Barbie Assessment: A Doll’s Existential Disaster Results in One of many 12 months’s Most Life-Affirming Movies

The Pitch: Day by day is a good day for Barbie (Margot Robbie). She wakes up in her Dreamhouse, takes a bathe, places on a superb outfit, after which heads out to spend time together with her pals, who’re all named Barbie, and are at all times pleased to see her. That’s life in Barbieland for you, at all times the identical and at all times excellent… Till the day comes when Barbie wakes up, and her day isn’t fairly excellent. Small issues go flawed, and she or he finds herself haunted by unending ideas of demise — not regular stuff for a Barbie.

Fortuitously, Bizarre Barbie (Kate McKinnon, often doing the splits) is ready to diagnose the issue: Each Barbie in Barbieland has a corresponding woman within the Actual World who performs together with her, and one thing is clearly flawed with our Barbie’s playmate. So Barbie leaves Barbieland behind to voyage into the actual world, and alongside for the experience is Ken (Ryan Gosling), who loves Barbie however is pissed off by the truth that each night time is ladies’ night time, and she or he by no means makes time for him. So, whereas Barbie is profitable find her playmate, Ken’s spent a little bit an excessive amount of time within the Actual World studying about the way in which issues work right here… and Barbieland might by no means be the identical.

C’mon Barbie Let’s Go Celebration: Barbie is a magic trick, a stellar instance of a filmmaker taking a well-established little bit of company IP and utilizing it to ship a message loudly and clearly. That Greta Gerwig’s third solo movie as director additionally manages to be a giddy, foolish, and hilarious time is crucial to its energy, and the problem of this evaluation is thus attempting to discover how the magic trick works, whereas nonetheless preserving the flat-out awe I’ve at what it achieves.

In spite of everything, Barbie isn’t only a toy. It’s a model synonymous with femininity, loaded with pulsing pink energy; energy that’s been weaponized by anti-feminists over time whereas additionally ruthlessly attacked by feminists themselves. In case you had been a lady with Barbies, you had been rising up with the concept of her as “the proper girl,” able to each potential career on the planet, however nonetheless largely outlined by her aesthetics, from her outfits to her equipment to her braidable hair to her excessive heels, for which her toes have been molded completely.

Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script acknowledges all of the criticisms that feminists have had for years (some extra superficially than others — the casting of a variety of physique sorts to play Barbieland Barbies doesn’t essentially make up for literal a long time of unrealistic physique expectations). Then, nonetheless, it pushes a step additional into exploring the promise of Barbie, and the way good intentions don’t at all times lead to optimistic change.

A number of the ideas explored by Barbie will sound acquainted, relating to the complexities that include being a modern-day trendy ladies, as a result of feminists from Gloria Steinem to Liz Lemon have been articulating these themes for years now. Right here’s the factor — sure, the sophisticated paradox of being a lady inside the jail of society’s calls for is well-covered floor. The rationale we’re nonetheless speaking about these issues is that they haven’t gone away.