Let’s talk about ‘Barbenheimer’, a genuinely organic phenomenon that produced one of the greatest box office weekends in Hollywood history. In an industry that has turned adversarial opening weekend competition into a standard, the idea that audiences would instead turn and embrace all options at the theaters seemed truly beyond any executive’s comprehension. That Oppenheimer – a three-hour biopic about the birth of nuclear weapons – ended up grossing over $80 million feels like a miracle; strapping itself to the pastel rocket that is Barbie and riding it to massive returns. And then you actually watch Barbie, which I finally have a week later, and you realize that this film – the third solo feature from Greta Gerwig – being a mega hit to the tune of $160 million, is almost just as surprising.

Greta Gerwig, the director and co-writer of Barbie, has managed a transition that few have ever pulled off. A darling actress from indie films from the 2000’s and 2010’s, she’s actually managed to achieve more fame by stepping behind the camera, directing Lady Bird and Little Women, two Best Picture nominees that probably rank amongst the best American films in recent memory. Barbie is a level up in terms of commercial profile and corporate resources. The first live-action theatrical feature based on the iconic Mattel doll, Barbie can partially sidestep accusations of being a contributor to Hollywood IP glut, and disguise itself as an original idea. Gerwig’s take, written along with her personal and professional partner, Noah Baumbach, is (as expected) fresh and (not as expected) shockingly moving.

Casting Barbie – long a symbol for impossible standards of beauty – would seem to be a daunting task. In casting the Australian actress Margot Robbie, Gerwig finds the perfect match. Robbie’s career – two Oscar nominations; has worked with Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Damien Chazelle; a formidable resume as a producer – has been ten years of unquestionable success. But Barbie feels like something different. Her performance as Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad are the only other times I can recall where Robbie’s talents as a movie star were truly capitalized on. But those films were both financial disappointments. Barbie is Robbie’s masterpiece, proving that she not only has the acting chops to fully realize a character based on a toy doll but also shows the level of her charisma and screen presence to lead a studio movie. Few performers can claim to do both, and with Barbie, Robbie puts herself in a rare and limited class.

Robbie’s Barbie is known as the “Stereotypical Barbie”, the standard platinum blonde with the unreal waistline and the permanent cheerfulness. In Barbieland, she wakes up every day to a cloudless sky surrounded by a variety of other Barbies, including but not limited to President Barbie (Issa Rae), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef), and Nobel Prize-winning Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp). All the Barbies of Barbieland represent a utopia of various races and creeds, embodying Barbie’s central ethos: women of all kinds can reach unprecedented success in any field they choose. Of course, there can be no Barbie without Ken, and Barbieland has plenty of Kens. The Kens don’t vary as much in profession or accomplishment as the Barbies, they mostly exist to entertain and accompany the Barbies. This existence bothers Beach Ken (a hilarious Ryan Gosling) who dreams of becoming something more with Stereotypical Barbie.

When Barbie wakes up one morning to find the perfections of her every waking moment are going askew, she begins to worry for the first time in her life. Encroaching thoughts of anxiety and death plague her mind in ways that the other Barbies can’t comprehend. Barbie is sent off to see Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) who tells her that she must travel to the real world and find the little girl who plays with her. Only through helping this girl see the perfection of womanhood can Barbie go back to her idealized existence. Making the trip out of Barbieland for the first time, she finds Beach Ken hiding in her backseat of her Barbie Mobile, an unwelcome companion in her journey to the real world. The pair end up on the boardwalk of Venice Beach where a troubling reality emerges: in the real world, there is no female supremacy – in fact, the opposite is true: Barbie finds herself commented upon and feeling like an object, an unsuspecting victim of the patriarchy.

This realization is less troubling for Ken, whose eyes are open to the possibility of a male-centric society. Realizing for the first time that he can be more than just “beach”, he scurries to take advantage of the patriarchy as much as he can. Meanwhile, Barbie finds Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), her disillusioned real world owner in her high school. Sasha’s mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), works as an assistant to the CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell), and when she learns that Sasha’s Barbie has come to life, she schemes to help Barbie and protect her from Mattell executives who only wish for her to go back into her box. Barbie and Ken’s emergence in California creates all types of havoc on the human world, and as they both become radicalized (in opposite directions) by gender politics, even Barbieland itself becomes infected.

Gerwig and Baumbach’s script is equal parts Toy Story and The Purple Rose of Cairo, with a heavier-than-you-may-expect dose of Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Ackerman’s epic and challenging film is perhaps the cinematic urtext of domestic female anxiety, and the Belgian film was recently voted as the greatest of all time in the latest Sight & Sound critics poll. That the choice was controversial is further proof that there is still a lot of misogyny throughout the world of film criticism, and by extension, the world at large. Gerwig channels Ackerman’s simmering feminist rage and funnels it through a vibrant crowd-pleaser. A golden spoon of crystalline sugar to help the medicine go down. It’s astounding to me the ways Gerwig takes Warner Bros’ tentpole Summer release and encases it not only with endless cinematic illusion but also with explicit and cogent takes on the gender politics that plague world culture.

It can always be fraught when a corporation like Warner Bros – whose 2023 has been mired by labor malpractice and creative decisions that has thrown speculation on their very interest in artistic creation – produces a film with a progressive political mindset. When corporations learn the vocabulary of leftist language and use it for capitalist gain, skepticism is a fair response. And surely, Barbie is at its weakest when it is less subtle about its ideas; Gerwig and Baumbach are often forced to say out loud what they have already cleverly and more organically woven throughout the script’s humor. Part of Gerwig’s take on the material is how there are inherent limits to what can be expected from Hollywood and corporations at large, a kind of cognitive dissonance that most commercial films fail to execute. But Gerwig is a phenomenal director, and she confronts uncomfortable truths about living as a woman and working within a patriarchal system, repackaging it as a confectionary delight.

It shouldn’t be ignored that Barbie is also a visual pleasure. Shot by Rodrigo Prieto, the film constructs elaborate musical numbers that recall the work of Stanley Donen and Vincente Minelli. The music, written by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, includes original songs sung by Lizzo, Charlie XCX, Sam Smith and Billie Eilish. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes and Sarah Greenwood’s production design expertly actualize Barbieland’s magisterial unreality. It’s all to say that Barbie can be enjoyed even beyond the supposed righteous politics of its subject matter. A formidable aesthetic belied by the buoyant lightness of its characters and humor, Barbie may be hard for some to take seriously. Produced for broad appeal, Warner Bros instead allowed Gerwig authorial voice, and Gerwig used that power to her advantage as a filmmaker and a storyteller. This is embodied by the film’s final line, which I won’t spoil but will say without irony feels as radical as anything I’ve seen in a mainstream comedy in a long time.

 

Directed by Greta Gerwig