Barbie – 4 stars
The other day, my son bemoaned people who couldn’t just enjoy the silly movies from their childhood, like Star Wars or Indiana Jones, because they had to find a reason to justify the continuation of their early filmic love into adulthood. So, they create a form of criticism that makes their adoration of juvenilia acceptable, even erudite, elevating simple, fun movies to high art or of great social import (which then naturally leads to a concomitant acceptability of their living at home in the basement amongst their toys well into their 30s).
To be fair, I added the parenthetical.
I thought about what he said when I was watching Barbie. Of course, it will be the subject of Gender Studies papers for the next 20 years, and has already spawned reviews of great seriousness (“a searing social critique”; “An earnest feminist manifesto inside a barbed social satire”; an “existential exegesis on what it means to be a woman, and a human”).
There are indeed very smart things in Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script, including some clever, contemporary touches and social observations. Some land and some elicit a groan.
However, the movie works best as a series of jokes and physical humor encased in a startlingly resonant set design and an energetic commitment to unbridled fun.
That it lightly lampoons patriarchy, consumerism, wokeness, feminism, bro’ culture, capitalism, and much more is undeniable. But that is icing. The cake is the yuks, and Gerwig offers an endless parade of laugh-out-loud lines and sight gags and rousing musical dance numbers, almost all of which land and charm.
A few nits.
I am sick of Will Ferrell. He’s the same schtick, every single time, and he is lazy and boring.
Also, there’s an inspiring speech that screeches the flow to a halt. A rousing feminist speech. To dolls. It’s a bit like watching a character in Star Wars give a soliloquy about colonialism. To Wookies.
The picture is also a bit repetitive and long in its syrupy, maudlin end (though it lands on a great crack to close out).
But these are annoyances. The film opens wondrously, as we are introduced to Barbieland, where everything is perfect; what is not perfect is plainly identified as such (aka, “Weird Barbie” and “Pregnant Barbie”); girls rule; and the Kens serve and bicker amongst themselves, vying for the attention of their masters. But the perfect world of one Barbie (Margot Robbie) begins to crack (her arches fall, she thinks of death), the real world beckons, and she answers the call with a besotted Ken (Ryan Gosling) as a stowaway. There, she finds sadness, men in power, and her own obsolescence. When she is gone, an empowered Gosling returns to Barbieland, and the Kens rise, in hilarious fashion.
After checking its social responsibility box with indelible ink, the picture ramps up as the Barbies use their superior intellects and, interestingly, their feminine wiles, to overthrow the dum dum Kens during their short-lived reign.
This allows for Gosling’s musical numbers, which are worth the entire movie. There is no way around it. He steals this picture. It crackles in every frame in which he appears, and his resume’ as a strong comedic actor (The Nice Guys, Crazy Stupid Love) has expanded.
And “I’m Just Ken” is undeniably the best musical number EVER!
filmvetter 
The opening scene parodying 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was pretty funny. I said to myself, “Oh, good. Finally a comedy that lives up to the hype.”
That was the last good laugh I had during the entire film.
Everything about the story is false. To be genuinely funny, you have to play off reality. BARBIE doesn’t.
21st-century Los Angeles is a milieu that poisons Ken into becoming a stereotypical masculine cliche and causes him to return to Barbieland to establish a patriarchy? Really? Is that funny?
A corporate board room is all male? In California? A state which mandates at least one woman on every corporate board? Is that funny? (BTW, Mattel’s current Board of Directors has *five* women on it.)
Barbie is arrested for punching a guy who gropes her? In 21st century LA? Is that funny?
BARBIE relies on lazy clichés about U.S. society and gender roles that weren’t true when we were kids, let alone true today. And so it parodies nothing, lampoons nothing. How could it? There’s nothing in the film which is real and therefore no basis for true comedy.
Well, it is hard to make a “real” Barbieland.
As for L.A., it seemed very broadly, comedically false, but so what? Ken is a dunce, a himbo. He literally crafted his entire orthodoxy based on books on horses from middle school. Verisimilitude strikes me as a strange ask.
Now, that said, the corporate board scenes were the least funny, but such is Will Ferrell these days (and even if Ted Danson played him, it took away from the great gags and numbers).
And yes, in this silly, zany LA, bereft of homeless or smog, Barbie and Ken do get arrested for punching a dude and stealing clothes! They were released immediately, so that seems contemporary.
Finally, nothing in Raising Arizona is real. It’s still a great comedy.
Let me give two examples of movie comedies over the last thirty years that lampoon reality for laughs. 1996’s THE BIRDCAGE and 2008’s TROPIC THUNDER.
THE BIRDCAGE gets its laughs from three characters: the stereotypical gay man, played by Nathan Lane; the stereotypical homophobe, played by Gene Hackman; and the comedic straight man for most of the movie played, surprisingly, by Robin Williams. While the two stereotypes, and Williams’ straight role, were obviously exaggerated, they had foundations in the real world of that day. So when tossed into a situation the characters can’t control, the fey mannerisms of Lane, the naiveté of Hackman, and the discomfort felt by Williams are all funnier because of it.
Same goes with TROPIC THUNDER. There are a host of parodic characters melded together beautifully by an ensemble cast. The maimed Vietnam War vet who wrote a war book despite never going to war. The futile efforts of the action hero trying to break into serious films. The serious method actor “overliving” his roles. The doped-up actor cut off from his source after he is thrown into the jungle. The Hollywood agent fighting to provide the small contractual obligations for his client. The profane Jewish mogul tossing insults and recklessly doing anything else to keep costs down and the project on track to make a profit. These caricatured characters work because they all had a foundation in reality that we in the audience recognize.
BARBIE has none of this. She and Ken wander out of Barbieland into something resembling THE HANDMAID’S TALE, which just happens to be a modern LA made to look just as fake as the Barbieland that Barbie and Ken came from.
You mention RAISING ARIZONA. But that film doesn’t lampoon anything. There’s no social satire in it at all. It’s a screwball slapstick comedy that is at points surreal. My comment about comedies being based on reality was based on your line about BARBIE, “That it lightly lampoons patriarchy, consumerism, wokeness, feminism, bro’ culture, capitalism, and much more is undeniable.”
BARBIE wants to say something. But it has nothing to say. And so the story meanders around, looking for laughs, but never quite finding them. Why would we laugh at a series of meaningless social satire skits when the characters aren’t real and the situation isn’t real?
I have no objection to your analysis of Birdcage and Tropic Thunder – great films. I laughed at those as well.
As to the “why” of my laughter at Barbie within the vein of social satire, I guess I don’t have as much invested in the necessity of “foundations in the real world” for it to work. Here, most of the time is spent in a place where there is no liquid anyway! And the foray into the real world, such as it is, is super cartoonish. It just seems “off” to demand better grounding for the Mattel Company HQ and when Ken is asking the “real” doctor why he can’t be a doctor, I was dying.
In fact, I laughed out loud tons at the vast majority of the flick, and mainly the silly parts, and didn’t think once about how “un-L.A.” it was for the short time we were there – I mean, if a grown man baring his tan chest was hanging out a middle school in fringe cowboy duds just grabbing books and accosting parents, I expect, in the real world, he’d be tased.
But if you saw The Handmaid’s Tale, I have a better sense of your reaction. For me, “I’m Just Ken” paid for the watch all on its own.
If I’m watching KUNG FU PANDA, the story doesn’t need to reflect social reality. But then that comedy doesn’t pretend to be a social satire. It doesn’t try to mock or ridicule social pretensions. Its story is solely driven by the individual virtues and vices of its cartoon characters.
But if I’m watching TOOTSIE, the comedy works best when it’s directed at social pretensions we in the audience take for granted are real. Traditional gender roles. Sexual abuse in the workplace. Women being judged by their looks. Etc. The laughs come because the absurd story of a man disguised as a woman to advance his career feels real. He is forced to live as a woman. He therefore begins to understand the real problems of living as a woman, but from the male perspective. That’s funny social satire because it is founded in reality.
When Dustin Hoffman’s character is complaining about the cost of his (female) clothes, we laugh at Bill Murray’s strange look in response. But imagine if the gender roles were reversed. Would we laugh if a woman who was pretending to be a man complained about having to buy expensive men’s clothes? Probably not. Because it’s not true. Men’s clothes are not expensive. For the joke to work as social satire, it needs some basis in reality.
You might disagree, but I think BARBIE is the second kind of movie. It clearly wants to be a social satire. But its message is so muddled and directed at obvious falsehoods that one can’t take its situations seriously. They therefore lack comic punch.
Barbie walks into a Mattel corporate boardroom full of men who treat her as a thing to be boxed up. The co-founder of Mattel (the character Ruth Handler played by Rhea Perlman) is a specter-like figure stuck in the bowels of the building somewhere, whose spirit is ignored by the men who have replaced her. It’s clearly supposed to be a message of some sort about the patriarchy. The problem is that Handler was president of Mattel for thirty years (1945-75) and corporate boardrooms have many women on them.
So where are the laughs? The social satire falls flat. We are back to the situation of having to laugh at a woman posing as a man while complaining about how expensive men’s clothes are.
Or take this scene. Barbie and Ken are rollerblading around Venice Beach. Barbie starts to feel self-conscious with so many people staring at her. She tells Ken she wants to visit a construction site to get back that “feminine energy.”
Construction site? Feminine energy? Is that true? Do little girls dream of running construction sites as they play with their barbie dolls?
Of course not. And so the scene is not funny. There’s no foundation of reality.
I think you’re roused that the film deems itself (or perhaps is deemed) a social satire because it is not constructed to be so.
I see the film as first and foremost a light, silly, and joyous entertainment with some social satire. Some of the satire lands and some of it thuds, but all of it is secondary to the yuks.
I don’t care whether it is considered a social satire, because I found that part of it subordinate, and I even poked fun at those who puffed up its social importance.
There were a lot of laughs at socially observant points, but again, at the risk of repetition, for me, that was frosting, not cake.
You write, “Barbie walks into a Mattel corporate boardroom full of men who treat her as a thing to be boxed up. The co-founder of Mattel (the character Ruth Handler played by Rhea Perlman) is a specter-like figure stuck in the bowels of the building somewhere, whose spirit is ignored by the men who have replaced her. It’s clearly supposed to be a message of some sort about the patriarchy. The problem is that Handler was president of Mattel for thirty years (1945-75) and corporate boardrooms have many women on them. So where are the laughs? The social satire falls flat. We are back to the situation of having to laugh at a woman posing as a man while complaining about how expensive men’s clothes are.”
Agreed. Most everything having to do with the boardroom fell flat, but for me, less so because of its gender makeup and cartoonish process (when they break the news to the CEO, they play two-line telephone tag, fer Crissakes, and here you are decrying the lack of reality and reporting on the gender stats of corporate boards) and more because it just wasn’t funny and was overly reliant on one-trick, zany, tired Will Ferrell.
The “feminine energy at the construction site” gag was because Barbie’s world had women as construction workers. In Barbieland, women were everything, the Kens mere accessories. That was her reality. Indeed, there is a construction worker Barbie – https://shop.mattel.com/collections/career-dolls
I’ll leave you the last word (maybe!)
I think the reason you believe BARBIE is not primarily social satire is because the movie is so bad at it. The film’s thematic incoherence makes you think it’s just a “series of jokes and physical humor” designed to make the audience laugh. Like AIRPLANE!, but with less slapstick and more musical segues.
As to the construction site scene, yes, it was foreshadowed by Barbieland. But that’s precisely the problem. Barbieland is an expression of a young girl’s view of how she wants the world to be.
But what young girl in the real world thinks about construction sites at all, let alone infusing them with “feminine energy”? I would say that number is close to zero. And so the joke falls flat because it’s based on something no one but a gender hack could possibly believe girls dream about.
I will re-watch at some point, cataloguing the parts that would qualify as social satire, and report.
While I have you, this is my “I watched” and “To watch” list for this year. Have you seen anything on here, other than Barbie?
SEEN
Oppenheimer
Asteroid City
The Killer
Barbie
A Haunting in Venice
Air
TO SEE
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
You Hurt My Feelings
Sharper
Passages
Maestro
Dumb Money
Anatomy of a Fall
Priscilla
They Cloned Tyrone
Night of the 12th
Blackberry
Guardians III
The Lost King
Skinamarink
Past Lives
The Origin of Evil
Saltburn
Somewhere in Queens
May December
American Fiction
Zone of Interest
The Burial
You list shows to what degree I’ve neglected the cinema recently. Perhaps COVID changed my viewing habits permanently.
From your list of “SEEN” movies, just OPPENHEIMER and BARBIE.
From your list of “TO SEE” movies, just GUARDIANS 3.
I’m embarrassed to say that I have not heard of a majority of the films on your two lists.
testing.
OK, I side with Pincher more than FV here, although I laughed at the same places FV did. Tovie sees itself as a meaningful satire, and on this point it fails completely and insultingly. I couldn’t even finish the movie until the third time I tried, leaving it on as background, and the last 20 minutes are just garbage.
The writing is only accidentally good and increasingly I’m convinced that it’s the performances alone that save the movie. For example, Jeff complains about Will Farrell. But just listen to his dialog. It’s shit. Greta Gerwig apparently thought having a buffoon be the CEO was clever. Why? This is idiotic. Another point: all the Barbies except Robbie and McKinnon are simply terrible. They’re plastic, saying stupid things. I mean, who the fuck thought “FLAAAAAAT FEEEEEET!” was funny? It was ludicrous. And is it really funny that the men are able to convert the Barbies into servants? Really? Is Gerwig saying that all women, no matter how accomplished, are secretly longing to be wives and girlfriends? I can’t believe that. Then what was her point in writing it that way?
But Gosling is genius. He should be nominated in the Actor, not supporting, category. I realized the last night every single Ken is better than all the subordinate Barbies. They’re all mini portraits of genius, while the Barbies are reciting 70s sitcom style humor badly. If you rank performances, you’ve got Gosling far out ahead of everyone, then ok, Margot Robbie is good, then it’s a close call between McKinnon and Asian Ken–and McKinnon has by far the showier part, so it shouldn’t be close.
I disagree with you both on one point: The LA stuff is beautifully delivered and transcends the rather obvious writing. I’ll point out three examples:
1) the cops at the police station. “Man, she’s even better looking with more clothes on!”
2) Corporate guy: “We’re actually doing the patriarchy very well…we’re just better at hiding it.”
3) The whole exchange between woman doctor and Ken still makes me laugh every time.
So the movie’s a failure. As a woman, I rejected the entire premise. But the concept was clever and well-executed, and the performances are sublime. And while the men were clearly superior, Robbie and McKinnon both have excellent moments of physical comedy. (Robbie’s collapse into neglected face in mud Barbie is hilarious).