Barbie is a fantasy/comedy based on the...doll? directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Issa Rae, America Ferrera, Kate MacKinnon, Arianna Greenblatt, Simu Liu, Will Ferrell, and lots of other beautiful men and women as various Barbies and Kens.
Barbie (Robbie) lives in Barbieland with all the other Barbies (Rae, Dua Lipa, Hari Nef, Emma Mackey, and many more), continually living her best day ever where women run the world and men pretty much just...beach. Her particular Ken (Gosling) tries to take a bigger role in her life, but the Kens are pretty much relegated to second class citizen, when they're considered at all. But then she starts having thoughts about death and she starts becoming more, well, realistic, developing cellulite and not being on tiptoes all the time, and the shaman-like Weird Barbie (MacKinnon) tells her that there's been a kind of rift in worlds caused by someone playing with her strangely, and she needs to go to the real world to sort that out.
(Side note: I love magical realism, and while I'm not sure this entirely qualifies, I really like the way that travel between these realms is portrayed - it's unusual, perhaps even dangerous, but it's not unheard of or even especially difficult. Many of the fantastical elements are depicted that way, and it's such a time-saver.)
Anyway, Barbie goes to the real world and discovers how we do things here, to wit, women aren't universally in charge and the patriarchy is alive and well. She further finds that the little girl she's looking for, Sasha (Greenblatt) hates her for the unrealistic standards she sets, but it was really Sasha's mother Gloria (Ferrera), a Mattel employee, who played with Barbie and instilled her existential crisis.
And on top of all this, Ken, having learned about the patriarchy, returns to Barbieland and brainwashes the other Barbies into being pretty companions and helpers. Gloria gives an Oscar-clip speech about being a woman and how exhausting and contradictory it is, which winds up being the antidote to the brainwashing, and the Barbies retake control of Barbieland from the Kens by tricking them into jealously going to war with each other. Barbie, however, isn't interested in a happily ever after, and chooses to go become human.
You know, this movie gets flak for being "about a doll", but it's actually a pretty involved plot. A lot of different arcs and actions take place, a lot of different conflicts get raised and resolved. It's not simple, is my point. I'm not remotely qualified to comment on the feminist themes of the movie, other than to say that I appreciate that the "resolution" isn't that the Kens now have equal voice in the Barbocracy, just that they have some voice.
I will instead say that the writing and the acting are both fantastic. Robbie and Gosling both turn in amazing performances (whether you want to call Robbie's Oscar snub unjust is up to you, but I think the performance was definitely worth of a nom), as do Ferrera and MacKinnon. The humor lands (apart from Gloria's line about smallpox, which was perhaps a little tasteless), and a lot of it is subtler than you'd think. Cinematography, set design, costumes, all really impressive. Based on any metric you want to use, I think it deserves its Best Picture nom. Oh, and, of course, both Original Song noms.
My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: Medium-high
Next up: The Evil
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