Barbie (2023): let's go party- and topple patriarchy

★★★ 1/2

I've never felt too akin to Barbie. I'm sure I had one growing up but I don't remember her— my brother and I played Mario Kart Double Dash on his Nintendo Game Cube, we watched Drake and Josh, Suite Life of Zack and Cody. I never found her alienating or out of reach, not a perpetuation of unrealistic beauty standards or a bimbo as so many wrongly label her— I just didn't "get" her.

So when my boyfriend and I decided on a whim to go see Barbie (one that he honestly may have been more excited than I was for) we decided to go tongue in cheek— he wore a tie-dye pink tee shirt, and I wore one of his green striped button downs. I don't think I knew it at the time, but it was in part a way for me to subvert the expectation that I'd be seeing a version of femininity on screen that I didn't identify with at all.

Instead, I watched enthralled as Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) fled to the human world and, aided by Gloria (America Ferrerra) and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), restored the link to Barbieland the human world and discovered her own agency— and I of course cracked up when Ryan Gosling's Ken led all the other Ken's in a misguided revolution of toxic masculinity. And walking out of that theater, I was so excited to have been proven wrong.

What Works:

Chock full of meme-able moments, music, memorable performances, and heart, there's so much to love about Barbie. What impressed me the most though wasn't any of the performances, it was the look of it all. I read an article featuring the Barbie set designers a few days ago that explained that to mimic the feel of a doll in a house, they calculated the proportions of Barbie to her Dreamhouse and determined that the Dreamhouse sets should be 23% smaller than a real house. It's clear that that kind of thought and dedication went into creating the visuals for the entire film. The old-fashioned painted backdrops of the journey between Barbieland and the real world, the incredible costuming inspired by real life vintage Barbie pieces— everything pointed to a team of people that were incredibly passionate about the movie they were making.

The same can be said for all of the performances— I like a movie where I can tell the actors involved were having fun, and Barbie was exactly that. From Kate McKinnon's hilarious, anarchist "weird" Barbie, to Michael Cera's delightfully awkard, one-of-the-girls Allan, there was no performance in this movie I didn't actively delight in.

Lastly, Barbie's heartfelt moments were handled with a care that only a woman telling a woman's story could. I couldn't help myself from crying when Barbie, not conditioned by society to fear aging, marveled at an old woman at a bus stop and told her with all the sincerity in the world that she was beautiful. The same went for the moment Barbie decided to become a human, when Ruth Handler told her that she didn't need anyone's permission to be whoever she wanted to be. I left the theater with a newfound appreciation for Barbie— knowing that she was never meant to be an example of what women should be, but rather a mirror onto which women could see their greatest hopes and dreams reflected.

What Doesn't:

What disappointed me most about Barbie were all of the points that came right up to the finish line without crossing it. True, I was surprised and encouraged by the weight that much of the social commentary held, but that made it all the more upsetting to see points that could've driven the movie's messaging home be abandoned.

The one that stands out the most is the underdevelopment of Gloria and Sasha's characters individually and as a pair. For a movie that put such an emphasis on girlhood and motherhood, that literally introduced the concept of Barbie's creator Ruth Handler being thought of as Barbie's mother, the one true mother daughter pair in this movie was woefully half-baked in a way that undermined one of the movie's main theme. There is no reason given for their growing apart other than a vague reference made by Gloria to her having a boring job and working too hard— a below base level explanation that doesn't do enough to justify Sasha's massive changes in attitude throughout the film, and, in turn, does a disservice to the importance of the mother daughter relationship themes.

This next one is going to be controversial: there was just too much Ken! I, like most who saw this movie, thought Ryan Gosling was one of the best parts of the movie, but I don't think the Kens were fleshed out enough to carry as much of the film as they did. The Kens began as a representation of how women are typically represented in media: accessories, eye candy, no real inner life beyond the person they're dating. As the movie goes on they become the oppressors when they learn about the idea of the patriarchy, until the Barbies gain their motivations back and take control of Barbieland once more— the ending sequence about having a Ken on the Supreme Court even including a tongue in cheek joke from the narrator about how Kens would one day have as much power as women do in the real world. My question for the whole movie then: who were the Kens supposed to be? As my boyfriend astutely observed, "it seemed like they represented how women are treated, but they acted like the worst version of men."

Final Thoughts:

I think there's a lot of pressure on movies and tv now to not only make a statement, but to make that statement perfectly, with the nuance of a scholar and expert on whatever the subject at hand is. While I agree wholeheartedly that entertainment can and should be a conduit for social commentary, I also think that a film should be able to make its point imperfectly and still be understood. My believing that the Kens' storyline was mismanaged and believing that this movie had some of the most cogent emotional moments surrounding girlhood I've ever seen portrayed on screen can both be true at the same time. I'm 24 years old with a newfound love for a toy that was invented before even my parents were born, and I swell with pride at everything she assures women that they can be.