Life in plastic
The phrase "generous to a fault" irresistibly suggests itself in connection with the feature film Barbie, a combination of toy commercial, exercise in feminist critical theory, anti-capitalist satire, and celebration of the ennobling power of consumerism directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, who certainly deserves some credit for having been assigned an almost impossible unfair task in trying to bring a film with this many competing (indeed, mutually incompatible) needs in for a landing. The generosity is that this really does seem to sincerely want to offer at least a little something for every conceivable viewer - up to and including people for whom the idea of feminist message movies sound inherently suspicious, and I think there was one target audience you'd be safely able to scratch off the list with this particular project, that would probably be the one I'd pick The fault is, well, you can't do that: at a certain point, it falls upon the artist to pick a thing, and say, "okay, we're going to go this direction", and then try to align everything else in the same direction, and drop the things that don't want to go in that direction. Barbie never finds its way to thus limiting itself: Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach are trying out different ideas and jokes and plot strands pretty much all the way through the 114-minute feature, and if anything the film gets noticeably less focused as it jostles its way towards the conclusion, rather than more. To put it in the least charitable way I can think of, this is an incoherent mess. The only thing holding it together, for a loose sense of "holding it together", is that it has relatively unflagging momentum to go along with a running time that, if it's not "short" in any objective sense, is at least much less bloated than a lot of wide-release tentpole movies tend to be in these benighted days. Though there are plenty of baggy patches where this is just begging for a more cold-blooded editor.
But let's not go there yet. If "incoherent mess" is me at my least charitable, here's some actual charity, which has the added benefit of being honest: I liked this more than I expected to. For one thing, there's just so much of it: it's a hurricane of story ideas and stylistic conceits, going for all sorts of different tones, trying to build a world while doing it, and it would take a truly herculean feat of grumpiness to find it "boring". It's way the hell too busy for that. For another thing, I think it's hard to imagine a viewer finding absolutely none of this to be at least a little bit funny. It spits out so many jokes over its two hours that some percentage of them almost by default have to work, and it's indulging in a pretty wide array of comic sensibilities, so even if you think some of them are bad (and I think some of them are genuinely awful, including a dirty pun on the non-existent phrase "beach off" that goes on murderously long and was somehow elected to go front-and-center in the film's ad campaign), there's plenty of variety. It's not really a clever film: what feels like an enormous percentage of the film's jokes are some variation on "Here's a thing typical of the Barbie line of fashion dolls and accessories! Boy, wouldn't that thing seem extremely stupid if you tried to apply it to reality?", and that is absolutely the lowest-hanging fruit for jokes in a movie based on Barbie dolls. But the filmmakers are sufficiently committed to selling those jokes, each and every time that they show up, that it's somewhat charming despite being pretty easy and obvious.
The other thing that Barbie has going for it, as every other review of the film has already dutifully pointed out, is some of the most ridiculously delightful sets of 2023, in which production designer Sarah Greenwood translates the hollow plastic toys of the Barbie line into a full-scale playground for the adult cast to goof around on. The only real problem with any of it is that I wish there was even more of it: we see all of the film's riot of pink plastic and flat surfaces, Barbieland, by the half-hour mark, and there's never really anything new after that. But it never stops being fun to look at, Gerwig never runs out of ways to block her extremely willing cast to make the best use of the sets, and the hammy theater kid energy with which that cast throws itself into taking this elaborately chintzy-looking world seriously never lessens. The film is an unmitigated triumph of putting us into a toy-sized environment in every way, including the shiny, soulless cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, who is probably overqualified for a job that amounts to "make sure everything is flat and bright", but it's the right look, anyway.
I don't think there are any other unmitigated triumphs, sadly. The story that Gerwig and Baumbach have glued together out of disparate plot threads and undercooked ideas is admirable chiefly in that they don't seem to have ever run out of those ideas, though this also means that never really get around to developing any of them. It's a pretty self-evident place to start, at least: in a world ruled by the logic of childhood play, the most sterotypically Barbie-esque Barbie of them all (Margot Robbie, who is so obviously the best choice to play Barbie of any moderately famous actress now living that the film even makes a joke about how lazy it was to cast her) is the most dancingest, happiest, party-ready doll of them all - right up until she starts to break, displaying conspicuously non-Barbie behavior like walking on the soles of her feat and contemplating mortality. The Barbie oracle (Kate McKinnon, giving a strictly by-the-books Kate McKinnonr performance), a doll who was played with too hard by her owner, tells "our" Barbie that she must go to the real world to find her owner, since this is a symptom of the psychological distress of whomever is playing with her. And so Barbie heads to real-world Los Angeles, accompanied by "her" Ken (Ryan Gosling), who has absolutely no personality that isn't related to being a Barbie accessory, so the idea of staying behind basically cannot enter his empty vinyl head.
That gets us to the point that the film blossoms into anything beyond "look at this filmic realisation of the Barbie toys as an alternate reality, isn't that goofy?", and it is the point at which Barbie starts to unravel fiercely. The film suffers from some terrible world-building, never committing to rules about the relationship between Barbieland and our human reality that go deeper than the needs of the individual gag or plot point - which might not matter if it were strictly a gag-driven film, reveling in its anarchic comic lawlessness, but the entire story is built on the conflict between the "playtime logic" governing Barbieland and the social and cultural realities of 21st Century America. Getting that distinction pinned down is pretty crucial to the film's function as anything but a loose vibe, and it doesn't even seem to want to try to pin it down. And it's not just the loosey-goosey writing: visually, the film presents Los Angeles as pretty stylised in and of itself, with corporate offices modeled on Jacques Tati and ludicrous props presented with deadpan earnestness. The CEO of Mattel is played by a rarely-more-grating Will Ferrell as every bit as much of a cartoon caricature as the Barbie dolls. There's just not enough of a division between the two worlds to support a narrative fundamentally about the nature of that division.
This is also the point where the film starts to churn out concepts and hope for the best, leading to a lot of clutter and no real definition. Probably the most damaging of these dog-ends is the matter of Barbie's owner, a fiery lefty teen named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), and her mother, who is - irony of ironies! - a Barbie designer at Mattel, Gloria (America Ferrera). The film just kind of drops them in, then abandons them, then drags them back to Barbieland to kill off the last vestige of coherent world-building that the film has managed to cling to, and all the while never gives either of them a more compelling or deep personality than "Mom is sad that daughter has outgrown Barbie". And then, out of the clear blue sky, the film expects that it can put all the weight of its emotional climax and thematic mission statement onto Ferrera's shoulders, despite Gloria being very little more than a plot point. Ferrera tries her absolute best to soldier her way through the cumbersome monologue where this all happens, but the film has done nothing at all to support her, and the moment just feels like bald sermonising detached from any human onscreen, an exhausted admission by the film that it has been too thematically confused basically since its second scene (its first scene is a wholly wonderful 2001: A Space Odyssey parody) to ever have any of these ideas come about organically, so it was time to force the issue.
The net result of all of the above: Barbie is a frustrating and annoying movie taken as a whole, but I think there are charms to extract from it viewed at the level of individual moments. The people onscreen are clearly having fun, and that helps makes the bits mostly work okay; even the best of the performances (which is by every imaginable measure Gosling) stops at the level of playing the beats that were already in the script, but it's such a concept-heavy comedy that I don't know there would have been a better way to go about it. It never runs out of gas, finding the energy to pull out a large-scale musical number and dance battle deep into the second half, and so managing to rally with its very best scene even as the script has basically just turned into a checklist of unrelated notions to try and shove up in there (I'm not remotely the first person to point this out, but it still bears saying: it is a weird unforced error that in this ode to girlhood, womanhood, and bourgeois feminism, the obvious strengths are all related to Gosling, the characterisation of Ken, and the jokes about masculinity in crisis). It's certainly not an onerous movie to sit through. But it's pretty sloppy and thin, inexplicably so for the film to have won the dubious honor of being the Film Discourse Champion of 2023.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
But let's not go there yet. If "incoherent mess" is me at my least charitable, here's some actual charity, which has the added benefit of being honest: I liked this more than I expected to. For one thing, there's just so much of it: it's a hurricane of story ideas and stylistic conceits, going for all sorts of different tones, trying to build a world while doing it, and it would take a truly herculean feat of grumpiness to find it "boring". It's way the hell too busy for that. For another thing, I think it's hard to imagine a viewer finding absolutely none of this to be at least a little bit funny. It spits out so many jokes over its two hours that some percentage of them almost by default have to work, and it's indulging in a pretty wide array of comic sensibilities, so even if you think some of them are bad (and I think some of them are genuinely awful, including a dirty pun on the non-existent phrase "beach off" that goes on murderously long and was somehow elected to go front-and-center in the film's ad campaign), there's plenty of variety. It's not really a clever film: what feels like an enormous percentage of the film's jokes are some variation on "Here's a thing typical of the Barbie line of fashion dolls and accessories! Boy, wouldn't that thing seem extremely stupid if you tried to apply it to reality?", and that is absolutely the lowest-hanging fruit for jokes in a movie based on Barbie dolls. But the filmmakers are sufficiently committed to selling those jokes, each and every time that they show up, that it's somewhat charming despite being pretty easy and obvious.
The other thing that Barbie has going for it, as every other review of the film has already dutifully pointed out, is some of the most ridiculously delightful sets of 2023, in which production designer Sarah Greenwood translates the hollow plastic toys of the Barbie line into a full-scale playground for the adult cast to goof around on. The only real problem with any of it is that I wish there was even more of it: we see all of the film's riot of pink plastic and flat surfaces, Barbieland, by the half-hour mark, and there's never really anything new after that. But it never stops being fun to look at, Gerwig never runs out of ways to block her extremely willing cast to make the best use of the sets, and the hammy theater kid energy with which that cast throws itself into taking this elaborately chintzy-looking world seriously never lessens. The film is an unmitigated triumph of putting us into a toy-sized environment in every way, including the shiny, soulless cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, who is probably overqualified for a job that amounts to "make sure everything is flat and bright", but it's the right look, anyway.
I don't think there are any other unmitigated triumphs, sadly. The story that Gerwig and Baumbach have glued together out of disparate plot threads and undercooked ideas is admirable chiefly in that they don't seem to have ever run out of those ideas, though this also means that never really get around to developing any of them. It's a pretty self-evident place to start, at least: in a world ruled by the logic of childhood play, the most sterotypically Barbie-esque Barbie of them all (Margot Robbie, who is so obviously the best choice to play Barbie of any moderately famous actress now living that the film even makes a joke about how lazy it was to cast her) is the most dancingest, happiest, party-ready doll of them all - right up until she starts to break, displaying conspicuously non-Barbie behavior like walking on the soles of her feat and contemplating mortality. The Barbie oracle (Kate McKinnon, giving a strictly by-the-books Kate McKinnonr performance), a doll who was played with too hard by her owner, tells "our" Barbie that she must go to the real world to find her owner, since this is a symptom of the psychological distress of whomever is playing with her. And so Barbie heads to real-world Los Angeles, accompanied by "her" Ken (Ryan Gosling), who has absolutely no personality that isn't related to being a Barbie accessory, so the idea of staying behind basically cannot enter his empty vinyl head.
That gets us to the point that the film blossoms into anything beyond "look at this filmic realisation of the Barbie toys as an alternate reality, isn't that goofy?", and it is the point at which Barbie starts to unravel fiercely. The film suffers from some terrible world-building, never committing to rules about the relationship between Barbieland and our human reality that go deeper than the needs of the individual gag or plot point - which might not matter if it were strictly a gag-driven film, reveling in its anarchic comic lawlessness, but the entire story is built on the conflict between the "playtime logic" governing Barbieland and the social and cultural realities of 21st Century America. Getting that distinction pinned down is pretty crucial to the film's function as anything but a loose vibe, and it doesn't even seem to want to try to pin it down. And it's not just the loosey-goosey writing: visually, the film presents Los Angeles as pretty stylised in and of itself, with corporate offices modeled on Jacques Tati and ludicrous props presented with deadpan earnestness. The CEO of Mattel is played by a rarely-more-grating Will Ferrell as every bit as much of a cartoon caricature as the Barbie dolls. There's just not enough of a division between the two worlds to support a narrative fundamentally about the nature of that division.
This is also the point where the film starts to churn out concepts and hope for the best, leading to a lot of clutter and no real definition. Probably the most damaging of these dog-ends is the matter of Barbie's owner, a fiery lefty teen named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), and her mother, who is - irony of ironies! - a Barbie designer at Mattel, Gloria (America Ferrera). The film just kind of drops them in, then abandons them, then drags them back to Barbieland to kill off the last vestige of coherent world-building that the film has managed to cling to, and all the while never gives either of them a more compelling or deep personality than "Mom is sad that daughter has outgrown Barbie". And then, out of the clear blue sky, the film expects that it can put all the weight of its emotional climax and thematic mission statement onto Ferrera's shoulders, despite Gloria being very little more than a plot point. Ferrera tries her absolute best to soldier her way through the cumbersome monologue where this all happens, but the film has done nothing at all to support her, and the moment just feels like bald sermonising detached from any human onscreen, an exhausted admission by the film that it has been too thematically confused basically since its second scene (its first scene is a wholly wonderful 2001: A Space Odyssey parody) to ever have any of these ideas come about organically, so it was time to force the issue.
The net result of all of the above: Barbie is a frustrating and annoying movie taken as a whole, but I think there are charms to extract from it viewed at the level of individual moments. The people onscreen are clearly having fun, and that helps makes the bits mostly work okay; even the best of the performances (which is by every imaginable measure Gosling) stops at the level of playing the beats that were already in the script, but it's such a concept-heavy comedy that I don't know there would have been a better way to go about it. It never runs out of gas, finding the energy to pull out a large-scale musical number and dance battle deep into the second half, and so managing to rally with its very best scene even as the script has basically just turned into a checklist of unrelated notions to try and shove up in there (I'm not remotely the first person to point this out, but it still bears saying: it is a weird unforced error that in this ode to girlhood, womanhood, and bourgeois feminism, the obvious strengths are all related to Gosling, the characterisation of Ken, and the jokes about masculinity in crisis). It's certainly not an onerous movie to sit through. But it's pretty sloppy and thin, inexplicably so for the film to have won the dubious honor of being the Film Discourse Champion of 2023.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
