Barbie Review: Greta Gerwig’s Feminist Satire Is A Fun, Tearful, Fabulously Pink Catharsis That Made Me Feel Seen
Come on Barbie, let's get an existential crisis!
4 / 5
To think, a film so pink, with a man wearing mink, could cleverly wink at everything that’s wrong with the patriarchy, performative feminism, and the clearly frustrating expectation from every women-led film to ALWAYS be serious and world-altering, is just so gloriously satisfying, I could scream! Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a meta, feminist satire that isn’t afraid to be cringey, silly fun, and fabulously pink while speaking to every woman’s lived-in experience. Yet, it is so crucially for the men as well. Directed by Greta Gerwig, with a screenplay written by her and Noah Baumbach, the Barbie movie stars Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, Michael Cera, America Ferrera, Will Ferrell, Ariana Greenblatt, Rhea Pearlman, Kate McKinnon, Emma Mackey, Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Alexandra Shipp, Ncuti Gatwa, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Scott Evans, Dua Lipa, John Cena, Nicola Coughlan, Ritu Arya, Emerald Fennell, Connor Swindells, and Jamie Demetriou, amongst others.
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In Greta Gerwig’s Barbie Land, everything is pink and perfect. Women rule, both literally and figuratively. There are men, who are just Ken, and let’s not forget, Allan (an adorable Michael Cera), who is quite literally not like all the men. But their existence isn’t really so important. Only the Barbies truly matter. I mean, it is the dream, right? So we think, ladies. So we think. When Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) starts having an existential crisis, her fellow Barbies (doctor, writer, president, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, lawyer Barbie, and so on) advise her to seek out Weird Barbie (McKinnon in her Morpheus moment), who offers her a choice: Forget everything and go back or seek out the Real World where she might find her answers.
Barbie, accompanied by Ken, makes a rather difficult (LOL) journey to the Real World. And well, things and humans, and their actual feelings towards Barbie dolls, aren’t what she expected them to be. While she’s trying to navigate this, Ken is having his own eye-opening journey in this topsy-turvy world so different from Barbie Land. Let’s just say, it’s an enlightened Ken going back and one changed Ken is kenough to rearrange their home world.
The Barbie movie looks and feels fantastic with some genuine vision going into crafting Barbie Land. I’ve seen the whole Architectural Digest video of Barbie’s Dreamhouse and still, I was fascinated by the set design (Sarah Greenwood, Katie Spencer) and the attention to detail in creating a perfect Barbie World with its mix of 2D and 3D, like a dollhouse would be. Every small gesture and posture that the Barbies adopt is a trip down nostalgia, reminding you of how you (or kids you saw) played with these dolls. Even the way children damage and mutilate these dolls in the real world has an impact on Barbie Land. The outfits (by designer Jacqueline Durran) are retro loud, chic, and Chanel, reflecting the vibrant style of the era when Barbie was popular.
Also Read: How The Fabulous Fashion Of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie Gives Satire, Ken-ergy, Chanel, And The Perfect Pink
Whatever your expectations are from the Barbie Movie, prepare to be surprised. As a kid, I subscribed to the Barbie magazine and I recognised how the dialogues, such as the “Hi Barbie!” scene at the Beach or the one where Ken hurts himself, have the rhythm and sound of something being read from a comic book speech bubble. Of course, Greta finds a way to sneak in the sharp satire that’ll catch you unawares and crack you up. The writing is loaded with jabs, some blunt and some incisive, but the lines that Ryan Gosling’s Ken gets are outrageously funny, and sneakily hit you right in the feels as you grasp the subtext (not that it takes much effort, it’s pretty spelt out). Gosling, with his physical language and splendid comic timing, sells it like gold! His Ken sure has rizz, and he steals the show in every scene he is in. He’s a different Ken than what I always thought Ken was, but he made me rethink, did we even know or care about Ken at all? The Barbie album is a bop for sure, but if “I’m Just Ken” isn’t nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar, it might break my heart.
Margot Robbie as Barbie is perfection (there’s a scene about this that made me spit my drink out in laughter), bringing a certain “Oh I like her, I want to be her, but I also envy her” vibe to her Stereotypical Barbie. Yet, her crisis never feels superficial. While the rest of the Barbie and Ken cameo cast is delightful, Simu Liu as the rival Ken, particularly during a Grease-inspired dance-off with Gosling in the song “I’m Just Ken,” is hilarious.
Barbie never stops being fun, absurd, and downright bonkers and carries on without taking itself too seriously. The self-deprecating humour and the meta jokes keep coming, and those who know of Barbie’s history would actually have lots to laugh about. Like when they mention that ’Skipper’ once escaped to the real world and offered to babysit some human kids, because Barbie’s sister Skipper is ALWAYS babysitting their youngest sisters Stacie and Shelly, and even does a summer job as a babysitter that was turned into a toy set! Or the multiple jokes about the dolls not having the paraphernalia for sex, which is why their world is so devoid of carnal desire or rage.
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With their writing, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach also capture some of the most ordinary, everyday troubles of what it means to be a girl or a woman in both the plastic and patriarchal world. The humour has the ‘written by women’ sting, because it uses the most casually hilarious lines to speak spot-on disarming truths about real issues women encounter, such as uncomfortable male gaze, painful fashion, body image issues, imposter syndrome, and even the complicated choice of motherhood. Barbie has never been a mother. She doesn’t have a vagina!
Gerwig and Baumbach pour a cauldron full of this hot feminine rage into a scene where Barbie says, “I don’t feel pretty anymore,” cueing a monologue by America Ferrera, that the Real Women Have Curves actor delivers with furious passion. The monologue was like Feminism 101 for the uninitiated, which I’d like to believe most women today aren’t. It’s very basic; like you’d find it during a random doomscrolling sesh on Instagram.
The monologue also made me cry. Each time we women are given a platform to speak up (which is rare), whether through film or on a stage, there’s an unspoken pressure to prioritise what concerns we raise. As if this patriarchal world is doing us a favour by giving us their time and listening to us, and that platform has no place for our “first-world problems.” It’s all grave. It’s all big stakes. And that’s great, we want more of that. But sometimes, just sometimes, all we women need is to have those lesser feelings represented without there being any deeper subtext to it. It’s just stubborn cellulite. And I want someone to tell me they understand why it bothers me.
As a woman, to feel yourself and your tiny, seemingly inconsequential concerns, insecurities, and imposter syndrome experiences that society dismisses without a second thought… so perfectly represented on screen… was cathartic. Do I wish the monologue was a bit more evolved? Yes, I do. But did America Ferrera sell it? Hell yes! With Barbie, Greta Gerwig made me feel seen, while the rest of the world was so busy calling me shallow.
And then, she cut a little deeper. In a clever subvert, Barbie attempts to show you just how simple it is for gender wars to tilt unfairly, and how that could make those in power oblivious to how (or in this case, even where) the other half lives. The argument that one gender is superior to the other only sounds cool when you’re yassifying the gender discourse. Feminists have been screaming from rooftops how the patriarchy hurts men just as much as it hurts women. And therefore, both sides aren’t rivals, but simply getting played by the same system.
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The character of Ken, created as an offshoot of Barbie’s (like Eve was created from Adam’s rib), isn’t here as a male-bashing punchbag! More than Barbie, Ken in a Barbie World represents what women have been feeling all their lives—second best, frivolous, with no representation, and constantly seeking validation from the opposite sex. Ken hiding his insecurity and emotional dilemma, even after establishing his Ken Dom, is exactly how many of us strong, independent feminists are conditioned to act, as if showing chinks in our armour would weaken our rebellion. How many times has feminism been relegated to catchphrases that patronise women, like ‘lean in’ or ‘girl boss’, or in this case for the Kens, Kenergy and Kenough on a t-shirt? As if that really would be enough!
Gerwig subverts the tropes in a way that both men and women can see themselves represented in both Barbie and Ken. In an ensemble cast film, the biggest turn-off would be to see talented actors underutilized. But in Barbie, that’s the whole point! Even with actors like Kingsley Ben-Adir and Ncuti Gatwa playing Kens, they’re relegated to the sidelines of the sidelines, because this world is a “women-centric” movie, guys! In Michael Cera’s Allan, who displays no conformity to cookie-cutter gender roles, we find what happens when society won’t let you be unless you don’t subscribe to the rigid masculine or feminine ideals.
I will admit that it’s a tad messy out there with the ideas and themes explored being all over the place. Barbie shuffles between being a story about an anthropomorphised doll having an existential crisis to a commentary on gender roles. It is even the story of a mother and a daughter’s strained relationship while calling out Mattel’s performative feminism. There’s a meet-your-maker surreal moment, with a heartwarming performance by Rhea Pearlman as Ruth Handler (the maker of Barbie). It’s quite frankly a lot!
Also Read: 5 Lesser-Known Facts About Ruth Handler, The Creator Of Barbie You Probably Didn’t Know
Greta Gerwig does manage to make this ride as smooth and cohesive as possible, tying it all up together with a bright pink thread of clever writing and humour that keeps the tone light. Some of the themes are toned down keeping the younger generation watching it in mind. It mostly works, though I am still peeved that Barbie and Ken barely spent time in the Real World and it brought such a huge transformation in Barbie and Ken’s ideologies. Furthermore, the Mattel corporate arc didn’t amount to anything truly substantial (a waste of Sex Education’s Connor Swindells, he is such a good actor!). The film has an awkward relationship with Mattel being both the producer and the butt of some of its satire. But these aren’t dealbreakers because the essence of what the film is trying to do with that is put forth early on in Mirren’s opening monologue. The Barbie dolls believe that they solved the ‘patriarchy problem’.
In an interview, Gerwig had spoken about how, with this film about a toy that has had its fair share of controversy, she would be both “doing the thing and subverting the thing.” Turns out, the Barbie Movie is quite the meta-commentary on performative feminism, lobbing a few sharp jabs at Mattel itself, on how marketing dolls to become feminist symbols that can effectively change the world is pushing it too much. I mean, real women have been fighting this battle for centuries now, and the world seems to not want to budge. This is a film about dolls. It might not change the world, but it can have some fun trying to. Yes, of course, it will whitewash the brand’s image, and they’ll also sell some merch in the process, but that’s the capitalist world we live in. Flawed, imperfect. Just like our feminism.
It’s not a bad way to get the message across, is it? Women have the most developed sense of dark humour, thanks to finding the silver lining in aeons of suffering and fighting the system. Do movies about the female experience always have to amount to some sublime, goosebumps-inducing, heart-wrenching experience? Or does it have to have that clever, sexy, smart librarian vibe that men think all ‘cool women’ have? We women deserve a goofy, silly, funny, giggle fest with men as eye candy! Men have thrown Kartik Aaryan’s monologue from Pyaar Ka Punchanama into our faces so many times as if it’s the gospel truth about what men go through. I’d love to have America Ferrera’s monologue tune out that sound, please!
And for once, I’d love for the pressure to be off us women to make some discourse-altering point. We’ve made it already, and we can make more of it while being so ridiculously funny, you won’t know what hit you. Just let us have our blowout party with mimosas, por favor.
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Verdict
It’s weird that even before I finished my review of the Barbie movie, I felt protective of it and wanted to write a detailed ‘In Defence Of’ for this film that’s already gotten hate from, sigh, the patriarchy. It isn’t enough that the patriarchy wants to mansplain to us women what to do and how to do it, we must also take notes on how to revel in OUR feminism. *rolls eyes*
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a film that’s not perfect, and despite what hype you read online, not entirely for the Oscars (except Gosling, he could get it). Barbenheimer aside, it’s not to be ‘pitted’ against the all-masculine Oppenheimer, although I could make some solid points comparing how male hubris destroys and how female existential crisis creates. But that’s another thinkpiece. No, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is just a whole lot of laugh-out-loud fun, as if a unicorn shat nostalgia all over the screen, and you had a therapy sesh with your girlies about how it is so hard to be a woman under toxic patriarchy, that could also be a hilarious play on a sound set. It’s female rage expressed in a slightly different, unexpected way. It doesn’t want to change the world, nor can it. It just wants to make women, and even men, feel seen.
Barbie the movie is currently streaming in theatres.
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