Barbie (Preview)
Reviewed by Mary F. Corey

Produced by Tom Ackerly, Robbie Brenner, David Heyman, and Margot Robbie; directed by Greta Gerwig; screenplay by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach; cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto; edited by Nick Houy; music by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt; production design by Sarah Greenwood; set decoration by Katie Spencer; costumes by Jacqueline Durran; starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Kate McKinnon, Michael Cera, America Ferrara, Arianna Greenblatt, Issa Rae, Will Ferrell, Helen Mirren, and Rhea Perlman. Color, 114 min. 2023. A Warner Bros. production.

I’m too old to have played with Barbie. I had a rubbery Betsy Wetsy doll who, if fed a tiny bottle of water, would pee out of a hole in her bum, at which point you got to “diaper” her—an activity that quickly lost its luster as I returned my attention to Space Patrol and Hopalong Cassidy.

Consequently, I approached Barbie with neither nostalgia nor agenda. I was skeptical about Gerwig’s decision to use her talents in the service of rebranding a retro toy—a venture whose $150 million marketing budget was financed by that toy’s manufacturer. But I admired Ladybird (2017) and had some hope that Gerwig would find a way to turn her subject on its head and create something fresh and dissident. She did not.

I tend to write about films I admire in some way. But when a film I think is a crock is overpraised or given outsized attention, I am ready to rumble. Think Crash (1996) or Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)—a film I would have trashed except that the idea of watching it for a second time was unbearable. But Barbie isn’t a true stink bomb. It is a mildly amusing “feel-good” movie that didn’t make me feel good. I was troubled by its reception, and the interpretation by both audiences and some critics of its cultural resonance. Most disturbing to me were Gerwig’s delusions about what she thought she had wrought.

In her New York Times review of Barbie, Manohla Dargis asks the salient question: “Can a doll with an ingratiating smile, impossible curves, and boobs ready for liftoff be a feminist icon? That’s the question that swirls through Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.” The answer is no. Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach are smart people. But they apparently are not smart enough to turn shit into Shinola. (I know the adage is “Know shit from Shinola.” But the misuse here is apt.) And why would they even want to do that? That is the question that nagged me as I watched this derivative, unsubversive, nonempowering, live-action fantasy about a bimboish doll. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has offered his own thumpingly hyperbolic answer to the question of why Barbie when he wrote, “Barbie is about the intellectual demand and emotional urgency of making preexisting subjects one’s own, and it advocates for imaginative infidelity, the radical off-label manipulation of existing intellectual property.” Huh? I’m all for “imaginative infidelity,” but I don’t think Gerwig’s very on-label Barbie delivers anything remotely like that. For me “imaginative infidelity” is Fur (2006), I’m Not There (2006), or Mr. Turner (2014).

The actual answer to the question of why Gerwig chose to make this film is not that the idea of creating a “radical off-label imagination” offered a cool challenge. The answer, obviously, is money. And Barbie’s original sin is Gerwig’s collaboration with Mattel, which compromises the film from the get-go and ensures that nothing genuinely critical or insubordinate can take place during its bloated one-hour-and-fifty-four-minute duration.

Still, Gerwig has dispensed her filthy lucre wisely by gathering a brilliant creative team to make a visually arresting film. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto magically backlights Barbieland, suffusing the screen with radiant sunlight by day and a soft eggy moonlight by night. He also adeptly manages the shift to the Real World with its scattershot lighting and welcome absence of pinkness. Production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer have crafted an eye-candy stage-set Barbieworld that feels purposely artificial and handmade, like good Wes Anderson. In one lovely scene, masses of guitar-strumming Kens serenade an infinity of Barbies seated beside papier-mâché campfires on a beach backdrop that looks borrowed from a high school drama club. Costume designer Jacqueline Durran has some fun with “patriarchal” Ryan Gosling, decking him out in a faux mink coat and skewed headband and putting Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) in a stiff, pink baby-doll frock. But she misses the opportunity to really challenge Barbie style, hamstrung both by the Mattel playbook and a Chanel tie-in linked to Robbie’s role as Chanel’s Global Ambassador. “Barbies,” Robbie has said in interviews, “love Chanel.”

I first saw Barbie at Long Island’s Sag Harbor Cinema on a hot summer day with a lot of tweens and a bunch of older dames, many of whom had probably sported NOW buttons in 1972. But here they were expressing “feminism” by seeing Barbie while wearing “Barbiecore” duds—pink Bermuda shorts, pink designer bags, and “Barbie” manicures. Eeewwww. Still, the film began promisingly with a bunch of little girls in 1950s frocks violently smashing their Betsy Wetsy and Baby Tears dolls on the rocks—a kick-ass play on the opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sadly, it was all downhill from there…

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Mary F. Corey teaches history at UCLA where she specializes in intellectual history and African American history.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 1