Film Review: Barbie

 

Sexuality/Nudity Mature

Violence No Objection

Vulgarity Mature

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

The makers of this movie think that they are smart.  To prove that, they wrote a movie that thinks you are stupid.

Barbie is a film based on the iconic toy doll.  In the movie, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives in Barbieland, an idealized version of the Barbie play world.  It is a society run by all different kinds of Barbies who live in their dream houses, have every kind of profession from President to construction worker, enjoy leisure of every kind, and parties every night.  Living with the Barbies are the Kens, who are treated as hapless accessories to the Barbie lifestyle.  Among these is Stereotypical Ken (Ryan Gosling), whose self worth is tied to Barbie's attention, which is constantly denied him.  One day Barbie (I will just call her this from now on instead of "Steretypical Barbie") has thoughts of death enter her head and her feet go flat.  Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) tells her that the person playing with her in the real world needs to be cheered up.  So Barbie goes to the real world with Ken stowing away.  When they get there, the real world is not what they expect.

This movie should be a nice and fun adventure like Elf or Enchanted, where a naive hero comes from a magical place to bring light and joy to our mundane world while have a fish-out-of-water comedic time.  That is part of what Barbie tries to be.  The problem is that the writers Greta Gerwig (who is also the director) and Noah Baumbach are so insistant that they show you how smart they are that they refuse to simply give you an entertaining movei.  No, no... they are going to use Barbie to teach you.

I've said this many times on this blog that the reason why most Christian movies are terrible is because a sermon is not a movie.  Those movies ignore the most important aspects of storytelling in order to preach a message.  And that is one of the main problems with Barbie.

The writers are completely lost when it comes to telling a coherent story.  I've seen a few of Baumbach's other movies and I am convinced I am correct on this subject.  He projects depth the way a teenager does who first reads some Nietzsche quotes and starts wearing all black.  

One of the biggest tells in the writing is how they never give you a coherent world-view.  Whenever something doesn't makes sense, a character literally will say "Don't think about it too much."  This is way too much of a cheat and speaks to incredibly lazy writing worse than "Somehow, Palpatine returned."  Once you free your writing from reason and accountability, you can basically tell the laws of storytelling to go to hell, which is what this movie does.

For example, the "real world" bears almost no resemblance to a real world.  As soon as Ken and Barbie make it to Venice Beach, people start staring at them as they rollerblade in their neon spandex.  How in the world are they a spectacle at a modern day California Beach?  In a world where public parades have naked people dancing in front of children, I fail to see how our characters stand out.  Minutes after they arrive, a man slaps Barbie on her rear end and then she punches him, causing Barbie and Ken to be arrested.  Again, in full public view a man commits blatant sexual assault and she gets arrested for defending herself.  

You can see this unreality again at the Mattel Corporation.  They portray the board as being all men.  This, of course, ignores the real world Mattel Board of Directors.  But again, the Barbie real world is one that is just as much a fiction as Barbieland.  But the part where I completely checked out was when Barbie tries to escape from the building.  As she runs through the cubicles, an actual chase does not occur.  Instead, a choreographed run between the cubicles takes place like something out of a 1980's music video.  This is not like Enchanted where Giselle makes her cartoon magic overflow into the real world.  In the Barbie real world, everything is fake and hollow.  This is where the writers really talk down to you and think you are stupid.  You are supposed to look at their illusory "real world" and think "wow, that must be how it really is."  But you would have to think that your audience members are true morons in order to believe that.

Why am I harping on this point?  Because Barbie wants to say something about how the real world affects Barbie and vice versa.  But there is no real world in this movie.  There are only the prejudices and insecurities of the writers projected as being the "real world."  Ken's story arc revolves around him discovering the "patriarchy" in the real world and he brings that back with him to Barbieland.   Barbie herself is confronted by a girl she thinks is her owner, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who is a snarky little, cynical communist who tells Barbie that she is a fascist.  Sasha has a TikTok-level apprenhension of all of the words she uses and she never quite comes to this realization throughout the movie.  Her mother Gloria (America Ferrera) is a put-upon business woman who is struggling with all the problems of modern life.  

When they all go back to Barbieland, Ken has turned it into a patriarchy with all the Barbies as mindless drones.  We are supposed to be horrified by this, but the movie lacks the basic self-awareness to see that Barbieland is exactly the same as before only with Kens in charge.  To break through the "brainwashing" of the Barbies, Gloria has to give speeches to them about how impossible it is to be a woman.  But again, this makes no sense.  None of the complaints Gloria has like "You are supposed to love being a mother but you aren't supposed to talk about your kids all the damn time."  Nothing about that statement exists in the Barbie experience.  None of them are mothers.  That statement would have the same effect on a group of 10-year-old boy scouts as it would on the Barbies.  But again, nothing has to make any sense.  It is simply a metaphor for how women need someone to wake them up from the bondage of the patriarchy.

The movie also doesn't quite understand that Ken is way more likable than almost all of the Barbies.  Yes, he is stupid, but his entire existence is based on upon Barbie's affection.  That isn't because of some ego.  He is made insecure.  The movie wants to say that men have a natural inclination to dominate.  But what it really shows is that if you don't give men space to explore true masculinity then some will run to an Andrew Tate-like false masculinity.  

I could have forgiven almost all of the above if the movie had one quality: being funny.  In the end, I don't have to agree with your point of view as a filmmaker in order for me to enjoy your work.  But if you are going to make a comedy about the battle of the sexes, then you have to entertain me or you fail.  There are maybe 3 or 4 good jokes in the entire run time.  The reason why most of the jokes fall flat is because good jokes require intelligence, which this script intentionally removes.

What is a real shame about all of this is that Gerwig is actually an incredibly talented director.  Little Women was an example of her skill and excellence.  It is so frustrating to see little pockets of that brilliance in this movie.  There is a scene where Barbie is in the real world and she really sees it for the first time.  It is also the first time the movie makes the "real world" seem real and superior to Barbieland with all of its artificial glory.  But what was so touching is that she looks to her right and sees an old woman.  She would never have seen an old Barbie before.  In this overwhelming experience, she looks at the old woman and says, "You're beautiful."  There is so much pure beauty and goodness in the movie that it reminds you have insufferable there rest of the movie is.

There are only two things that keep this movie from being a total disaster: the leads and the set design.

Robbie is actually quite incredible in the role.  She has to transition from a one-dimensional piece of plastic to a fully realized, complex person in a believable way.  And to my amazement she does it without at all feeling false.  Even when she is horrible to Ken, she has enough charisma and charm to hold onto the audiences good will.  She could come off as vapid, but she never stops being endearing.  Gosling is also fantastic.  His Ken should be loathed, but you always feel sorry for him.  And his comedic skills are just as good as his dramatic ones.  Everyone else in the movie is either decent to terrible.

The production design also is great.  Barbieland looks like what a little girl would dream of.  Everything looks just like its toy counterpart while also feeling livable.  The color and creativity of that world make for a nice visual spectacle.

I do find it pernicious that a movie marketed to all ages contains innuendo about sexual activity, transgenderism, and direct talk about sexual organs.  Again, it seems like such an adolescent way of getting attention.

But even beyond that, the movie sets up men against women.  All the men are either antagonistic or superfluous.  Romance is completely dismissed out of hand in this movie.  No, no, we cannot have romance, because that would imply that somehow men and women need each other rather than being to autonomous groups acting as opposing furies.  This ignores the truth about human beings in that we were made for each other.  Men need women.  Women need men.  We were created to be partners in surviving and thriving through life.  

Barbie  preaches that life is a battle of the sexes.  But, again, the filmmakers are too ignorant to see the truth:

In the battle of the sexes, everyone loses.