmmaker this way? It’s the ultimate sign that Gerwig and Baumbach know nothing about making pop entertainment. They left the indie-world of American eccentrics to join Hollywood’s obnoxious elite. Frantic, uncheerful, and graceless, Barbie symbolizes a culture that devalues childhood and goodness.
