Greta Gerwig’s Barbie opens in a world made of plastic and pastel, where every day is the best day and every woman is a lawyer, a physicist, a politician. Then its heroine learns what cellulite is, and the whole thing falls apart in the most interesting way a studio comedy has managed in years.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Barbie Land Is a Matriarchy With a Ken Problem
The film is a 2023 satirical fantasy comedy directed by Greta Gerwig, who wrote the screenplay with Noah Baumbach. It runs 114 minutes. It is the first live-action Barbie film, arriving after decades of animated specials and direct-to-video titles, and it is based on the fashion dolls made by Mattel.
Margot Robbie plays the title character, a “stereotypical” Barbie living among many other Barbies in Barbieland, a matriarchal society built by collective human imagination. The Barbies hold the prestigious jobs — law, science, politics, media. The Kens spend their days playing at the beach, which they treat as a profession. Ryan Gosling’s Beach Ken is happy only when he is near Barbie, and she keeps brushing him off for other activities and her female friends.
The tagline tells you where the film’s sympathies sit: “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.”
A Dance Party, Then Flat Feet
Barbie’s trouble starts at a dance party, when she is suddenly stricken with worries about mortality. By morning she has bad breath, cellulite and flat feet. Her routines break down. The aura of classic perfection that the Barbies carry is gone.
Weird Barbie, a disfigured doll played by Kate McKinnon, tells her the fix is to find the child playing with her in the real world. Barbie heads there, and Ken stows away in her convertible.
In the film, Barbie punches a man for groping her and is briefly taken into custody. She and Ken are also taken into custody after failing to pay for new clothes. Mattel’s CEO, alarmed by the dolls’ presence and remembering the “Skipper incident,” orders them recaptured.
Barbie finds her owner, a teenager named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who criticizes her for encouraging unrealistic beauty standards. Then she learns the cause of her crisis: Gloria (America Ferrera), a Mattel employee and Sasha’s mother, started playing with Sasha’s old dolls and drawing Barbies with dark emotions and thoughts.
A Cast Built on “Barbie Energy”
Gerwig and Robbie cast the film by searching for what they called “Barbie energy,” a trait they described as “a certain ineffable combination of beauty and exuberance.” The supporting cast includes Issa Rae, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey, Hari Nef, Sharon Rooney, Ana Cruz Kayne and Ritu Arya as Barbies, plus Michael Cera as Allan, Rhea Perlman as Ruth Handler and Will Ferrell as the Mattel CEO.
The road here was long. Universal Pictures announced a live-action Barbie in September 2009 with Laurence Mark producing. Sony Pictures picked up the rights in April 2014. Writers and directors changed. Amy Schumer was cast as Barbie, then Anne Hathaway. The rights moved to Warner Bros. Pictures in October 2018. Robbie was cast in 2019, and Gerwig was announced as director and co-writer with Baumbach in 2020.
Principal photography ran from March to July 2022, mostly at Warner Bros. Studios in Leavesden, England, and at the Venice Beach Skatepark in Los Angeles. The film premiered at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on July 9, 2023, and opened in the United States on July 21.
Its release alongside Universal’s Oppenheimer created “Barbenheimer,” a double-feature phenomenon that pushed audiences into both films at once.
What the Movie Is Actually About
Here is the part worth arguing about. Barbie is not a toy commercial with a wink. It is a movie about what happens when a woman stops being looked at and starts noticing. The cellulite, the flat feet, the bad breath — these are not gags about aging. They are the moment Barbie becomes a person with a body that will one day fail her.
The Mattel executives are the weakest material in the film. Will Ferrell’s CEO and his board are a soft target, and the movie knows it. The “Skipper incident” is a joke the film never bothers to explain, which is fine, but the corporate chase that follows is the least convincing stretch of the 114 minutes.
Robbie carries the first act on pure comic timing, then has to sell a genuine breakdown in the second, and does. Gosling is the film’s engine. Ken’s arc — a man who defines himself entirely through a woman and then discovers patriarchy as a replacement — is the sharpest thing in Baumbach and Gerwig’s script, and Gosling plays it without a trace of vanity.
McKinnon’s Weird Barbie gets the film’s best single piece of design: the doll who was played with too hard, now living as an outcast with the discontinued models. That group includes Tanner, a discontinued toy dog known for a defecating feature, who appears without speaking. It is a small, strange detail that tells you the filmmakers actually looked at the toys.
The Verdict on Barbie
Barbie earns its 8 of 10. It is a comedy that takes a brand with no interior life and gives it one, and it does so without turning the audience into the joke. The third act gets talky, and the Mattel subplot never earns its screen time. But the film’s central idea — that a doll built to be perfect is more useful as a doll who learns she is not — holds all the way through.
The “Barbenheimer” phenomenon will be remembered longer than most of what opened that July. What will last past the memes is Gosling’s Ken, a performance that turned the film’s thinnest character into its most quoted one. That is the trade Barbie makes, and it wins.
KEY FACTS
- Title: Barbie (2023)
- Director: Greta Gerwig
- Writers: Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig
- Runtime: 114 minutes
- Genres: Comedy, Adventure, Fantasy
- Lead cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt
- US release date: July 21, 2023
- Premiere: July 9, 2023, Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles
- Principal photography: March–July 2022, Leavesden, England, and Venice Beach Skatepark, Los Angeles
- Metacritic: 80/100
- Score: 8 of 10
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