Last week, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie officially became the first film directed by a woman to gross over $1 billion at the global box office. To help unpack this complex aesthetic-experiment-meets-branding-exercise, the BPoFD editorial board has assembled some of the country’s leading film critics to participate in an in-depth exit survey about the movie. The critics’ responses, which have been edited for length, clarity, sexism, and sanity, can be found below. Please note that, in accordance with feminism, the first and last word was given to the female critics within each response. Thanks to Darri, Fatima, William, and Carmen for sharing their thoughts and opinions.
Q: What’s your 280-character review of BARBIE?
Darri: I watched Barbie Birthday Party at Walt Disney World Epcot ’94 till the VHS broke, so I didn’t need feminist irony or even a plot to enjoy Barbie—I just wanted to be dazzled by the costumes and sets. And I was! But expecting the movie to say anything new/daring about womanhood/consumerism is setting yourself up for disappointment.
William: Barbie offers the silly fun, vibrant colors, and don’t-think-about-it-too-much plotting of late ’90s blockbuster comedy. The film has a lot more in common with Austin Powers than it does with Lady Bird, which makes it both a total pleasure and a minor disappointment.
Carmen: Barbie is a delightful film about a doll named Ken. It’s at war with itself every second of its runtime, and never once in a not-fascinating way. My eyes were either wide with glee or rolling back into my skull. ~4.42 strawberries out of 5.
Fatima: Delicious sets and costumes, a good amount of laughs, a very confusing plot that abandoned some of its most promising potentials for very safe and expected conclusions. (“Women have to be pretty but not TOO pretty…”) I felt the film wasn’t saying anything we hadn’t already heard from Chimimanda [Ngozi Adiche]. I wanted it to be weirder and wilder in terms of sex and gender. After all, Barbie is a doll — anything that could conceivably be in a child’s mind could be in the doll’s, so why not fully push that? As a movie about Ken, though, it was great.
Q: Aside from Ryan Gosling’s performance, what were the strongest elements of BARBIE?
Darri: Margot Robbie was great, too! I think her main strength as an actor is lending depth to characters who society doesn’t take seriously (trophy wives, hot crazy chicks, actresses). Her whole shtick is exposing the real, hot-blooded people behind the personas that beautiful woman are forced to adopt, and for that reason it’s like she was born to play Barbie, who obviously embodies that impossible plastic perfection. As Barbie she manages to be sympathetic and funny and ridiculous all at the same time. It’s a real testament to her talent that she makes me empathize with blondes!
As I said before, the costumes absolutely delivered. Barbie’s whole thing is that she’s defined by her clothes; that’s the medium through which her jobs/hobbies/nationalities are communicated, but they also have to convey glamour and fantasy to be appealing. I think costume designer Jacqueline Durran nailed that combo of major whimsy and minor practicality (her one miss was not interpreting a Bob Mackie look, which are pure, exhilarating fantasy). I appreciated that the costumes were neither too contemporized nor too ironized and were celebrated as the real feats of imagination and craftsmanship that they were.
That said, I was triggered by the pink utility jumpsuits the Barbie junta is wearing at the end of the movie, when they’re celebrating their bloodless coup. They’re so 2017, so peak-Madewell, so Pussyhat. But of course the movies’ politics also end up being so 2017, peak-Madewell, and Pussyhat, and the jumpsuits represent that brand of corporatized feminism and its authoritarian daydream. That scene of the Barbies overthrowing the Ken government is like, Pantsuit Nation’s PG-rated fantasy of them doing their own January 6th.
1. Rhea Perlman. The biggest casting coup is Rhea Pearlman playing Barbie’s Creator, Ruth Handler. She fills a godlike role similar to Ed Harris in The Truman Show or Ed Harris in Snowpiercer. There is a flawed and funny humanity in her divine presence that makes her the embodiment of both God and Everywoman. Barbie works best when it functions like a spiritual/metaphysical fable about what it means to be alive, and Pearlman’s two brief scenes deliver that side of the movie’s storytelling perfectly.
2. The One-Liners. The screenplay of Barbie is not some great achievement in structure or social commentary, but this movie has some of the best joke and gag writing I’ve seen in a while. My own favorite jokes involve The Godfather and a chorus of 2,000 young fathers.
3. The Design. Along with Oppenheimer, Barbie makes a compelling case to Hollywood about the immersive limits of computer-generated worlds. No one fantasizes about living in Dr. Strange’s Multi-Verse of Madness or Ant-Man’s Quantum Realm. They are obviously fake and their lack of verisimilitude makes them unappealing. Most of Barbie-Land is achieved with real sets built on Hollywood sound stages. The world is tactile and fun to get lost in and all because the Barbie team is not afraid to choose old-school movie magic over CGI.
4. The Kens. The Kens are almost too good. I left Barbie wondering why a Ken-only musical number was the dramatic climax of a female empowerment blockbuster, but I think the script worked out like that because the Kens are the most compelling characters in the movie. The Kens are allowed to be flawed. They make mistakes. They behave badly. They feel alienated. In a film that prides itself on deconstructing the myth of BARBIE and celebrating the lives of ordinary women, the film does not showcase a wide-range of female representation.
Carmen: Beyond the objectively impressive set design and world building, I was endlessly compelled by how Barbie was and wasn’t serving its competing artistic, political, and commercial masters. There is a direct reference to The Matrix (Weird Barbie’s demonstration of the high heel-Birkenstock dialectic), yet Barbie may owe a greater debt to another masterpiece from the Wachowskis: the necessarily imperfect Speed Racer. Like Barbie, that movie offers the viewer a choice between a zany, brain-off spectacle and a metatextual reflection on the impossibility of reconciling the demands of the market with the imperatives of the artist. The gender and legacy of Barbie The Doll adds layers that aren’t present in Speed Racer, however. On the screen, you have a pretty uneven, ham-fisted articulation of the double binds inherent in contemporary womanhood; off of it, you have to reckon with the possibility that a less flawed Barbie might be a lesser Barbie.
In terms of details and scenes, I have a deep respect and appreciation for the Matchbox 20 needle drop, Margot Robbie’s Lucille Ball-y physical comedy, Ken’s discovery of the patriarchy, Barbie’s one cellulite, the Gondry-esque cardboard stages that ferry the characters between Barbie Land and Real World, and the Kens’ dance sequence. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach should receive the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the last line alone.
Fatima: It was the DANCE SCENE with the Kens. I wish Barbie had more moments of homoerotic fantasy and camp like that; I loved where it got gay and Gene Kelly-esque.
Q: What elements of BARBIE were less successful for you? How might the film have improved these creative shortcomings?
Darri: I don’t think the movie was fully convinced by its own message. It seemed unsure of what it was really about; by the end, it landed on how it’s hard to be a woman and live up to all these conflicting societal expectations, but it felt like the movie gave up and settled without developing that (kind of trite) message all the way through.
There are all these dangling threads, as if other messages were considered then abandoned or forgotten about. Like… what do we do about men? What do we do about our moms/creators? What’s the deal with corporate consumer culture? What’s the deal with gender and biology?
I can’t help but try to psychoanalyze Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s relationship via their films. I envision them in that scene from Friends With Money, sitting at their dining room table with their laptops facing each other, arguing over what the movie is going to be About, and Greta says it has to be about how it’s impossible to be a woman, and Noah says that’s too simple, and Greta says he wouldn’t understand because he’s a man, and Noah says maybe not, but it’s also impossible to be a man, and Greta gets up from the table and says, well it’s my movie, and Noah makes a bitter little laugh and says, I guess it is. That’s how we get to her attending the premiere without him.
But the movie is also about how it’s hard to be a man, especially under patriarchy! And you know what, in theory, I support the Ken Rebellion. The Kens are second-class citizens; of course they’re within their rights to rise up against the Barbie regime. There were a few times where I was like, Wait—is this movie actually going to posit that the goal of feminism is abolishing systems that not only oppress women but also men? Will it show that absolute power corrupts absolutely regardless of gender? Will it address why the Barbies and Kens are so gendered although they have no biological differences? Will it end with the creation of a hermaphroditic utopia? But I was being naive. The way that whole subplot is tied up with the Barbies suppressing the Ken revolt is honestly chilling.
1. The Representation. While I’m sure the casting director was kept up late into the night trying to ensure there was every type of physical female form (race, body type, gender identity, etc.) represented in this movie, most of her work only pays off at a surface level. I understand that this is a Barbie movie and ultimately has to operate on a surface level. I also understand that the Barbies cannot be flawed in the way the Kens are since they are the rulers of Barbie-Land. However, I found their emotional sameness tedious. Can they give Issa Rae something else to play besides beautiful, strong and powerful? Any half-decent acting teacher will tell you that those are not playable actions. Even if complexity can’t be found in the Barbies themselves, it would be nice to see it in some of the Real World Women. America Ferrera’s life seems fine. She’s a little stressed out about her job and has a distant relationship with her daughter––that’s never properly explained––but that’s really all she’s got going on. Does she ever make a mistake or do something surprising? No. She’s not afforded that richness. Her character appears to be an example of “powerful representation,” but there is something sinister in how little depth the movie gives her. When she articulates the thesis of the movie in a third-act monologue, I couldn’t help but think, “This is a nice piece of writing, but I have not seen an arc that gets this character anywhere near having such a clear-sighted and impassioned revelation about the nature of womanhood.”
A more interesting movie might put America Ferrera and her daughter in the center of the narrative and have them experience Margot Robbie’s Barbie as an exciting new presence introduced into their hum-drum lives––a kind of Barbie Poppins. However, I’m sure that film is not what the studio or Gerwig wanted because God-forbid the Barbie movie wasn’t All Barbie, All the Time.
2. The Plot/The Writing When watching Barbie, you can tell there were multiple ideas for the movie’s main storyline. The decision not to elevate and develop one (or even two!) of these stories, and the attempt to pack all of them into two-hours, is the film’s biggest mistake. The corporate hijinks with Will Ferrell and Mattel do not belong in the movie. A scene between America Ferrera and her daughter as they drive away from Barbie-Land is truly some of the worst writing I’ve seen in modern film. Kate McKinnon’s scene that sends Barbie out on her quest into the real world does what it needs to do but lacks any real meaning or stakes. A lot of scenes are like that. They do what they need to do and are fun because the people in them are fun, but it often feels like there is a better version of the scene lurking below the shiny, scrubbed surface of the film.
This movie is ultimately a silly comedy, and it always chooses fun over the internal logic of its world. It’s fine for a movie to be that (a truly great example of this kind of movie is Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar!), but Barbie bothered me because it clearly has bigger ambitions and serves those ambitions less well in the name of silliness. Barbie undelivered by overpromising.
Carmen: I would have left the opening 2001 homage in the trailer where it belonged. The Hellen Mirren voiceover was unnecessary, unfunny, and it breaks and rebreaks the immersive spell cast by the film. Most of the plot elements introduced in the second act flirt with disposability by the end (the Mattel executives, the mommy-daughter bonding, the ghost of tax-evading Barbie’s creator). America Ferrera’s Feminism Monologue could have worked if it was weirder and shorter, so it’s a shame that such a pivotal moment plays like a microwaved Hillary Clinton speech from Davos 2012. Finally, I have no idea what the hell is going on during the home video montage that seems to transform Barbie into a “real woman.” Are we meant to assume that Barbie’s personhood depends on being implanted by VHS-grain memories of random people going bowling? Derek Parfit is rolling in his grave.
Fatima: More or less as above. It felt safe as far as gender and identity were concerned. I really liked the concept introduced early on that Barbie and the child that plays with her share a mind and an imagination. I loved the idea of the doll consigned to a certain fate, as with Weird Barbie, because of what the child makes them be and do. But this seemed to be abandoned once Barbie found her girl, and the psychology of the mother and daughter pair seemed to disappear as a concern once the Ken plot line (which was very fun on its own, no hate) took over. I wish that the mind melding had been fully explored, and that we could see what the possibilities are for the dolls in a world of pure imagination. Also I think it was weird how small the Stath from Stath Lets Flats cameo was.
Q: What is BARBIE attempting to communicate about gender dynamics and commercialism?
Darri: Nothing very revolutionary. I don’t even think the movie was trying to say anything about commercialism beyond “heard of it.” The Will Ferrell sub-plot was doing absolutely nothing. Actually, that and the voiceover seemed mostly to be functioning as save-face for Gerwig, like she wanted to assure us that she knew making this movie was like, so corporate and uncool, but she wasn’t fully compromised and is still at heart an indie girl. Of course, that sort of brand sentience is corporate culture now (see Wendy’s Twitter). It’s boring to even explain, because everyone already knows this. Everyone is black-pilled.
William: Barbie the film is oblivious to Barbie the brand. It does not understand that any movie about a doll must also be about commercialism. I could maybe tease out a subtle interpretation of the movie about how gender is always commodified based on majoritarian positions about what gender means in the dominant culture. The original Barbie could traffic in masculine and feminine stereotypes, later Barbies are career-oriented because of Second Wave Feminism, and this current version of Barbie is based on a post-MeToo Feminism in which the mere fact that a Barbie movie exists is––regardless of quality––a pure act of goodness. I’m not sure Gerwig & Co. realize that the ideas being sold (and they are being sold) in Barbie now occupy a strong position in dominant culture because the movie’s plot relies heavily on this not being true. While gender stereotypes have changed over time, exploiting those stereotypes will always sell more Barbies and Kens. Perhaps it can be said that Barbie confirms our dependency on the gender binary, since its very existence is a catalyst for consumerism and profit.
Carmen: Assessing Barbie as a comment on gender politics, Gerwig’s intentions and execution are either ingeniously auto-critical and self-reinforcing, or inadvertently undermining and antipodal. Because, arguably, there is quite a bit of internalized misogyny in this movie. The camera, script, and direction are often more invested in Ken’s dramas and self-actualization than Barbie’s. Though the movie wants to champion the idea of a woman becoming president or winning the Nobel Prize, the tone and framing of the Barbies at work is almost always unserious and quasi-satirical. When Ken does return to Barbie-Land preaching the gospel of patriarchy, all the Barbies roll over and forfeit their power and agency immediately, and instead of refuting the female shallowness this connotes, the movie reconfirms it when the Barbies take back their autonomy after hearing a single poorly written speech. (Listening to that America Ferrera speech, I was reminded of Zoom meetings in which manipulative executives convince their employees to return to the office after the pandemic, or when Jared Leto appeared on the screen before my showing of MORBIUS and thanked me for watching MORBIUS in a real movie theater; you can hear the doublespeak descending from on high, asserting that Americans must return to the exploitative Before Times and start Spending Money Again.)
There is a cynical argument to be made that Barbie grossed a billion dollars because it is a Trojan Horse patriarchal narrative, a film that makes permissible an illicit mass cultural embrace, particularly among heterosexual women, of strict social binaries and rigid, regressive perceptions of gender. But the end of the film does throw that reading for a loop, somewhat. (Spoilers.) As I see it, Barbie’s visit to the gynecologist is as much about the humanization of an impossible ideal women as it is about the end of a very male and adolescent cinematic dark age defined by the ugly, incoherent, and sexless superhero movies of the Marvel and DC variety. Like the Barbies and Kens, the characters in those movies may as well have plastic nub genitals, since they lack the physical and psychological hardware to desire as flesh-and-blood people do. But maybe Barbie signals a change. If the blockbuster paradigm is shifting from braindead superheroes movies to half-braindead brand movies, we should welcome it. Life is better is the cooler circles of hell.
Fatima: That girls can be bosses too? That they can sell their own merch? That you need to collect all the pretty things to have a lovely, peaceful, Barbie life?
Q: (SPOILERS) Since the film ends with Barbie becoming a “real woman” by growing a vagina, is BARBIE a bio-gender essentialist text?
Darri: I dunno, the movie is very confused on this front. Barbie-Land is sexless (both asexual and biologically undetermined) but deeply gendered. (How did their society develop this way? Is Ruth Handler like the Architect in The Matrix? Did she create Barbie-Land to subdue the Barbies and Kens? Is the relationship that Barbies have to the children who play with them in the real world actually parasitic?)
Anyway, the Barbies seem to have implemented this extremely rigid gender hierarchy to consolidate their power—Is the movie low-key saying that women are just as ready and able to exploit others to preserve hegemony? Is this Noah Baumbach’s little secret dig at Greta?
I am overthinking it again! But I mean, they really casted Hari Nef as a Barbie and then told audiences it was Stereotypical Barbie’s new vagina that made her a “real woman” (or did Barbie get gender-affirming surgery? omg is this a trans text? I must stop).
I’m making myself crazy because, at times, it does seems like the movie wants to get QUEER, but it always pulls back. I’m a bitch about Greta Gerwig because I’m Team Jennifer Jason Leigh, but maybe the glimmers of queerness are Gerwig’s hand, and the The Wing Feminism is Mattel’s. It’s probably in Mattel’s interest to sell boy toys to boys and girl toys to girls.
William: See my answer above. However, while I don’t agree with this line of argument, I will use it whenever I need to deliberately repel someone at a theater event or a gay bar.
I’d like to say something nice here. That last line of Barbie is one of the all-time great movie last lines. Maybe the best since “Nobody’s Perfect,” at the end of Some Like it Hot. It’s pithy, surprising, witty, and encapsulates the movie perfectly. That was the only moment in Barbie where I almost cheered because I was so gobsmacked by the brilliance of the writing.
Carmen: The gender essentialism question is more 50/50 than it should be. While I want to respect Ms. Gerwig’s vision, a truly transgressive Barbie would have featured one more scene: We follow Barbara into her OBGYN’s examination room. Once inside, she meets her doctor, dons a paper gown, climbs into the procedure chair and places her feet in the stirrups. Then, from over the doctor’s shoulder, we see that Barbara has an absolutely gigantic, stud-horse-humongous penis between her legs. The OBGYN makes no comment and proceeds with the exam. Cue Nicki Minaj. Cut to black.
Fatima: Yes. But again, why should Barbie in 2023 be confined to normative womanhood? What is Barbie except the stories and situations that children create for “her”? I wanted Barbie and Ken to abandon gender essentialism all together. In this way, I thought Little Women was actually a more interesting Gerwig film as far as gender is concerned. Maybe because of Greta’s ideas about Alcott and Jo as potentially non-binary? It said all the stuff Barbie said, but with subtlety.
Q: How did BARBIE change your perceptions of Greta Gerwig as a director? Where do you see her going in the future?
Darri: Not much. Barbie is her second-least annoying movie, so that’s something.
As I mentioned, I am solidly Team JJL, who radiates righteous, Gen-X white female rage. Gerwig radiates privileged, Millennial white female discomfort, which gets transmuted into a flaccid, “well-behaved women seldom make history” performance of rage.
The crazy thing is that it’s such low-hanging fruit to make fun of white feminism and girl bossery now; I’m honestly boring myself! We’ve been criticizing it for half a decade, and yet Gerwig makes a movie that traffics in it? It’s possible those really cringe parts were determined by Mattel. At the same time, I don’t think Gerwig has anything else to say yet. We might have to wait for her relationship to blow up to for her rage to become solid and interesting.
William: This film didn’t change my perceptions about Greta Gerwig at all. It was very much in line with what I thought she was capable of/limited to as a director. I also reject the idea that making the film represents her “selling out.” Anyone who thinks Barbie doesn’t fit well with her oeuvre has not been paying attention.
The biggest question I have is about the type of director she is. Is she the type who makes the same movie over and over again, like a Wes Anderson or her romantic partner/Barbie co-writer Noah Baumbach? Will white women continue to self-actualize in all her films? Or is she more like a Spielberg or a Scorsese, who is known for a particular kind of film but often branches out and works in a different genre? If you’ve seen Gerwig’s Letterboxd interview where she discusses the cinematic influences on Barbie, it’s clear she has a deep knowledge of film history. She embraces the concept of the canon in a way some of her more zealous fans might find suspect. Does this knowledge increase her curiosity about working in other filmic forms, or does it just give her more creative tools to tell the same story in a new way? I’m curious to see what she’ll decide.
Gerwig going to have carte blanche on her next movie. Will she go even bigger than Barbie, or will she make something smaller and more intimate like Lady Bird? Lady Bird is a film I really love, and I strongly prefer it to her bigger budget efforts, so I hope she goes in that direction. There’s a rumor that she’s going to direct two Narnia movies for Netflix, and I hope that doesn’t happen. Does anyone truly want to see a Frankenstein constructed from C.S. Lewis’s religious fundamentalism and Gerwig’s easily digestible brand of white feminism?
Carmen: As others have pointed out, Barbie does feel like Greta Gerwig’s Batman Begins moment, which will enter her into a recognizable populist auteur cycle of one-for-them-one-for-me. Which I’d be fine with. Since Lady Bird and Little Women were obviously smaller scale, I was impressed by how much indelible and deliberate image-making there was in Barbie–her permanently arched feet coming out of the heels, for instance. That feels like a visual that would imprint itself on a monoculture back when such a thing existed. I’m glad that there’s one more director seeking to produce those experiences for audiences.
Behind the camera, I really hope that Greta Gerwig stops co-writing movies with her husband, Noah Baumbauch, even if I consider him one of the best living screenwriters. There’s something unnerving about the fact that the two most prominent female writer-directors of the Xennial generation–Greta Gerwig and Phoebe Waller-Bridge–are romantically involved with male screenwriters (Baumbach and Martin McDonough, respectively) who are so overloaded with cultural capital. Though it’s never outwardly articulated, the industry seems to have elevated these particular women partly because of the cosign of their celebrated, literary-adjacent husbands. While I recognize the possibility that Baumbach’s co-writer credit was probably a financial decision whose logic derives from royalty payouts or his divorce agreement, his involvement does slightly muddy the waters in terms of celebrating Barbie as an accomplishment entirely belonging to Gerwig.
Fatima: It really didn’t. It just made me think she had to satisfy Mattel as a corporation.
Q: Where does BARBIE rank among the movies you’ve seen this year?
Darri: It’s not better than Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? or the new Mission Impossible, but I did like it more than Oppenheimer.
Carmen: 5th. It’s below Beau is Afraid; Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret; Oppenheimer; and Past Lives.
William: I’ve seen 13 new releases in 2023. Barbie ranks #5, just ahead of Beau is Afraid and Past Lives and behind (in ascending order) You Hurt My Feelings; Showing Up; Oppenheimer; and Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. In fact, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret is the only 2023 movie I’ve truly loved and can recommend unequivocally.
Fatima: Middle of the pack, alas. And I wanted to love it.
