Film Review: On the "Marvelous Weirdness" of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie's Perfect "Barbie" Movie
Margot Robbie stars as Stereotypical Barbie in Greta Gerwig’s new film. Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.
By Kate Mazade
I think it's safe to say that we all remember the doll we ruined. We remember her pristine just-out-of-the-box togetherness with razor straight hair and coordinated accessories. We remember waving her molded hand and touching her painted face. But mostly, we remember the mortifying realization that we weren't natural born hairstylists and that Expo marker doesn't wipe off as easily as we thought. We remember how "weird" she looked.
The newly released "Barbie" movie ostracizes the over-played-with weird doll. Meanwhile, the pink-saturated flick acknowledges that, while fixing the world might be too large of a task to undertake, embracing our innate weirdness might be the only real way to live.
The first Barbie doll was released in 1959 by toy manufacturer Mattel. Rising quickly to the top of the market, Barbie soon became the No. 1 fashion doll ever produced. Over 100 dolls are sold every minute worldwide. Officially named Barbara Millicent Roberts, Barbie has had over 250 careers — serving as both a professional role model and a style icon for young girls — and at the same time becoming a widely criticized expectation of the model woman.
"Barbie" was produced by Warner Brothers, Heyday Films, and LuckyChap Entertainment. Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, the film follows the doll's identity crisis, trying to find a place between her perfect world and the Real World. Barbie is played by the categorically beautiful Margot Robbie, side-kicked-slash-antagonized by Ryan Gosling's Ken, and foiled by Kate McKinnon's Weird Barbie.
"Barbie" relies on the same imagination the toy required when we were children to provide the story and fill in the gaps. Like any toy, she is an outlet for the narrative created in a young mind. Barbie provides the object, outfit, and setting, but leaves the plot to the player — a stage set and a profile, as deep as the typecast but an untapped well of character.
Barbie Land recreates googie Palm Springs in a pink plastic utopian set. Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.
The film takes place in utopian Barbie Land, a monochromatic swatch book of pink created by production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer. The set's plasticity has the effect of raking glitter-painted nails over a sticker version of a chalkboard — visually satisfying and sensorily unfulfilling.
The constructed world was inspired by classic soundstage musicals, employing what Gerwig called an “authentically artificial” feeling. It draws on elements from the “Wizard of Oz” (1938) and “Singing in the Rain,” (1952) — not to mention the trailer and opening sequence from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” (1968) — all set in front of a muted painted backdrop of the San Jacinto Mountains.
The pink pièce de résistance of Barbie Land is Babs' three-tiered, mid-century modern Dreamhouse. Modeled after Richard Nuetra's 1946 Kaufmann Desert House, the Maison Don-Ino is complete with a shell-shaped bed and a three-story spiral slide.
Like Mattel's many iterations — which date back to a 1962 cardboard fold-out ranch house — the Dreamhouse opens Barbie's private life to the world. She can stand on the edge of her bedroom platform and wave across the cul-de-sac to the dolls in other wall-less houses. It takes the Peeping Tom aspect of “Rear Window” (1954) and turns it outright into a happy “Hi Barbie” way of life.
The set mixes three-dimensional objects with two-dimensional appliques and references the toy's infuriatingly precise packaging: each accessory is magically balanced next to an upright outfit in the wardrobe, suspended as if wired into the cardboard of the box.
Whether it’s the freight train of commercial advertising or the memory of standing in the toy aisle staring up at the unattainable plastic house, Dreamhouse makes you want it — and everything in it, naturally. (I'm dying to figure out how Barbie's excellent flamingo mailbox will look in front of my house.)
Different elements of the set are out of scale — some oversized like a hairbrush that requires two hands, and some undersized like the floor-to-ceiling height that makes the characters too tall for the space. The scale incongruities emphasize the toy-like nature of the production — none so obvious as Margot Robbie's entire upper half sticking out of her bubble gum-colored Corvette.
Elements of the set are both over- and undersized to emphasize the toy-like nature of the character. Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers.
More so than "The Truman Show,” Barbie Land is perfect — practiced until automatic. It doesn't even have water. Imaginary dirt rinses from her body magically while candy floss bubbles rise into the air. Her glistening kidney-shaped pool is dry (no need to carry cups of tap water from the bathroom and pour them on the playroom floor until the carpet is sodden and squelching — an entirely hypothetical situation, of course). Its surface is flat and solid, allowing Barbie to walk across the water like a pastel gingham-clad Jesus.
Barbie Land’s intentionally imperfect top-of-the-mountain trope is Weird Barbie’s house. Set at the top of a jagged stair, Weirdhouse is more akin to an angular, imbalanced “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” than a Dreamhouse, with bands of bold color, skylights to nowhere, and a Murphy bed map.
Although set in the Real World, the Mattel headquarters is essentially the Allegory of the Cave, but it feels more fake than Barbie Land with its mouse trap grid of square cubicles and boardroom floating in airy emptiness straight out of “Heaven Can Wait” (1978).
"Barbie" is full commitment. From the casting to the set to the splatter pink vinyl album to the AI-generated turn-yourself-into-a-Barbie app to the impeccable recreations of Margot Robbie's press tour outfits, the movie is over-hyped and all-encompassing.
As Ariana Greenblatt's character Sasha puts it, the film could be seen as a "glorification of rampant consumerism," and while aimed at being a critique on the hypocritical nature of gender stereotypes, results in a reductive cliché about finding yourself.
But is there something universal in the cliché? Does the mass production of an anatomically unrealistic and fashionably unachievable female icon speak to how both men and women feel women should appear? Does the manufactured representation of that ideal foretell the inevitability of gender stereotypes, ones that were perpetuated by the time in which the original Barbie was created?
Kate McKinnon plays the sage Weird Barbie, the over-played-with broken version of the perfect toy. Photo by Warner Brothers.
The movie's set, costuming, and plot harkens back to mid-century idealism — of what women should be both socially and aesthetically, how styles should maintain image and composure, and how you can really be anything you want, as long as you can shake off what is expected of you. The film is what Barbie has always conceptually been: style over depth.
All compliments to Margot Robbie and Mattel, but the shared connection that Barbie brings to us is not her potential to do anything and be anyone. It's Kate McKinnon's chopped hair, spattered dress, and off-kilter house — and all of the glorious weirdness that goes along with it.