Jonah Naplan   July 21, 2023

There’s something mysteriously beautiful about “Barbie,” and it’s not the people who star in it. Yes, the Barbies and Kens who make up Barbieland have their hair styled just so, their makeup and pearly white teeth are perfect, and they’ve all been dressed in astounding outfits by two-time Oscar winner Jacqueline Durran. But there’s something else here; something more ethereal, meditative, and deeply beautiful at play.

Writer and director Greta Gerwig loves Barbie, and it’s clear. Her sharp script is simultaneously a love letter to the product and an amalgamation of everything wrong with it. “Barbie” makes fun of Mattel and Warner Bros., even though both corporations are obviously in on the joke. It deceives, teases, humors, and entertains the viewer, but not without forcing them its vitamins. At its sincere core, “Barbie” is a splashy entertainment fit for families with older tweens, not because there’s that much lewd content, but because most of the film’s clever jokes will fly way over the heads of younger audience members.

Yes, it’s a “Barbie” movie—the Barbies you know and love are all here, smiling and dancing, singing and waving—but it’s also quite the opposite. While the film mentions and tributes the classic, newbie, and discontinued dolls, it also acknowledges the politics surrounding Barbie’s perfect body that was seen as controversial and an unreasonable representation of what a woman’s appearance should look like. In the fantastical Barbieland, the citizens feel as though they’re helping to encourage young women to do whatever they want, when in reality, they leave no such impact. To all the naive Barbies, what’s there to do other than believe that you’re the most influential people in the world?

One such “influencer” is “stereotypical Barbie,” a blue-eyed blondie played to her peak by Margot Robbie, a perfect casting that is simply irreplaceable. Calling to mind similar sequences from “The Truman Show” and “Free Guy,” Barbie begins each day exactly the same. Waking up in her pinker than pink dream house, she showers (the nozzle eschews water), eats her breakfast (her carton of milk does not actually contain liquid), and brushes her teeth (no actual contact with teeth can be found). In Barbieland, every day is the best day ever, as it should be, and no one ever finds themselves asking existential questions, because that would just be too much of a crisis for everyone to bear.

But this Barbie starts “glitching.” It begins with thoughts of death and other deep topics, but then evolves into shifts in her perfect appearance. Cellulite patches develop on her skin, and her feet, molded to immaculately fit high heels, go flat! She must seek the insight of “Weird Barbie” (Kate McKinnon) to travel to the “real world” and track down the girl playing with her, discovering her real purpose along the way. Barbie comes bearing baggage: Ken (Ryan Gosling), her sort of boyfriend, whose entire self-confidence is devoted to whether or not Barbie will notice him in any given day. Their road to the real world and back is not shaped by the proscenium arch, rather it takes unexpected directions—emotional directions—that you may not expect.

“Barbie” is stuffed with humor from beginning to end. Some of it is slapstick, most of it is not. All of it is funny. Like other fish-out-of-water comedies, “Barbie” is super meta. It surprises no one that Barbie and Ken are disappointed to find that the real world is not as jolly or positive as theirs, nor is there a whole lot of smiling. The Los Angeles “Barbie” takes place in is dreary, yet all of the scenes in the Mattel headquarters are dreamlike, fatuous, and psychedelic in all the right ways. The Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell) is your stereotypically exuberant man in charge, trying desperately to put Barbie back in her box and return her home. Ferrell plays opposite most of his iconic roles here. He’s still hilarious as always, exclaiming that he has a couple Jewish friends when accused of being non inclusive, but he plays more like Walter Hobbs than Buddy the Elf. If nothing else, see “Barbie” for a pleasant reminder of how amazing Ferrell really is.

Barbie teams up with a mother/daughter duo, that of a crucial but underappreciated Mattel employee (America Ferrera) and her fierce daughter, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), to take back Barbieland once Ken returns home, inspired by the examples of masculinity in the real world, and takes over. It is here that Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script loses traction. After a strong opening and promising setup, “Barbie” begins to drag, rephrasing and reusing its ideas ad nauseam until they get worn out. For the most part, “Barbie” is consistent with its notions of female empowerment, without shoving them down our throats, but the second act is where it all slows down, sacrificing the hilarity of the first act and the emotional credibility of the preceding third.

Gerwig has a tendency to linger on certain ideas a bit longer than necessary, coinciding into a power monologue from Ferrera’s character about the meaning of being a woman—what’s required, what’s expected, and what often goes unsaid. This will be an affirmation for many parents in the audience, and for young women, too. I admire how it is written, said, and performed, but it feels a bit more like a device to validate the film on transcendental terms than an actual part of the movie.

Yet, when the filmmakers are so clever as to show us their ideas rather than telling us, “Barbie” is brilliant. It’s not only attributed to female representation, it is an homage to many things—pop culture, filmmaking, the industry, people, ideas, evolvement. It opens with a nod to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” it peaks with a wink towards 80’s power ballads, and it concludes with love to the product itself. Not only is the world of Barbieland filled out with familiar faces—Simu Liu, Issa Rae, Emma Mackey, Alexandra Shipp—and Michael Cera, portraying the only “Allan” amidst an army of Kens, but it is also a metaphor for privilege and the potential of Gen Z.

The wry, yet satirical production design by Sarah Greenwood, matched with the work of impeccable cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto gives the film a flair that is uniquely its own. But what gives the film its beauty is the potential for young people everywhere, not just girls, to see themselves in Barbie. She’s a Barbie girl, not limited to a Barbie World. And it’s fantastic.

Now playing in theaters.