One day Barbie is struck by a thought she's never had before. It's about death. The next day her permanently high heeled feet don't perch but flatten down. Her play food and milk disgust her and the leap she makes from her house's balcony to the front seat of her car lands her flat on her face on the driveway. On Dr. Barbie's advice, Barbie goes to see Weird Barbie who tells her she has to go into reality to find the girl who's been playing with her and sort things out. She goes to reality, Ken in tow, only to find the world hostile and unlovely. But she has a mission.
Greta Gerwig's Barbie plays a constantly rebalancing line between cartoony fantasy and inspirational comedy. If she stumbles here and there or damn near hurtles from the rope it's because the brief is a tough one. If you remember the 1980s kid blockbusters of characters or toys getting their own movies like Santa The Movie or The Garbage Pail Kids Movie you might recall how they tended to deflate rapidly once the premise was done with and everything kept under the thumb of the brand. That's the case here with Mattel not just keeping a close watch on proceedings but featuring as an imagined toy like corporation. If you give someone like Greta Gerwig this movie to write (with life and creative partner Noah Baumbach) and direct you would know you aren't going to get a shill fest, well, not wholly.
So, what do you do when you have to juggle a fantasy world, a corporation and a believable version of reality? You treat them all the same. Barbie's wake up routine and the weird sounding medical advice she gets are funny but offered deadpan. Same with the whimsical corporate round table whose members are later seen in rollerblades as black as their suits. The construction workers respond to Barbie's intended wooden spoon comment on her and Ken's anatomy elicits at least one snorting laugh from the final comment in the scene. These realms are uniform and held together and to each other with the kind of arch dialogue that Gerwig and Baumbach have been winning with for their careers. Michael Cera as Alan might well have had an odd sense of career flashback to the dry and dust delivery of his breakout role in the tv show Arrested Development. He slots right in.
Margot Robbie in the title role (or the manifestation of it we follow) brings everything she can to the table. She has to; without her range and physicality the arc Gerwig asks of her would collapse the way she does when reverting to a doll-like torpor in a second act motion impressive for its plainness. I'd suspect a lot of details will be missed at least on first viewings when her performance will be confused with her vanilla choctop persona. I'll bet I didn't pick up a good third of them. Ryan Gosling as the Ken in Chief surprises with his comic turns, using a naive unawareness of his absurdity, ensuring that the Ken world he aspires to features some of the funniest takes on masculinity I've seen since the classic South Park era. The foils from reality form one of the most poignant aspects of the dizziness. America Ferrara and Ariana Greenblatt as mother and daughter respectively who play a decisive part in the third act as well as present a generational divide to be sorted which feels genuine (again, because it has to as it gets tested against the constant loopiness of Barbieworld). Katie McKinnon as Weird Barbie could make laugh with a raised eyebrow and Will Ferrell as the CEO Mattel are always welcome on screen.
Barbie takes a toy and turns it into a tale of enablement. Greta Gerwig's feat is one of keeping control over such an explosively idea-laden project so that it never quite falls into dragging repetition nor bloats itself on its own feedback. From the hilarious Kubrick tribute of the opening scene, through the collision with the real world and the thrilling toy politics in the third act, this film works, oddly enough, by restraint. Even when the themes turn grave and the messaging threatens to burst its bounds, the lightness of the aesthetic and the clear love of subject and then the wicked grin of shoving a hand into the pool and splashing it around loop back to give it a good save.
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