Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. He will be contributing a series of "critic's notes" to the Scarecrow blog—a chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connecting them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Barbie, a film made by intelligent people, has a clever idea about how to use the plastic world of Barbie dolls to argue that misogynistic patriarchy is an absurdity that crumbles under logic. This argument is successfully made in the opening couple of scenes and then repeated for the remainder of the film's 114 minutes. There is really just one joke, varied slightly throughout. Some of those variations are funny—Ken's confusion over the masculine place of horses in the world outside the matriarchal Barbieland, the way women must endure the mansplaining of The Godfather—but even the good gags are buried by the drumbeat of repetition.
The film is the phenomenon of the summer of 2023, which frankly needed a good phenomenon, and as such things go, I'm fine with it. It assumes its audience is smart (but still in need of the occasional lecture), it's on the right side of history, it will almost certainly build a better-informed citizenry. People are apparently seeing it more than once, maybe for the feeling of being part of a happening, maybe for the arch songs and garish colors and inside jokes about Barbie lore.
I can't imagine seeing it a second time, because everything is right there on the surface (except for the Mattel Easter eggs, I guess), easy to grasp and easy enough to enjoy. And that's it. Yes, Ryan Gosling's Ken has many throwaway pouts to savor, but beyond that there isn't much to get. Take Allan, a sidekick doll to Ken, played by Michael Cera. In the film's pre-release publicity, the photographs of Cera—hilariously decked out in loud and sexually ambiguous beachwear—suggested a high point in the movie itself, especially with this inventive actor. But then you watch Barbie, and there's Allan and his beachwear, and although he pops up a handful of times in the action (as though somebody realized we've got to get Allan involved somewhere, which I guess is very Allan), that's the extent of it.
This is moviemaking, circa 2023, and the movie's success suggests there is no fighting it. Believe me, I am aware of my wet-blanketness when I ask if this is really all there is to Barbie, especially when there are Tik Tok commentators who are so much more upbeat about the movie, and about every movie, apparently. Anyway. I have found Greta Gerwig's work as a director to contain legitimately wonderful things, and will make just a couple of observations here about directing style before standing aside and allowing the zeitgeist to roll over me.
Gerwig's method of composing (the film is shot by Rodrigo Prieto) has a few notable strategies; for instance, proscenium-like compositions that approximate looking at a toy diorama such as Barbie's Dreamhouse, thus placing the film in the unlikely tradition of Jerry Lewis's The Ladies Man and Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va bien. In Barbie, this visual style extends beyond the depiction of these cut-away sets; so, for instance, the scenes in which Margot Robbie's doll passes between Barbieland and the real world are similarly squared-off and formal. Elsewhere, the film has a curious reliance on putting characters in the middle distance of a shot, which seems odd and detached to my eye, but which possibly has something to do with playing with dolls at arm's length. For certain large-scale scenes, such as the Kens' dream ballet, Gerwig apes the form of a big Hollywood studio-system production number, which allows for a parody of that style as well as an approximation of how kids arrange their dolls on a living-room floor.
All of the visual noise sets up the movie's one moment containing a shudder of mortality (and "meaning," as Barbie hesitantly tries to form the unfamiliar concept), a climactic conversation between Barbie and a mysterious character played by Rhea Perlman. No gaudy colors here, no elaborate set design, just a bold little moment out of those movies where characters find themselves poised in a void-like afterlife.
Barbie's arrangement of time is amusing; everything happens at once (Ken, armed with information about how the real world is a man's world, establishes an overriding patriarchy in Barbieland seemingly overnight). As we have established, Barbie is a movie made by intelligent people, to the extent of its awareness that a product—doll or movie—created by a megacorporation is automatically suspect. Even the Mattel head honcho, played by Will Ferrell, is able to bullshit his way through today-speak, including a glorious line about how the next logical step from Barbie "sparkle" is female agency. (Could this be the moment when the academic popularity of the word "agency" can finally be laughed off into oblivion? I doubt it.) This movie has sparkle and agency aplenty. I don't need to watch it again.
August 18, 2023
Robert Horton is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
