A construction site! We need that good feminine energy: Barbie (2023)

Most of last year’s big movies “finally” hit streaming at the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them. Spoilers ahoy, but I promise not to give away any jokes, at least other than the one I used in the title.

There’s an almost infinite number of sentences you can start with “What’s really brilliant about Barbie is…” Here’s mine: What’s really brilliant about Barbie is how smart Barbie, the character, is. She’s not a ditz, or uneducated, or even really naïve—she’s an incredibly smart, accomplished person from a totally alien culture. The challenges she faces in “the real world” aren’t those of Buzz Lightyear grappling with existential crisis, they’re an immigrant realizing that the stories she heard back home are all wrong, and adapting.

There’s a difference between “naïve” and “misinformed”, and this movie starts all of its characters—the Barbies, Kens, business people, and students—solidly in the second category. Amongst the many joys of the film is watching all the characters adapt and learn.

In the center of this, Margot Robbie does one of the most subtle pieces of acting I can remember seeing. At the start of the movie, she looks and moves like a living doll; the way she stands, the way she moves her hands, the way she holds the not-quite-human expressions on her face. But by the end of the movie, she looks like a regular person—a regular person that looks like Margot Robbie, sure, but human. The expressions are natural, her gait has changed, her hands are real hands. But at no point is there a big change; she doesn’t get zapped with a “human ray”, she never shows off the difference by inflating and deflating while Lois Lane is in the other room. She just quietly changes over the course of the movie, subtly so that you never notice the change from scene to scene, but by the end she’s transformed. It’s a remarkable physical performance.

The movie has gotten an… interesting critical reaction.

The modern critical apparatus—pro and “internet”—has a hard time with movies that don’t fit in a comfortable category, and with movies about women. This one was both, and you could tell it really impacted into some weird seams of the structure around how movie reviews even work.

Just about every professional review was postive, some extremely so, and others with a sort of grudging quality where you could tell the writer was grouchy they hadn’t gotten to use the negative review they’d half-finished ahead of time.

Because the cognitive dissonance of “they made a movie about Barbie—Barbie, of all things—and it’s good” was clearly a struggle for many. My favorite way this manifested—and by favorite I mean the sort of laugh to keep you from crying favorite—was when everyone did their top ten best movies of the year lists in December. About half of the ones I read had Barbie on them, the other half not. But every single one that didn’t have Barbie on the list talked about it, pondering if it should have been there, justifying to themselves why it wasn’t. One, which I have lost the tab for and refuse to go digging for, had a long, thoughtful postscript after the end of the top ten list itself about how Barbie had made her cry four different times while watching it, but somehow these other movies were better. She spent more words on Barbie than her ten “best” movies combined. That’s a real calls are coming from inside the house moment, I think, maybe you’re trying to tell yourself something? If nothing else, maybe step back and define your terms: what do you even mean by “best”?

Roger Ebert (hang on, I know he wasn’t around to review this but this is gonna connect, bare with me) has a bit in his 2003 four star Great Movies re-review of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly where he talks about how he reacted to it when he saw it the first time in 1968, and says:

Looking up my old review, I see I described a four-star movie but only gave it three stars, perhaps because it was a "spaghetti Western" and so could not be art.

Barbie feels like a movie that’s going to cause a lot of similar reflections 35 years from now.

That said, my favorite review I read was jwz’s capsule description of watching it with his mother, wherein his mom just can’t engage with the fact that the movie called “Barbie” has the same opinion of Barbies that she does.

On the one hand, you clearly have the set of critics unable to comprehend that a movie based on Barbie could possibly be good, but also it’s hard to have an extended critical discourse about a movie where American Ferrera looks the camera dead in the eye and says the central thesis of the movie out loud.

I was just talking about the modern style to for Tell over Show, and this movie is a perfect example of that done well. We live in an era where subtlety is overrated, sometimes it’s okay to just say what you mean.

And—ha ha ha—everything you’ve read so far I wrote before the Oscar nominations were announced. I don’t have much to add to that particular discourse except to point out that regardless of context, any time a movie gets nominated for Best Picture and not Best Director, something is hinky.

Gerwig and Robbie being snubbed by the Oscars while Gosling was not is, of course, infuriating, but it’s also the new grand champion of “real life comes along after the fact and proves the movie’s point better than the movie ever could. (The previous all-timer was when Debbie Reynolds died the day after Carrie Fisher, so Carrie couldn’t even have her own funeral, which is a fact that should be tacked on to the end of every print of Postcards From The Edge.) The post-credits scene should just be Margot Robbie reading tweets about how Barbie should be grateful for the 8 nominations it got against Oppenheimer’s 12.

One of the other things that makes the movie hard to talk about is that all the movies you want to compare it to are made by and about men, and that feels a little strange.

The movie’s satire and takedown of toxic masculinity is as pointed and full-throated as any I’ve ever seen. It’s a David Fincher movie, but backwards and in high heels. But where Fincher tends to stop at “look at this sad weirdo”, this movie knows the Kens are victims too, and wants things to work out for them too. But, you know, tells a story about toxic men from the perspective of the women, which shouldn’t be rare but there you go.

It’s worth acknowledging that as a straight cis man who didn’t have Barbies as a central feature of his childhood, I probably responded to different things than maybe the intended core audience. (And, by the way, please someone do a metafictional satire of marketing and gender roles with The Transformers. I’m available to pitch.) But on the other hand maybe not? It’s dangerous to try and attribute any part of a work with shared authorship to a specific contributor, but this movie was written by both Greta Gerwig and her husband, Noah Baumbach, and there were definitely parts where I thought I could hear the voice of a fellow Alan. The Kens are a satire of a very particular Kind of Guy, and I can’t stand those guys either. The joke about “The Godfather” felt like it was written for me, personally. Alan trying to sneak out of Barbieland to get away from the Kens was basically my entire High School experience summed up.

There’s so many little, nice touches. The way that the “real world” is portrayed as realistically as possible, but the inside of the Mattel offices is a realm as strange and alien as Barbieland. The way those realms play as having their own internal rules that are totally different from each other. How casual the people in the know are with beings crossing between those realms, and the way they interact with each other. The fact that there’s a ghost, which is treated as being not supernatural at all, until it is. (In some ways, this is the best Planescape movie we’re ever going to get.) The way the Ken dance fight resolves. The choice of song the Kens use as a serenade. There’s a Doctor Who in it!

And, I don’t want to give anything away, but the thing Barbie says after being scolded by a student? When she’s crying on that bench? That’s the hardest I’ve laughed at a movie in I don’t know how long.

Mostly, though, what I like is how kind this movie is. It’s rare to see a satire that’s actually funny and loves both all of its characters and the thing that its satirizing—in fact, I’m not sure I can think of another one. Galaxy Quest, maybe?

This is a movie that wants everyone in it to do well. It’s a little disappointed in some of them; but no one really gets “a comeuppance” or “punished”, or really even a Second Chance; instead everyone gets an opportunity to do better, and they all take it.

There’s a saying that inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist; and this is a movie made by some very disappointed people. But it’s a movie that spends as much time showing a way forward, as it does attacking the problem.

The resolution manages to simultaneously hit “Immigrant assimilating while still being true to themselves”, “Pinocchio”, and “the end of 2001”, and do it with a joke. Brilliant.

Absolutely the best movie I saw last year.