As Barbie helpfully reminds us via an ingenious opening sequence, playtime for young girls before Barbie left much to be desired.  Young girls were given baby dolls to play with, subtly  coercing them into choosing motherhood when they grew up.  When Barbie appeared on the scene in 1959, she liberated the minds of young girls everywhere.  (The movie cannily represents this seismic moment using a famous scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Barbie standing in for the monolith.)  Barbie made it possible for girls to imagine a life other than being a mother.  Girls could see themselves growing up to become pretty, confident and independent women, with their choice of careers ranging from athletes to lawyers to astronauts.  Whereas baby dolls were tools of indoctrination in the guise of toys, Barbie symbolized what was possible.

While symbols can inspire, they do not guarantee change in and of themselves.  Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie, perfectly cast), however, believed that she made lives better for girls everywhere just by her presence, and every day in Barbie Land celebrates that achievement.  She wakes up in her beautiful dream house, waves a cheerful good morning to all of her fellow Barbies, eats a plastic-yet-perfect breakfast and checks in on her how her colleagues are doing.  Lawyer Barbie is kicking ass in court.  Supreme Court Justice Barbies are ruling in her favor.  Construction Worker Barbies are building things.  Writer Barbie is winning accolades.  All of the Barbies are happy and doing great.  The same cannot be said for the Kens, however.

Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling, blond and sporting glimmering abs) is a frustrated alpha male who wants to be more than an accessory.  Additionally, he’s jealous whenever Barbie pays attention to Ken (Simu Liu).  (There are multiple Barbies and multiple Kens.  Please keep up.)  No matter what Ken does, Barbie doesn’t want anything to do with him.  (His attempts to ride a plastic wave at the plastic beach is comically disastrous.)  Later, when Ken tries to convince Barbie that he should stay over because they are boyfriend and girlfriend, she rebuffs him.  It’s her Beach House, not his.  Besides tonight (and every night) is Girls Night.  Ken is hurt at being tossed aside but has no choice but to take it.  In Barbie Land, the Barbies rule, not the Kens.

Barbie’s perfect life is changing, however, and not for the better.  In the middle of a choreographed dance number, Barbie inexplicably asks the other Barbies if they’ve ever thought about dying.  (Queue the needle skip.)  The following morning, everything goes wrong for Barbie.  Her breath smells, her shower is cold, her waffle is burnt and her milk is spoiled.  Even worse, her feet are flat!  Gack!

The other Barbies recommend that she visit Barbie Land’s resident sage, Weird Barbie (a wonderfully kooky Kate McKinnon) for advice.  Weird Barbie tells Barbie that she’s connected to a girl in the Real World who is depressed.  Fortunately, Barbie can use the portal that’s been opened between both worlds to find the girl who’s playing with her and cheer her up.  How does a portal exist between Barbie Land and the Real World?  How will Barbie find the girl when she finally arrives in Los Angeles?  As Weird Barbie tells Barbie, “Don’t think about it too much.”  (I found it refreshing that Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, who wrote the screenplay, refused to let boring stuff like logic get in the way of having fun.)

Barbie’s trip to the Real World begins with a ride in her pink Corvette.  (The “portal” is actually a trip through several fully-realized Play Sets.)  When Barbie started singing along to the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine”, I assumed that Barbie’s journey would be another fish out of water story like Elf.  But then Ken appears and begs Barbie to let him tag along.  When she relents (Ken’s a pest but has his charms), the movie shifts from what would have been a very funny but unsurprising fish out of water story into something more complex and emotionally engaging.

Barbie and Ken arrive at Venice Beach decked out in bright pink outfits and yellow roller blades and are immediately met with ridicule.  The culture of the Real World–male-dominated and testosterone-fueled, is the exact opposite from Barbie Land.  Barbie becomes self-conscious, while Ken is downright giddy.  The Real World celebrates masculinity and he’s thrilled at no longer being #2.  While Ken learns what a patriarchy is all about, Barbie finds the girl she’s come all this way to help.  Unfortunately,  Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) wants nothing to do with Barbie and tells her that she’s the reason why women have it bad.  (Sasha has clearly spent a lot of time on TikTok.)

Wounded by Sasha’s comments, Barbie goes to the Mattel headquarters.  There, the CEO (Will Ferrell in daft manchild mode) tells Barie that everything will go back to normal if she would just get back into her box.  Sensing something is up, Barbie flees and finds the person she actually is connected with, Sasha’s mother Grace (a hyper-neurotic America Ferrera).  Grace became lonely and depressed when Sasha became a teenager and shunned her Barbies.  In an attempt to cheer up Grace and enlighten Sasha, Barbie takes them to Barbie Land, where women run the show.  Little do they know that Ken has already gone back and has changed the place to his liking.

Barbie is as fun as advertised, but it’s much more than a screwball comedy.  The production design, in particular the Barbie Land set, is colorful and eye-catching in ways that only physical sets can accomplish.  (Take that, CGI!)  The movie grooves along to a collection of tunes by Lizzo, Charli XCX, Tame Impala, Dua Lipa and more.  The movie is incredibly funny, with jokes and sight gags coming at a rapid clip I haven’t seen since the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedies from the Eighties.  Margo Robbie and Ryan Gosling, two actors known more for their dramatic roles, magically excel at the broad comedy in this movie.  Will Ferrell is reliably goofy and Michael Cera, playing the discontinued Allan, gives his funniest performance in years.  Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie is undeniably her best movie performance to date.  Finally, as zany and outlandish as Barbie often is, the movie plumbs emotional depths that are rare for blockbuster movies these days.  The screenplay, by writer-director Greta Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach, is filled with sharp observations on gender politics, women in the workplace, and the complex and contradictory lives that women are forced to lead.  Barbie disarms with playful silliness, only to hit right back with moments of shrewd insight and raw emotion.  Highly Recommended.

Analysis

Initially, I thought Barbie would end up being another movie where the character leaves their idyllic life in search of answers to life’s most perplexing questions.  Who am I?  Why am I here?  What is my purpose?  Upon arriving in the Real World, the character struggles to fit in, leading to various culture-clash jokes. Eventually, the character meets a sympathetic person who would help them navigate our world and achieve enlightenment.  Finally, instead of returning home, they decide to stay in the Real World and build a life.  This is basically the plot of the movie Elf.  Barbie starts out this way, but quickly reveals that it’s only using this setup as the launching point for a much more complex and layered movie.  (I don’t say this to disparage Elf, a movie I love and watch whenever it’s on.)

By expanding the scope of the story so that it is not just about Barbie’s journey of self-discovery but also Ken’s and Gloria’s, writers Gerwig and Baumbach were able to weigh-in frequently and often on many topics they feel strongly about.  They use nearly every moment as a launching pad for pointed commentary on gender roles, sexism in everyday life, the conflicting pressures in the lives of modern women, codependency and so on.  Watching all three characters evolve in very unexpected ways until they reach a state of grace in the end was quite a feat to pull off, something I doubt would have worked with a movie focused only on Barbie.

Barbie

Of the three character journey’s within the movie, Barbie’s is essential.  At the beginning of the movie, she’s introduced via a bravura opening scene that parodies 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Just like the use of tools made it possible for primitive man to evolve, Barbie dolls made it possible for young girls to envision a life for themselves besides motherhood.  However, while the line of Barbie dolls was incredibly popular and successful, they were only an ideal of what women could achieve.  A young girl could dream of becoming a doctor or a lawyer when they grew up, living independently in their own home with their own money.  Unfortunately, achieving that goal remains frustratingly difficult because Barbie dolls could not deliver equality and respect.

When the movie begins, Barbie’s life is perfect.  She wakes up in her spacious Dreamhouse, her morning shower is always hot, her milk is fresh and her toast is just right.  Then, reality begins to intrude.  She begins to have thoughts about dying.  Everything in her morning routine becomes a nightmare.  Then her feet go flat.  As Weird Barbie explains, a portal has opened between the real world and the Barbie world.  This is due to Stereotypical Barbie and a human girl creating a reciprocal connection between themselves, a plot element that didn’t add up for me.  Barbie was completely happy before she was receiving pings from Gloria.  The last thing on her mind was mortality, a concept I doubt she understood.  Furthermore, Weird Barbie needs to convince Stereotypical Barbie that she needs to go to the real world in order to get her old life back.  I don’t want to belabor this point because 1) screenplays are rarely perfect, and 2) Gerwig and Baumbach didn’t want boring logic to get in the way of having fun.

Barbie’s eyes are opened immediately after she arrives in downtown LA.  Unlike in her world, the Real World’s society is male-centric.  Women are relegated to subservient roles and constantly deal with sexism.  After Sasha’s harsh words crush her spirit, Barbie agrees to be taken to the Mattel headquarters, where she has the option to return to her world if she follows the CEO’s advice and gets into a box.  Barbie is tempted to simply return home and forget every unpleasant thing she’s experienced, but the option triggers something in Barbie.  She knows she wants to do something besides hitting the reset button, but she doesn’t know what that is just yet.  All Barbie knows is she wants to escape the clutches of her silly corporate overlords.

Once she’s free of Mattel, Barbie figures that the best way to help Gloria out of her is by taking her to Barbie Land.  Unfortunately, when she finds that the Kens have taken over, Barbie becomes depressed herself.  (Having her face-plant on an artificial lawn was a hilarious bit of physical comedy.)  Until this moment, Gerwig and Baumbach haven’t revealed what they had in store for Barbie all along.  Like Pinocchio, Barbie wants to become an actual woman.

I was genuinely surprised by Barbie’s decision because she had been very clear in her dislike of everything associated with being real (bad breath, cellulite, sore feet, etc.)  However, the movie gave us hints along the way that this was what Barbie’s journey was actually about.  Every woman Barbie met in the real world was subtly changing her perception, and collectively those experiences influenced her decision.  The elderly lady at the bus stop, Barbie creator Ruth Handler and Gloria all showed her that womanhood is something that should be celebrated despite its challenges.  How Gerwig and Baumbach made this choice the culmination of Barbie’s journey was a nice bit of narrative poetry.  Instead of going back to being a symbol of inspiration, she wants to walk among those she’s inspired and experience life for herself, just like the angel in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.  Being an eternal deity is nice, but nothing beats being alive.

Gloria

In the beginning, she’s a career woman just like the source of her inspiration.  Unfortunately, she’s stuck in a dead-end job at Mattel as a receptionist.  The men in charge ignore Gloria’s designs and prefer she stay in her cubicle (or corporate box) and leave it to them to run things.  If that wasn’t bad enough, her daughter has become distant and the bond between them is nearly broken.  The movie doesn’t spell out why the two have grown apart, but the implication made is that Sasha’s cynicism clashes over her mother’s unfounded optimism.  Gloria still believes in the promise of Barbie, but Sasha despises everything Barbie stands for.  Sasha’s attitude could also be described as normal teenage rebellion against everything their parents stand for, but her opinion’s sound like they were fed by social media.  After hearing Sasha drop knowledge on a guileless Barbie, I concluded that Sasha’s worldview could only come from spending countless hours on TikTok.

As I mentioned above, the movie glosses over how Gloria and Barbie managed to open a portal between their respective worlds.  Despite Weird Barbie’s explanation, I believe Gloria opened the portal on her own because she had a spiritual connection to Barbie through her job at Mattel.  Barbie had no choice but to “hear” Gloria’s distress signal from the real world and respond.  While meeting Barbie in person does not solve Gloria’s problems with her career or her daughter, it does put her on the path towards changing her approach to life.

Seeing the Barbies reduced to mindless servants by the Kens helped Gloria realize she had allowed the same thing to happen to her in the real world.  She meekly accepted her role as corporate functionary because she believed the men in charge had her best interests in mind.  Over time, Gloria gave up on her goals and resigned herself to an unfulfilling career.  Once Gloria recognizes the parallels between herself and Barbie, she is able to understand her daughter’s behavior.  Sasha stopped respecting her mother because she no longer respected herself.  Gloria allowed others to control her life and had become a corporate doormat.

Fortunately, after watching Alan single-handedly fight off the construction workers, Gloria realizes that the only way she (and the Barbies) will get what they want is if they too put up a fight.  Gloria shifts her worldview into one rooted in pragmatism (a bridge between Barbie’s  optimism and Sasha’s cynicism) and is able to change things for the better.  She helps the Barbies take back control of Barbie Land, pitches her idea of Normal Barbie to the CEO and regains her daughter’s respect, proof that idealism only works when coupled with action.

Ken

Like Barbie and Gloria, Ken’s journey also results in personal growth.  However, Ken’s empowerment initially is a bad thing.  At the outset, Ken is incredibly needy.  He wants Barbie to think of him as her boyfriend, but in Barbie Land, Barbie is in control.  Every time she resists his advances, Ken becomes more insecure.  Both Barbie and Ken know that he is little more than an accessory, and he can’t accept that power dynamic in their “relationship”.  Barbie is perfectly fine without Ken, but a world without Barbie is catastrophic for Ken.  Without her attention, Ken has no reason to exist.  He desperately tries to catch her eye at the fake beach, but his silly attempt at hanging ten is an epic failure.  He then becomes jealous whenever she dares to look at another Ken.  (The irony of gender-swapping the typically insecure female character into the ultra masculine Ken was another master stroke by Gerwig and Baumbach.)

Ken is a stand-in for all controlling men who can’t handle rejection.  If he can’t have Barbie, then he’ll remake the world in his image.  Much to his surprise, Ken discovers that even a world filled with horses, trucks, beer fridges, leather couches and matchbox 20 songs won’t fill the emptiness inside of him.  Fortunately, through his climactic beach-off with the other Kens, he realizes that he can be happy by himself.  He doesn’t need to define his existence in relation to Barbie.  By accepting himself as he is, he realizes that he is “Kenough”.  This comes as a relief to Ken because enforcing the patriarchy is hard work and actually had nothing to do with horses.

While Ken’s journey basically has him go from harmless douchebag, to world-destroying douchebag, to self-aware douchebag, he does emerge as a slightly better version of himself at the end.  This is real progress on Ken’s behalf, at least to the point where Barbie doesn’t have to worry about Ken staging another coup of Barbie Land.  Ultimately, the purpose of Ken’s character is to show how men (like him) can evolve when they are made aware of their boorish behavior.  The truth may hurt, but as with Ken, growth comes when we acknowledge our faults.  For example, men love to mansplain any of their favorite things.  But there’s a difference between expressing one’s love for The Godfather and providing a running commentary of it while watching it with your partner.  It’s all about balance and recognition.  Lastly, any woman who professes to her man that she’s really interested in the Zach Snyder cut of Justice League is being nice.  If you didn’t realize that before, Barbie (movie and character) has just served notice.

Worlds Upon Worlds

All of the fully realized worlds in Barbie combine to make the movie a visual feast.  First is Barbie Land, where everything is pink and plastic.  The toys pretend to eat and drink and their movement resembles how the children play with their toys.  Barbie floats from her balcony gently into her car.  After Ken crashes into some fake waves, he cartoonishly flips onto the beach.  When Ken startles Barbie while she’s driving, her car turns over and over in midair before landing rightside-up.  When Barbie and Ken travel to the Real World, they pass through a series of toll gates in the form of extravagant play sets.

LA is the exact opposite of Barbie Land.  Every aspect of the city is a reflection of men and masculinity.  The office buildings are tall, made of darkened glass and steel so that they shimmer in the sunlight.  Trucks abound.  (Hello, Hummer!)  Construction workers verbally abuse Barbie.  When Ken and Barbie first appear at Venice Beach on their yellow rollerblades, people laugh at their outrageous outfits.  (Ok, maybe that last one is a stretch.  Nothing is too outrageous for Venice Beach.)  Much to Barbie’s dismay and Ken’s delight, the Real World revolves around men.  Men lead the country.  Men are on currency.  Men star in the biggest movies.  (Stallone!)  Every aspect of the Real World is about men, with women mostly in subservient roles.

The Matten headquarters is a hilariously surreal depiction of the drabness and repetitiveness of corporate-driven reality.  The world inside is filled with rows of gray cubicles enclosed by gray walls.  Sensitive, creative types like Gloria and Aaron Dinkins work unfulfilling jobs that slowly  crush their spirit and grind them into dust.  The CEO doesn’t just think like a child, he actually has the mind of a child.  (That he is played by perpetual man-child Will Ferrell is perfect casting.)  All of the executives exist only to support the CEO’s minimalist thinking.  When Barbie flees, everyone runs after her as if they were characters in a Saturday morning cartoon.  The silliness of corporate groupthink is further personified when the CEO and the executives follow Barbie to Barbie Land en masse on roller skates and then ride a tandem bike with a dozen seats, an image straight out of Dr. Seuss.

Ken’s transformation of Barbie Land into Kenland results in a garish world devoted to all things “dude”.  Depictions of horses abound, followed by leather couches, exercise equipment, mini fridges just for brewski brews, etc.  Instead of wearing effeminate clothing, the Ken’s are decked out in gym wear and cowboy-style apparel.  Women are reduced to wearing skimpy maid or cheerleader outfits.  Video games, volleyball and golf are the preferred recreational activities.  In Ken Land, men insist on explaining everything to the Barbies.  (The mansplaining joke about Godfather was spot on.)  And when they’re not explaining, they insist on helping.  Using the Real World for inspiration, Ken transformed Barbie Land so that it serves only to gratify the male ego and satisfy male desire.

The Art of Dialog

Both Gerwig and Baumbach have been individually nominated by the Academy for their screenplays, her for Lady Bird and Little Women and him for The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story.  With their track record, it was probably a foregone conclusion that their collaboration on Barbie would result in a solid script.  Even so, there were numerous examples when the dialog surprised me for how sharp, insightful and funny it was.

One aspect that stood out was how Barbie speaks like a child whose knowledge and understanding of the world is growing, but not yet fully formed.  For example:

Barbie:  I know I’m stereotypical Barbie and therefore don’t form conjectures concerning the causality of adjacent unfolding events but some things have been happening that might be related.

Barbie: I feel kind of ill-at-ease, like, I don’t know the word for it, but I’m conscious but it’s myself that I’m conscious of.

Barbie: I don’t know exactly what you meant by all of those little quips, but I’m sensing some kind of entendre here that appears to be double.

There were several noteworthy political jabs:

Lawyer Barbie:  Money is not speech and corporations have no rights to begin with.  So any attempts on their part to be exercising their rights is just their attempt to turn our democracy into a plutocracy.

Allan:  As soon as they figure out how to build that wall sideways and not just up, nobody’s getting in or out.

And some sly double-entendres:

Ken: If I wasn’t severely injured I would beach you off right now, Ken.

Ken: I’ll beach off with you any day, Ken.

Ken: Anyone who wants to beach him off has to beach me off first.

Ken: I’ll beach both of you off at the same time!

And finally, some honest feminist observations:

Barbie: I would never wear heels if my feet were shaped this way!

Weird Barbie:  That’s cellulite.  That’s going to spread everywhere, and then you’re going to start becoming sad and mushy and complicated.

Sasha: Men hate women and women hate women. It’s the one thing we can all agree on.

Gloria:  You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin.

Set Pieces to Die for

I mentioned the movie’s brilliant opening scene above, a clever riff on one of the most recognizable scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  This scene, confidently and boldly executed by Gerwig, is a knowing homage that only someone who loves movies could make.  (And despite what some folks claim, this scene is not a dig at “bro movie culture”.  That is saved for The Godfather and Zach Snyder’s Justice League.  Anyone who thinks Gerwig is somehow slighting Kubrick is off their meds.)

Following that opening salvo, the first act is constructed around a series of fantastic set pieces:   Barbie in her Dream House, her tour of the other Barbies in their native element, Beach Ken wiping out, the dance party at Barbie’s Dream House, Weird Barbie’s House, culminating with  Barbie and Ken going through the portal to the Real World vis-a-vis a montage of Barbie Play Sets.  The production design of all of those scenes was fantastic.

The third act features two scenes that are both audacious and fun. First there’s the battle of the Kens, where beach toys fly back and forth while the Kens battle each other with an arsenal of nuggies and their own awesomeness.  (How else to explain how Simu Liu’s Ken repels a would-be attacker?)  Somehow this epic battle transitions into the booming rock opera that is “I Am Ken”.  Gerwig managed to do something nobody thought possible: combine Meatloaf with a jazz-influenced musical number from the fifties.

Kate McKinnon

McKinnon has been in several movies, but this is the first one that grasped how to utilize her oddball energy to great comedic effect.  (Ghostbusters: Answer the Call gave her a few moments to shine amidst the tedium.)  I rarely say that an actor deserves to be nominated or win an award for their work, but McKinnon deserves nothing short of a medal for playing a character who is the butt of many jokes throughout the movie.  When Barbie was startled by Weird Barbie’s appearance and screamed, I actually felt sorry for Weird Barbie and McKinnon.  Much to Weird Barbie’s credit, she shrugged it off and admitted that she “walked into that one.”  I hope McKinnon’s work in this movie leads to more of the same.

Analysis

Initially, I thought Barbie would end up being another movie where the character leaves their idyllic life in search of answers to life’s most perplexing questions.  Who am I?  Why am I here?  What is my purpose?  Upon arriving in the Real World, the character struggles to fit in, leading to various culture-clash jokes. Eventually, the character meets a sympathetic person who would help them navigate our world and achieve enlightenment.  Finally, instead of returning home, they decide to stay in the Real World and build a life.  This is basically the plot of the movie Elf.  Barbie starts out this way, but quickly reveals that it’s only using this setup as the launching point for a much more complex and layered movie.  (I don’t say this to disparage Elf, a movie I love and watch whenever it’s on.)

By expanding the scope of the story so that it is not just about Barbie’s journey of self-discovery but also Ken’s and Gloria’s, writers Gerwig and Baumbach were able to weigh-in frequently and often on many topics they feel strongly about.  They use nearly every moment as a launching pad for pointed commentary on gender roles, sexism in everyday life, the conflicting pressures in the lives of modern women, codependency and so on.  Watching all three characters evolve in very unexpected ways until they reach a state of grace in the end was quite a feat to pull off, something I doubt would have worked with a movie focused only on Barbie.

Barbie

Of the three character journey’s within the movie, Barbie’s is essential.  At the beginning of the movie, she’s introduced via a bravura opening scene that parodies 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Just like the use of tools made it possible for primitive man to evolve, Barbie dolls made it possible for young girls to envision a life for themselves besides motherhood.  However, while the line of Barbie dolls was incredibly popular and successful, they were only an ideal of what women could achieve.  A young girl could dream of becoming a doctor or a lawyer when they grew up, living independently in their own home with their own money.  Unfortunately, achieving that goal remains frustratingly difficult because Barbie dolls could not deliver equality and respect.

When the movie begins, Barbie’s life is perfect.  She wakes up in her spacious Dreamhouse, her morning shower is always hot, her milk is fresh and her toast is just right.  Then, reality begins to intrude.  She begins to have thoughts about dying.  Everything in her morning routine becomes a nightmare.  Then her feet go flat.  As Weird Barbie explains, a portal has opened between the real world and the Barbie world.  This is due to Stereotypical Barbie and a human girl creating a reciprocal connection between themselves, a plot element that didn’t add up for me.  Barbie was completely happy before she was receiving pings from Gloria.  The last thing on her mind was mortality, a concept I doubt she understood.  Furthermore, Weird Barbie needs to convince Stereotypical Barbie that she needs to go to the real world in order to get her old life back.  I don’t want to belabor this point because 1) screenplays are rarely perfect, and 2) Gerwig and Baumbach didn’t want boring logic to get in the way of having fun.

Barbie’s eyes are opened immediately after she arrives in downtown LA.  Unlike in her world, the Real World’s society is male-centric.  Women are relegated to subservient roles and constantly deal with sexism.  After Sasha’s harsh words crush her spirit, Barbie agrees to be taken to the Mattel headquarters, where she has the option to return to her world if she follows the CEO’s advice and gets into a box.  Barbie is tempted to simply return home and forget every unpleasant thing she’s experienced, but the option triggers something in Barbie.  She knows she wants to do something besides hitting the reset button, but she doesn’t know what that is just yet.  All Barbie knows is she wants to escape the clutches of her silly corporate overlords.

Once she’s free of Mattel, Barbie figures that the best way to help Gloria out of her is by taking her to Barbie Land.  Unfortunately, when she finds that the Kens have taken over, Barbie becomes depressed herself.  (Having her face-plant on an artificial lawn was a hilarious bit of physical comedy.)  Until this moment, Gerwig and Baumbach haven’t revealed what they had in store for Barbie all along.  Like Pinocchio, Barbie wants to become an actual woman.

I was genuinely surprised by Barbie’s decision because she had been very clear in her dislike of everything associated with being real (bad breath, cellulite, sore feet, etc.)  However, the movie gave us hints along the way that this was what Barbie’s journey was actually about.  Every woman Barbie met in the real world was subtly changing her perception, and collectively those experiences influenced her decision.  The elderly lady at the bus stop, Barbie creator Ruth Handler and Gloria all showed her that womanhood is something that should be celebrated despite its challenges.  How Gerwig and Baumbach made this choice the culmination of Barbie’s journey was a nice bit of narrative poetry.  Instead of going back to being a symbol of inspiration, she wants to walk among those she’s inspired and experience life for herself, just like the angel in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.  Being an eternal deity is nice, but nothing beats being alive.

Gloria

In the beginning, she’s a career woman just like the source of her inspiration.  Unfortunately, she’s stuck in a dead-end job at Mattel as a receptionist.  The men in charge ignore Gloria’s designs and prefer she stay in her cubicle (or corporate box) and leave it to them to run things.  If that wasn’t bad enough, her daughter has become distant and the bond between them is nearly broken.  The movie doesn’t spell out why the two have grown apart, but the implication made is that Sasha’s cynicism clashes over her mother’s unfounded optimism.  Gloria still believes in the promise of Barbie, but Sasha despises everything Barbie stands for.  Sasha’s attitude could also be described as normal teenage rebellion against everything their parents stand for, but her opinion’s sound like they were fed by social media.  After hearing Sasha drop knowledge on a guileless Barbie, I concluded that Sasha’s worldview could only come from spending countless hours on TikTok.

As I mentioned above, the movie glosses over how Gloria and Barbie managed to open a portal between their respective worlds.  Despite Weird Barbie’s explanation, I believe Gloria opened the portal on her own because she had a spiritual connection to Barbie through her job at Mattel.  Barbie had no choice but to “hear” Gloria’s distress signal from the real world and respond.  While meeting Barbie in person does not solve Gloria’s problems with her career or her daughter, it does put her on the path towards changing her approach to life.

Seeing the Barbies reduced to mindless servants by the Kens helped Gloria realize she had allowed the same thing to happen to her in the real world.  She meekly accepted her role as corporate functionary because she believed the men in charge had her best interests in mind.  Over time, Gloria gave up on her goals and resigned herself to an unfulfilling career.  Once Gloria recognizes the parallels between herself and Barbie, she is able to understand her daughter’s behavior.  Sasha stopped respecting her mother because she no longer respected herself.  Gloria allowed others to control her life and had become a corporate doormat.

Fortunately, after watching Alan single-handedly fight off the construction workers, Gloria realizes that the only way she (and the Barbies) will get what they want is if they too put up a fight.  Gloria shifts her worldview into one rooted in pragmatism (a bridge between Barbie’s  optimism and Sasha’s cynicism) and is able to change things for the better.  She helps the Barbies take back control of Barbie Land, pitches her idea of Normal Barbie to the CEO and regains her daughter’s respect, proof that idealism only works when coupled with action.

Ken

Like Barbie and Gloria, Ken’s journey also results in personal growth.  However, Ken’s empowerment initially is a bad thing.  At the outset, Ken is incredibly needy.  He wants Barbie to think of him as her boyfriend, but in Barbie Land, Barbie is in control.  Every time she resists his advances, Ken becomes more insecure.  Both Barbie and Ken know that he is little more than an accessory, and he can’t accept that power dynamic in their “relationship”.  Barbie is perfectly fine without Ken, but a world without Barbie is catastrophic for Ken.  Without her attention, Ken has no reason to exist.  He desperately tries to catch her eye at the fake beach, but his silly attempt at hanging ten is an epic failure.  He then becomes jealous whenever she dares to look at another Ken.  (The irony of gender-swapping the typically insecure female character into the ultra masculine Ken was another master stroke by Gerwig and Baumbach.)

Ken is a stand-in for all controlling men who can’t handle rejection.  If he can’t have Barbie, then he’ll remake the world in his image.  Much to his surprise, Ken discovers that even a world filled with horses, trucks, beer fridges, leather couches and matchbox 20 songs won’t fill the emptiness inside of him.  Fortunately, through his climactic beach-off with the other Kens, he realizes that he can be happy by himself.  He doesn’t need to define his existence in relation to Barbie.  By accepting himself as he is, he realizes that he is “Kenough”.  This comes as a relief to Ken because enforcing the patriarchy is hard work and actually had nothing to do with horses.

While Ken’s journey basically has him go from harmless douchebag, to world-destroying douchebag, to self-aware douchebag, he does emerge as a slightly better version of himself at the end.  This is real progress on Ken’s behalf, at least to the point where Barbie doesn’t have to worry about Ken staging another coup of Barbie Land.  Ultimately, the purpose of Ken’s character is to show how men (like him) can evolve when they are made aware of their boorish behavior.  The truth may hurt, but as with Ken, growth comes when we acknowledge our faults.  For example, men love to mansplain any of their favorite things.  But there’s a difference between expressing one’s love for The Godfather and providing a running commentary of it while watching it with your partner.  It’s all about balance and recognition.  Lastly, any woman who professes to her man that she’s really interested in the Zach Snyder cut of Justice League is being nice.  If you didn’t realize that before, Barbie (movie and character) has just served notice.

Worlds Upon Worlds

All of the fully realized worlds in Barbie combine to make the movie a visual feast.  First is Barbie Land, where everything is pink and plastic.  The toys pretend to eat and drink and their movement resembles how the children play with their toys.  Barbie floats from her balcony gently into her car.  After Ken crashes into some fake waves, he cartoonishly flips onto the beach.  When Ken startles Barbie while she’s driving, her car turns over and over in midair before landing rightside-up.  When Barbie and Ken travel to the Real World, they pass through a series of toll gates in the form of extravagant play sets.

LA is the exact opposite of Barbie Land.  Every aspect of the city is a reflection of men and masculinity.  The office buildings are tall, made of darkened glass and steel so that they shimmer in the sunlight.  Trucks abound.  (Hello, Hummer!)  Construction workers verbally abuse Barbie.  When Ken and Barbie first appear at Venice Beach on their yellow rollerblades, people laugh at their outrageous outfits.  (Ok, maybe that last one is a stretch.  Nothing is too outrageous for Venice Beach.)  Much to Barbie’s dismay and Ken’s delight, the Real World revolves around men.  Men lead the country.  Men are on currency.  Men star in the biggest movies.  (Stallone!)  Every aspect of the Real World is about men, with women mostly in subservient roles.

The Matten headquarters is a hilariously surreal depiction of the drabness and repetitiveness of corporate-driven reality.  The world inside is filled with rows of gray cubicles enclosed by gray walls.  Sensitive, creative types like Gloria and Aaron Dinkins work unfulfilling jobs that slowly  crush their spirit and grind them into dust.  The CEO doesn’t just think like a child, he actually has the mind of a child.  (That he is played by perpetual man-child Will Ferrell is perfect casting.)  All of the executives exist only to support the CEO’s minimalist thinking.  When Barbie flees, everyone runs after her as if they were characters in a Saturday morning cartoon.  The silliness of corporate groupthink is further personified when the CEO and the executives follow Barbie to Barbie Land en masse on roller skates and then ride a tandem bike with a dozen seats, an image straight out of Dr. Seuss.

Ken’s transformation of Barbie Land into Kenland results in a garish world devoted to all things “dude”.  Depictions of horses abound, followed by leather couches, exercise equipment, mini fridges just for brewski brews, etc.  Instead of wearing effeminate clothing, the Ken’s are decked out in gym wear and cowboy-style apparel.  Women are reduced to wearing skimpy maid or cheerleader outfits.  Video games, volleyball and golf are the preferred recreational activities.  In Ken Land, men insist on explaining everything to the Barbies.  (The mansplaining joke about Godfather was spot on.)  And when they’re not explaining, they insist on helping.  Using the Real World for inspiration, Ken transformed Barbie Land so that it serves only to gratify the male ego and satisfy male desire.

The Art of Dialog

Both Gerwig and Baumbach have been individually nominated by the Academy for their screenplays, her for Lady Bird and Little Women and him for The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story.  With their track record, it was probably a foregone conclusion that their collaboration on Barbie would result in a solid script.  Even so, there were numerous examples when the dialog surprised me for how sharp, insightful and funny it was.

One aspect that stood out was how Barbie speaks like a child whose knowledge and understanding of the world is growing, but not yet fully formed.  For example:

Barbie:  I know I’m stereotypical Barbie and therefore don’t form conjectures concerning the causality of adjacent unfolding events but some things have been happening that might be related.

Barbie: I feel kind of ill-at-ease, like, I don’t know the word for it, but I’m conscious but it’s myself that I’m conscious of.

Barbie: I don’t know exactly what you meant by all of those little quips, but I’m sensing some kind of entendre here that appears to be double.

There were several noteworthy political jabs:

Lawyer Barbie:  Money is not speech and corporations have no rights to begin with.  So any attempts on their part to be exercising their rights is just their attempt to turn our democracy into a plutocracy.

Allan:  As soon as they figure out how to build that wall sideways and not just up, nobody’s getting in or out.

And some sly double-entendres:

Ken: If I wasn’t severely injured I would beach you off right now, Ken.

Ken: I’ll beach off with you any day, Ken.

Ken: Anyone who wants to beach him off has to beach me off first.

Ken: I’ll beach both of you off at the same time!

And finally, some honest feminist observations:

Barbie: I would never wear heels if my feet were shaped this way!

Weird Barbie:  That’s cellulite.  That’s going to spread everywhere, and then you’re going to start becoming sad and mushy and complicated.

Sasha: Men hate women and women hate women. It’s the one thing we can all agree on.

Gloria:  You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin.

Set Pieces to Die for

I mentioned the movie’s brilliant opening scene above, a clever riff on one of the most recognizable scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  This scene, confidently and boldly executed by Gerwig, is a knowing homage that only someone who loves movies could make.  (And despite what some folks claim, this scene is not a dig at “bro movie culture”.  That is saved for The Godfather and Zach Snyder’s Justice League.  Anyone who thinks Gerwig is somehow slighting Kubrick is off their meds.)

Following that opening salvo, the first act is constructed around a series of fantastic set pieces:   Barbie in her Dream House, her tour of the other Barbies in their native element, Beach Ken wiping out, the dance party at Barbie’s Dream House, Weird Barbie’s House, culminating with  Barbie and Ken going through the portal to the Real World vis-a-vis a montage of Barbie Play Sets.  The production design of all of those scenes was fantastic.

The third act features two scenes that are both audacious and fun. First there’s the battle of the Kens, where beach toys fly back and forth while the Kens battle each other with an arsenal of nuggies and their own awesomeness.  (How else to explain how Simu Liu’s Ken repels a would-be attacker?)  Somehow this epic battle transitions into the booming rock opera that is “I Am Ken”.  Gerwig managed to do something nobody thought possible: combine Meatloaf with a jazz-influenced musical number from the fifties.

Kate McKinnon

McKinnon has been in several movies, but this is the first one that grasped how to utilize her oddball energy to great comedic effect.  (Ghostbusters: Answer the Call gave her a few moments to shine amidst the tedium.)  I rarely say that an actor deserves to be nominated or win an award for their work, but McKinnon deserves nothing short of a medal for playing a character who is the butt of many jokes throughout the movie.  When Barbie was startled by Weird Barbie’s appearance and screamed, I actually felt sorry for Weird Barbie and McKinnon.  Much to Weird Barbie’s credit, she shrugged it off and admitted that she “walked into that one.”  I hope McKinnon’s work in this movie leads to more of the same.