Barbie (2023) - Movie Review

After the dramatised kinda-sorta autobiography of Lady Bird, and the classic literary adaptation of Little Women, writer/director Greta Gerwig’s latest feature is… a curveball. A curveball I have had several months to adjust to (and we’re talking before all the actual marketing material and ‘Barbenheimer’ was a thing) but a curveball nonetheless. But that’s just in terms of this film existing in the first place; the actual film itself is something else entirely.

For a start, this looks absolutely amazing. Sarah Greenwood’s production design here, particularly when it comes to the fantasy world of Barbieland, is so vibrant and positively bursting with colour that it ends up standing out from basically all other big-studio films of the last long while. It reminded me quite a bit of Bo Welch’s work on films like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands in just how detailed and eye-catching the set design and props are, not to mention all the doll-appropriate clothing. I mean, sure, when things take a turn for the Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle and Barbie takes a trip to real-world California, it all looks pretty plain, but thankfully, we don’t spend that much time there anyway.

Then there’s the music, which is so prominent here that this is basically a musical. Not only do Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt bring some serious bops to the picture, but the way they’re used in-film adds a lot as well. From Lizzo’s Pink, and its later fourth-wall-breaking retakes, introducing the audience to Barbieland, to Just Ken serving as the Villain Song of the film, to Billie Eilish’s What Was I Made For? soundtracking the existential crisis at the heart of the story. Also, the extent to which I wasn’t expecting Matchbox 20 to show up here, or work this freaking well in-context, is staggering.

And on the note of pairing genuine human drama with literal plastic, this has some of the most perfectly-honed self-awareness I have ever seen in a film. Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s scripting comes across like they had a good, long think about pretty much every underlying implication for whatever they put down on paper and on-screen. Some of it is unassuming, like Will Ferrell as the CEO of Mattel saying that he got to where he is because he cares about the dreams of little girls… and quickly reassuring everyone that he doesn’t mean that in a creepy way. While some of it is much more upfront, like the narrator (Helen Mirren) openly pointing out that the character neurotically worrying about her looks and not being pretty… is the one played by Margot freaking Robbie. It’s like a postmodern, and exponentially funnier, take on Amy Schumer’s I Feel Pretty, and accomplishes more in a throwaway gag than that film did in its entirety. Looks like we dodged a bullet when Schumer left this production over 'creative differences', eh?

It perpetually toes the line of acknowledging that, yes, this production exists primarily as a feature-length toy commercial, while still wanting to tell a proper story in the process. That awareness helps it to stand out from the vast majority of modern IP-reliant blockbusters, especially the ones that Warner Bros. have developed a nasty habit of releasing lately (I will likely never let them live down the decision to expose Space Jam: A New Legacy to open air). With that attitude, this feels like a true throwback to the ‘80s commercial cartoon boom, where a lot of Saturday morning television programming served much the same purpose, but the actual quality of some of those shows made them work far beyond the scope of their merchandising (Transformers, He-Man, My Little Pony, etc.). Selling toys is one thing, but for a property to grow the kind of legs that would allow it to still have films in cinemas today, it indicates that fans care about the soul inside that plastic.

Where that acknowledgement, and ultimate acceptance, of messiness and imperfect starts to get really interesting is in how that relates to the characters as well. The character of Barbie (Stereotypical Barbie, specifically, as played by Robbie) is more than just a toy; she’s an idea made into a physical form. An embodiment of every feminine ideal and belief, every hope and dream, and as much a reflection of real-world women as real-world women are, in their own way, a reflection of her. She is every woman, it’s all in her. (And yes, the film points out the optics of a white woman serving as this avatar, in a multi-ethnic world)

From there, the film goes full force into speaking the feminist gospel, contrasting her journey out into the real world and discovering that Barbie as a role model didn’t, in fact, solve every gender-related issue in the world (again, openly poking at its own existence as a Girlboss fantasy), while Beach Ken basically takes what he learns in Patriarch’s World (it’s all one bondage session away from being a Wonder Woman movie) and turns Barbieland into… well, an even bigger reflection of the real world.

The dialogue covers a lot of ground as far as looking at gender politics, from the expectations placed on women (summarised in a major mic-drop monologue by America Ferrara), to the defining characteristic of patriarchy that man and his desires are the default, to how a lot of post-MeToo pretences about standing up for women are mainly just reworded excuses to carry on as normal, to highlighting the inherent problem in men only defining themselves in how they relate to women (or, more specifically, how women relate to them). I had many a giggle looking at all of this, and while I think the film doesn’t entirely manage to square the circle as far as the gender equality utopianism it espouses, I still like the overall idea that one’s identity shouldn’t be tied directly to other people or things, but strictly to oneself. It certainly feels like the kind of optimism that would come from creatives who understand their own absurd association with consumerism, as Gerwig and Baumbach showed back in White Noise.

And then there’s Barbie herself, whose characterisation and general framing here ends up matching that of her CGI counterpart in the Toy Story movies. Remember, Toy Story 3 had Barbie say, and I quote, “Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force”, which is incidentally one of the most power-bottom lines of dialogue in any film ever. This also has her dealing with the reality of being a plaything for someone else’s amusement, and through a similar kind of existentialism that comes out of stories about characters whose existence is literally to be played with. Margot Robbie does a fantastic job here, selling the aesthetic ideal of the Barbie doll alongside the creeping dread about her life and the need to be ‘perfect’. It’s reminiscent of Turning Red in its insistence on women being accepted as is, not just for what they could aspire to be or what they could pull themselves away from. It reframes the notion that Barbie represents women as capable of being anything, and highlighting that it’s okay to just be.

For as brightly-coloured, madcap, and toe-tapping as this film is, there’s something unshakeably earnest about it that I find quite charming. It’s the product of someone who went “Yeah, it’s a movie about a doll, but we’re going to make it the best damn movie about a doll you’ll ever see”, and who actually had the talent and creativity to live up to that goal. It’s a commercial product through and through, but one with real heart and soul behind it, examining as many facets of its source material and its real-world contexts as it can reach for and saying some genuinely poignant things in the process. That it’s incredibly fun and more than a little bonkers is just the pink frosting on what is a surprisingly nutritious cake.