The BARBIE Reviews Are In
Let's see what the critics have to say.
One of my favorite activities within the ever-growing phenomenon of monoculture is studying the reaction to a thing that everyone can’t stop yammering on about — especially in this specific instance of Greta Gerwig’s something-in-a-stratosphere-beyond-”highly anticipated” film Barbie, when the preamble has gone on for what feels like 84 years. We know every detail of how the sauce was made, and now folks are finally digging in. What say they?
We can boil it down to Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic but that dilutes the nuance. So here, let’s dig into something more substantive than a rating and take a gander at what the critics are saying about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. (I’ll have my ~review~ out early next week for the six people asking, one of whom is my mother.)
Barbie the film suffers from the same problem as Barbie the character: it ends up flat-footed. The film is buoyed by jokes yet heavy with speeches.
A soulful film underneath all the persistent fuchsia. One that has heart and ambition as well as abundant beauty, inside and out.
Drawing on the breathless narrative velocity and sly comic mischief she showed in her sparkling recent adaptation of Little Women, Gerwig maintains a delirious but remarkably coherent onslaught of gags, twists, ideas, non sequiturs and scholarly bits of Barbie arcana — all of it swirling like a merry comic tornado around the serene center of gravity that is Robbie’s captivatingly sincere performance.
The question we’re supposed to ask, as our jaws hang open, is “How did the Mattel pooh-bahs let these jokes through?” But those real-life execs, counting their doubloons in advance, know that showing what good sports they are will help rather than hinder them. They’re on team Barbie, after all! And they already have a long list of toy-and-movie tie-ins on the drawing board. Meanwhile, we’re left with Barbie the movie, a mosaic of many shiny bits of cleverness with not that much to say.
Gerwig does much within the material’s inherently commercial parameters, though it isn’t until the finale that you see the Barbie that could have been. Gerwig’s talents are one of this movie’s pleasures, and I expect that they’ll be wholly on display in her next one — I just hope that this time it will be a house of her own wildest dreams.
There is plenty in Barbie to be delighted by, even moved by. I have no doubt that the film will be a massive hit, cheered for turning a cynical I.P. project into a loopy treatise on being. But the movie could maybe have been stickier, more probing and indelible, if it had reined in some of its erratic energy and really figured out what it wanted to say.
Combining the meta jokiness with a heap of motivational sincerity is no easy task, but Barbie is a very charming success.
The result is a very funny kids’ movie with a freshman liberal arts student’s vocabulary that tosses around terms like “patriarchy” and “appropriation” — pretty much everything but “problematic,” which the movie implies without actually calling Barbie’s legacy.
However smartly done Gerwig’s Barbie is, an ominousness haunts the entire exercise. The director has successfully etched her signature into and drawn deeper themes out of a rigid framework, but the sacrifices to the story are clear. The muddied politics and flat emotional landing of Barbie are signs that the picture ultimately serves a brand.
There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness.
It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re all just living in it. How fantastic.
Barbie adds levels of intelligence and interrogation into not just the script, but the narrative itself. Rather than turn away from the baggage, the movie unpacks it… You’ll still get your mondo Barbiemania, but you’re going to have deal with some pop-cultural potholes left in its wake. This is a movie that wants to have its Dreamhouse and burn it down to the ground, too.
The zaniness of Barbie, combined with Gerwig’s interest in skewering the patriarchy, sometimes makes the movie a baggy, tonally dissonant viewing experience. But for the most part, she achieves a pleasing balance between the silly and the serious; she makes sure to pay homage to some of Barbie’s most cherished accessories and costumes, all the while keeping up a running commentary on sexism, objectification, consumerism and the double-triple-quadruple bind in which women have historically been forced to navigate the world — while wearing attractive heels.
This is a truly original work — one of the smartest, funniest, sweetest, most insightful and just plain flat-out entertaining movies of the year.
It's a movie that sits at an interesting inflection point in moviemaking and movie consumption, when almost every idea seems born from a pre-existing product. While it's easy to balk at, the truth is, the tension between filmmaking and commerce has and always will be present in the work itself, be it a broad Hollywood blockbuster or the most idiosyncratic and Terrence Malick-y of endeavors. Something like Barbie lays that tension bare and exposed in its unabashed commercialism and heightened sensibilities, so that you can't not think about how its aims may be at odds with its execution.
The Barbie movie could’ve been another forgettable, IP-driven cash grab. Instead, the director of Little Women and Lady Bird has crafted a neon pink delight.
Barbie boasts a joyously wry self-awareness akin to the Lego Movies, taps into childhood innocence a la Toy Story, plus goes deep weaving in actual Barbie history… The narrative jostles between extreme silliness and heady self-reflection, with not a lot of middle ground, though Ferrera and a bunch of brainwashed Barbies are front and center for a hilarious and incisive sequence explaining contemporary gender dynamics.
A frequently hilarious script and anthemic musical number give Greta Gerwig’s film, starring Margot Robbie, a delightfully skittish energy.
It’s a tall order for Gerwig and company to deliver a feature that’s reverent and revelatory while speaking directly to the pressures of living up to an impossible feminine ideal. And yet they did it with crafty aplomb. Though a tad overstuffed with too many good ideas, pulling from loads of subtly identifiable cinematic references, Barbie ultimately leaves us entertained, emotionally exhausted, and ready to play again soon.
While Barbie is wildly ambitious in an exciting way, it’s also frustratingly uneven at times. After coming on strong with wave after wave of zippy hilarity, the film drags in the middle as it presents its more serious themes. It’s impossible not to admire how Gerwig is taking a big swing with heady notions during the mindless blockbuster season, but she offers so many that the movie sometimes stops in its propulsive tracks to explain itself to us—and then explain those points again and again.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a masterful exploration of femininity and the pressures of perfection.