Note: This Barbie review will contain an excessive amount of comparisons to The LEGO Movie. This is your final warning.
I’ve said it before and will say it again: As superhero movies and other traditional IP-centric event movies begin to crater, the Toy movie will eventually be positioned as the blockbuster’s successor/savior. Aisle-level brand recognition is the established currency on which Hollywood now trades its reputation, and thanks to Chris Miller and Phil Lord, there’s a way filmmakers (or, less politely, brand ambassadors) can maintain a distance from their subject matter without having to delve deep into the “lore” established by the tertiary elements of whatever franchise they’re attempting to breathe life into. Prior to The LEGO Movie, toy movies were wholly lore-based, not simply due to matters of brand strategy (of course, Transformers and G.I. Joe would continue the plots of their individual television series when brought to the big screen) but because corporations themselves kept an un-ironic distance from their products so as to not get in the way of their target audience: children. Lord and Miller preserved that distance while also getting metatextual with the concept in service of greater meaning, with The LEGO Movie mainly being about the act of creative play itself, with the Scandinavian brick-makers serving as a type of deist “distant watchmaker,” putting the tools in the hands of parents and children to let them realize their imaginative ambitions through colorful bricks. Of course, to have Batman interact with Han Solo or whatever, you’d have to buy all of the sets, but ultimately the point existed regardless of brand identification: You could have a Lincoln Logs or Tinker Toy story that could follow a similar pathway and present a similar message. I’ve dubbed this the “platform-based” toy movie, and there are more and more emerging as we speak: Playmobil, The Emoji Movie, and Barbie.
If you’ve followed film discourse for the last couple of years, you know that that’s not good company to be in. Everyone wants to be The LEGO Movie, but for whatever reason, the ambitions of these features, aesthetically or thematically, fall dramatically short. In those first two examples, it’s a matter of budget and execution: you don’t have the money or the time to do things right, so you just pump it out with the hopes that you can con some poor bastard and their family into the cinema one weekend afternoon in late August. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie doesn’t have that problem – in fact, its commitment to realizing the toy line’s aesthetic is one of the most compelling parts of the film itself. Barbie World, the hyper-stylized world beyond our world that the metaphorical representations of the dolls inhabit, is an Olympus stacked with platonic ideals and the would-be deities that they embody, swathed in pink, living in wall-free houses, sipping invisible tea and milk from molded cups, taking dips in cardboard pools or hanging ten on the paper-mache beach.
The production and costume design teams have brought their A-Game, practically realizing in a life-size scale the fantasy that Mattel sells to children around the world: for a price, you too can imagine yourself in a house like this and, importantly, have the power over these adult figures in miniature. As much as playing with Barbies is about storytelling, creativity or preparation for the end of childhood, it’s also about control, with the child being the master of their dolls’ fates. They can be cruel and unforgiving gods, as the presence of “Weird” Barbie (Kate McKinnon) in this paradise suggests. Her abstract domain is as impeccably constructed as the rest of the façade, and if nothing else, Barbie is a pleasure to look at, a pop-art reconstruction of the key cultural contribution of America’s modern toymakers. It was expensive, and you bet your ass it shows.
Yet the depth found in the rigorous design doesn’t carry over to the story or its execution, precisely due to the presence of that heavy brand involvement that Lord and Miller avoided back in 2014. Gerwig’s Barbie is the kind of self-effacing corporate hagiography that everyone tires of quickly when, say, Moon Pie or Beefaroni gets too familiar with lower-case shitpost lingo in order to provoke vulnerable zoomers to form Pavlovian attachments with a faceless brand. Mattel exists in this world as a part of “The Real World,” a far-off land that Barbies can affect as much as normal humans can alter theirs. They act as a kind of gatekeeper, ensuring that things remain normal and peaceful in Barbie World so that the collective unconscious (and their profits) remain properly in order in ours. But when one anomalous stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) begins to have an existential crisis, with her manicured perfect life collapsing under the strain of her realization that death exists, she decides to journey to the Real World in order to find the little girl who must be having these terrible thoughts. Oh, and Ken (Ryan Gosling) also hops along for the ride to Venice Beach, where they stumble upon how shitty the real world really is in comparison to the plastic Valhalla of Barbie World. Mattel, of course, hates this: They cannot have Barbies running around in the real world trying to fix things over there, and so they set out to recapture her and send her packing, newly-flat feet, and cellulite not being a major issue for them: as long as Barbie is in her heaven, all is right in the world.
Yet Barbie World isn’t exactly heaven if you’re a Ken (the film’s tagline kind of elides the fact that Barbie, even with an existential crisis, is quite welcome in her world and the first-class status it brings, provided that she’s not ugly). They’re the perpetual second bananas to their “friend-zoning” rulers (I don’t use that term to say that this is a bad thing or whatever, just that by design, they’re meant to be friends, suffix-only), and Ken’s probably the closest we have to a genuinely compelling protagonist, provided he wasn’t trying to replace the benignly-repressive matriarchy with his own brand of childish, horse-loving patriarchy. That’s inspired by what he witnesses in the real world. In some ways, he’s the Eve in this tale, with an added heaping of Milton’s Lucifer as well: He realizes he’s never going to find God’s favor and makes his play to try and wrest control of the world away from it, enlightened by the knowledge that there could be more. Gosling’s portrayal plays a bit off of his role in Blade Runner 2049: Both are second-class citizens keenly aware of their status by virtue of the world that they’ve been birthed into, with a similar sort of insecurity and alienation at both characters’ core, not in the least because they’ve fallen in love with artificial women. Yet his manic energy sustains much of the film’s momentum, as his foibles and follies prove to be ceaseless and amusing, even as Gerwig’s humor begins to curdle into a toothless Reductress riff once the pair reaches LA. There’s a level of fearlessness in his commitment to the bit that few other characters in the film can match, mainly because they’re not exactly written that way.
Take Robbie, a gifted comedian in her own right, who was chosen for the role – as lampshaded by Helen Mirren, the film’s narrator in the movie’s best laugh – because she has the kind of good looks one would associate with a Barbie doll and the chops to carry a feature film all by herself. Yet Gerwig’s script sees her as an almost totally passive figure: she’s not vapid by any means, but she has to be poked and prodded into moving the film’s plot along rather than by making any choice of her own. By the time she has made the most important decision she’s made in the film, she’s spent the better part of the runtime in tears from one ruinous slight followed by another in short succession. She’s torn to bits by the girl she assumes (wrongly) is the source of her physical and emotional transformation, only to discover that it’s her mother – a disaffected Mattel employee played by America Ferreria) – who has been causing all of this chaos by imposing real-world ennui on the Barbies she’s drawn. Ferreria serves as the film’s conscience (though Robbie, ultimately, acts as Gerwig’s thematic stand-in, the loose tie that links this, Little Women and Lady Bird together thematically coming within the closing minutes), the movie’s momentum grinding to a halt at the start of the third act so that she can deliver one of the most hoary speeches in popular cinema, a reemergent facet of culture that coincided nicely with The Great Dictator’s restoration and release on Criterion Blu-Ray. Forging a new mother-daughter connection between the two is ostensibly the film’s emotional core, but it really never manages to gel together in the beautiful way that Lord and Miller managed to do in The LEGO Movie’s live-action segments.
Under Gerwig, the film’s politics are as expected – one could easily imagine this being a fever dream that the Broad City leads had the night after they met Hillary Clinton – and to expect a radical inversion of the gender binary perpetuated by the very existence of the pink-branded Barbie dolls would be hideously unrealistic in any Mattel-branded version of this film much in the way that it would be dumb to demand that Top Gun: Maverick indict Navy aviators for war crimes or unsubtly go after Scientology. To say that the film is less provocative than those culture jammers who stuck G.I. Joe voice-boxes in Barbie dolls back in the ‘90s is just to state a fact: the essential division of Barbies and Kens will not be undone any time soon, and Mattel has heard every single one of your criticisms and, with Gerwig’s help, address every single one of them within the context of the film itself. It is somehow supposed to be edgy for the toy company to acknowledge the fact that they pulled a line of pregnant dolls off of the shelves because it somehow “promoted teen pregnancy” or that they once had a Barbie story in which she had to get help from the Kens in order to use or become a computer programmer or that their CEOs have mostly been white and male or that Ruth Handler lost control of the company because of tax evasion issues. The corporation doth protest too much, methinks (same with Warner Bros, which throws out a very weird slight at Zack Snyder given the circumstances that led to his Justice League ever appearing on HBO Max in the first place). They want their former consumer bases’ adoration, and there’s no sin that they won’t cop to if it can earn them brownie points for faux self-recognition. And that’s the whole issue with Barbie, wrapped in a proverbial bow: like a blogger called out for some problematic slight, Mattel wants you to know that they’re listening to your millennial complaints and will do better. In fact, they already are!
Such is the problem inherent in a corporation outright forgetting who the hell they’re supposed to be selling these dolls to in the first place (and they most definitely will be rewarded for it, at least this weekend). Kids – the target audience for any Barbie media – are represented much like Bruce the Shark in Jaws: they’re glimpsed in sly fashion until a big third-act moment places them front-and-center for whole seconds at a time. They’re the ones still attracted to the fantasy of adult liberation and the limitless possibility that the figure represents, and the ones that will actually use the doll for means outside of the purview of Mattel’s control: Creative, fanciful play. Barbies were an extension of paper dolls, an extension of a girl’s drawings: the play itself was the point, and one never actually had to buy clothes for their Barbie if they wanted to, provided that Mom and Dad had some scrap fabric around the house. Then again, they are not who Gerwig is speaking to. To wit, Barbie is a feature-length recitation of that famous quote from Fight Club about how a generation had been led to believe that they were intended for superstardom, only to discover that the best that the forces of life and capital were going to give them was an office job. Barbie is intended for those who couldn’t, by whatever circumstance, and who have an estranged relationship with their childhood plaything, loving the joy it brought them but hating that it let them dream of better things that might have been possible once upon a time.
And so, our problems come to Barbie World in lieu of Barbie World’s solutions coming to ours. One might have figured that the cultural exchange between these two dimensions might have been broader, with the Earthbound characters returning home to fix something in the Real World or to take some sort of greater initiative, inspired by their experiences over in an imaginary land, but it is, after all, easier to imagine a potential revolution in Barbie Heaven than it is to imagine the end of patriarchal capitalism. There’s something deeply withering at the core of this resentment, as if we’re taking out our frustrations on a teddy bear for not getting a promotion at work, but that’s because we have deeply misidentified the purpose of Barbie in the presence of all of her accouterments: we see the dream car, the dream house, the dream clothes, the dream planes, the dream horses, etc. Her purpose is a different unreality: To provide children with self-assurance and confidence as they progress through adolescence. It’s where Mattel’s self-criticisms ultimately fall flat: the hyper specificity of her many careers isn’t just about representation, it’s about limiting the possibilities available to kids to what they can put on the shelves so that they have no need to imagine further than the end of the Wal-Mart toy aisle.
Above all else, it feels like Mattel hates it when the doll leaves the confines of the box, gets a new name, is played with, and transforms into something beyond their creation, even as they poke and prod Gerwig to suggest otherwise. It seems we are losing the capacity to make our icons separate and distinctive in order to grasp broad-strokes inspiration from them, with their capacity to represent something grander and ambitious – ideals to strive towards, as the dread Snyder put it – being replaced by an ironic re-assertation of the status quo, with all hope for its potential evolution artificially limited by the fear of vulnerability and embarrassment. Dull, recursive revisionism is what the future may hold, but hey, at least it comes in cool-ass hot pink.