Barbie

Year of release: 2023.     Directed by Greta Gerwig.             Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Kate McKinnon, Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, and Helen Mirren.

If you saw the first teaser for Barbie, you may have thought the 2001: A Space Odyssey tribute was a one-off gag filmed just to promote the movie. You would have been wrong. Not to spoil the best surprises of the film, but the prologue telling the history of the world from the perspective of the Barbies is both hilarious and an ingenious homage to Kubrick’s masterpiece.

The homage is also thoroughly appropriate given the film’s epilogue where stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) enters a new chapter of her life not at all dissimilar from man’s rebirth as the space child at the end of 2001. To drive the new life idea home, the final line is a funny zinger about the ability to do just that.

What if I also said there’s a “beach off” among the Kens that plays extremely similarly to the pie fight that initially ended Dr. Strangelove? Or a proud proclamation of the same dolls’ identities reminiscent of the most famous line from Spartacus? And what if in fighting the villain of patriarchy, two women communicate mentally, and one of their daughters refers to it as “shining?”

I am convinced there must be more Kubrick references in Barbie, and I’d happily see it again just to catch more of them, but the film delivers on so many other levels as well.

Gerwig and Baumbach’s story does almost nothing that I expected, and while the trailers hinted at similarities with The LEGO Movie, it is very much something different. When stereotypical Barbie discovers her perfect pink world with arched feet and hot, waterless showers falling apart with thoughts of *gasp* death, weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) informs her she has to travel to the real world and find the child playing with her who has clearly become troubled by something, thus repairing the rift between their two worlds. Stereotypical Barbie just has to choose the Birkenstock over the pink heel, which to be fair, is a choice that not many Barbies would want to make.

If stereotypical Barbie is apprehensive about going to the real world, she is reassured when the other Barbies remind her that the invention of Barbie empowered young girls, letting them know they could be anything they want and not just mothers, and now as a result women hold all positions of power in the real world. And women everywhere will probably want to run up to her and hug her for initiating feminism and fixing all women’s problems.

“At least,” Helen Mirren’s narrator tells us, “That’s what the Barbies believe.” Helen Mirren also delivers my favorite joke in the film, turning an expected breakdown from Robbie’s Barbie into something hilarious, but I’m not spoiling that here.

The slap of cold water that is the real world shocks and appalls stereotypical Barbie while making Ken (Ryan Gosling) feel empowered and respected. A crash course on patriarchy thrills Ken, which he eagerly takes back to Barbieland to inform the other Kens on how they’re supposed to be subjugating the Barbies, riding horses, drinking beer, and watching The Godfather.

As an inverse of the real world’s patriarchal structure, Barbieland is a world where the Kens cannot be president, cannot have Supreme Court appointments, cannot hold high paying jobs, and exist purely for the edification of the Barbies. Since the Ken dolls were created by Mattel to be a companion for Barbie, it’s a very clever twist that demonstrates the toxicity of patriarchy that has plagued the real world for centuries. It reminds me of Aamer Rahman’s comedy bit about reverse racism only being possible with a time machine that would enable Africa to colonize Europe and inflict the abuses on white people that they inflicted on Black people for centuries.

I suppose it needs to be said given the absurd hatred Barbie is generating from right-wing incels for its wokeness, but a film that says we should build a society where women and men are treated equally with equal opportunities is hardly what I’d call woke. Although in a post-MAGA world, general human decency often is woke, so I suppose the label is not wrong, but the film’s basic feminist message is a beautiful thing that would have widely been accepted had not the alt-right gained so much traction in recent years. Nonetheless, the film’s box office success and glowing reviews are reason for hope.

Like Gerwig’s two previous films, Barbie is another example of Graham Greene’s maxim that movies should depict the world as it is and as it should be. While the subject matter here may seem far removed from Lady Bird and Little Women, there is a common thread of hope and decency that celebrates the beauty of love for what is true, noble, and good in the midst of an imperfect world.

Between Barbieland and the real world, there is so much good, and to the extent that the film has any villain at all, it is patriarchy. Patriarchy claims victims of the Kens, the Barbies, America Ferrera’s mother and secretary for Mattel, and Will Ferrell’s CEO of Mattel, who is not a villain copied from The LEGO Movie as the trailers suggested, but a well-meaning executive who wants to help girls and women while not realizing the ways he’s accepted patriarchal norms.

Ferrera’s third act speech that sets up the climax of the movie may be on-the-nose, but it exhibits the same passion a five-year-old girl has for her make-believe land with Barbies, and as a mom reconnecting with that same childhood passion, I thought the speech worked brilliantly.

Several reviews have commented on how Gosling steals the movie, but honestly, Robbie is just as good and gives him an equally clueless character to play off of. The two of them make for a great duo for a road trip movie that takes hundreds of unexpected turns.

Returning to Kubrick, Gerwig and Baumbach wrote a movie about human progress and relationships where our own inventions (patriarchy instead of HAL) plague us and hinder that progress until we can overcome them. It makes the 2001 framing story all the more fitting, and it shows how we can appreciate that journey through an obelisk and light show or a polarizing doll.

Personal recommendation: A-