Over the Rainbow with Barbie-BARBIE

By Maribeth Thueson

Here’s a little quiz for you. Barbie is:

A) a feminist screed, B) a clever product advertisement, C) a glorification of a toy that objectifies women, D) a subversive upending of the brand and the tropes surrounding it, E) a popcorn movie, F) all of the above?

The answer, of course, is all of the above, and the fact that Barbie is also witty, touching, and a whole lot of fun is a testament to the skill with which director Greta Gerwig, who also co-wrote the script with Noah Baumbach, weaves all of these strands together.

Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives in Barbie Land, a Technicolor wonderland — heavy on the pink — where each Barbie has her own dream house, Barbies hold all the jobs — led by the president (Issa Rae) — and every day is the best day ever. Every morning Barbie greets the other Barbies from her no-walls dream house, picks out a fabulous outfit from her fabulous closet, and floats down from the roof of her dream house to her pink convertible, as if lifted by the hand of an invisible child.

Barbie mostly hangs out on the beach with the other Barbies and her boyfriend, Ken (Ryan Gosling), who, the narrator (Helen Mirren) tells us, doesn’t feel like he exists unless Barbie notices him. Poor Ken doesn’t have a job or a dream house, and Barbie doesn’t even bother to invite him to her evening dance party. He’s an afterthought, an appendage, as are all the Kens, including Gosling’s main rival for Barbie’s attention, Simu Liu.

But then, in the middle of a dance number, Barbie suddenly kills the vibe by asking if anyone ever has thoughts of death. The next day, her breath is bad, her shower is cold, her toast is burned, and — horror of horrors! — her permanently high-heel shaped feet go flat. Desperate for answers, she turns to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who has been played with too hard (and looks it), and she tells Barbie that the trouble is in the real world, where the girl who is playing with Barbie is having those terrible thoughts. Weird Barbie says that Barbie must journey to the real world to help the girl, so off Barbie goes, with Ken as a stowaway, sure that women will greet her with a big hug for showing them how all the problems of feminism have been solved.

Instead, she is called a fascist and is blamed for making women feel bad about themselves, and the Mattel board, led by inept CEO Will Ferrell, tries to put her back in the box, literally and figuratively. In the meantime, Ken discovers that men seem to be in charge in the real world and decides to export the patriarchy to Barbie Land, where he convinces the other Kens to stage a coup and demote the Barbies to be vapid bimbos.

This all sounds pretty didactic, but in Gerwig’s deft hands, the medicine goes down like sugar, and the lessons about the virtues of equality and self-determination are hilariously funny. The jokes come so fast that it’s easy to miss many of them, and the allusions and Easter eggs abound. The movie makes references to 2001: A Space Odyssey (in a prologue in which little girls smash their baby dolls and maternal ambitions after being amazed by a monolith Barbie), The Godfather, Rocky, The Matrix, the Zach Snyder cut of Justice League, and The Wizard of Oz, which is playing in the movie theater in Barbie Land. In fact, Barbie is sort of a reverse Dorothy, having to journey from Oz to Kansas (or at least Los Angeles) in order to learn that she had the power within herself all along.The songs sound seem like pop songs that have been included just to sell the soundtrack, but listen to the lyrics — they cleverly comment on the action and the characters. The Kens break out into a full singin’-and-dancin’ production number inspired by the “Greased Lighting” number from Grease. We even get to meet dolls who were discontinued for various reasons — the pregnant Midge (Emerald Fennell), the hapless Allan (Michael Cera), and Sugar Daddy Ken (really!). It’s been a long time since a movie was this fun.

But there are plenty of touching moments, too. The Barbies and Kens are inclusive, coming in all skin tones and body types, but there’s one thing they aren’t — old. So it’s crucial to Barbie’s sense of humanity that when she sits next to an elderly woman at a bus stop she realizes the woman is beautiful and sincerely tells her so. “I know,” the woman replies with a grin. (She’s played by Oscar-winning costume designer Ann Roth, 91.) Gerwig has called this scene the heart of the movie.

Two other women also influence Barbie’s emerging sense of herself. The ghost of Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), the inventor of the Barbie doll, acts as a sort of Glinda-the-Good-Witch mentor, guiding Barbie on her path, and America Ferrara, who plays a Mattel employee, gives an impassioned speech about the impossible and contrary expectations women face every day.

The cast are all terrific, and Margot Robbie embodies Barbie perfectly. Gosling, though, is the scene-stealer, really committing to Ken-ness in an all-out wacky performance. There are too many bits with the Mattel board, but you really can’t fault a movie that makes so many jokes at the company’s expense. Don’t cry for them, though; they’re getting more free publicity and tie-in deals from this movie than they could have imagined. It doesn’t seem possible that the planned movies based on Mattel’s other products (UNO, anyone?) could possibly be as good. No matter what you may think of Barbie, there’s something in this movie for you, and unless you’re a misogynistic troglodyte, you’ll enjoy it, too. Just pardon me if I never want to see the color pink again.

Originally published at https://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on August 2, 2023.