Things take a turn when Stereotypical Barbie begins to notice slight imperfections in herself and her environment, most hilariously in a creeping existential dread. On the advice of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), so named because she’s been significantly altered by whoever’s playing with her, Stereotypical Barbie ventures out to the real world to find out what’s going on with her child owner. Her Ken counterpart (Ryan Gosling) stows away in her car, accompanying Stereotypical Barbie into a modern-day Los Angeles that is decidedly not the matriarchy of Barbieland. Where Barbie is immediately made into a sex object by leering passers-by, Ken discovers a world where know-nothing hunks are catered to and idealized. He takes this newfound confidence to Barbieland, while Barbie stays in LA and discovers that though her teen girl owner Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) is viciously uninterested in her, Sasha’s mother Gloria (America Ferrara) works at Mattel. The CEO (Will Ferrell) can’t have a living Barbie walking around, and he and his executive goons pursue Barbie, Gloria, and Sasha back to a Barbieland that Ken, now in the persona of late-70’s Sylvester Stallone, has transformed into a dumbed-down patriarchy.
Lady Bird and Little Women both follow an emotional pattern of building worlds and characters that the viewer wants to be a part of, and then shifting the tone from warmth and humor of that world towards loss and melancholy as it inevitably changes. With its crowd-pleasing aims, Barbie is outside of that pattern, providing a constant stream of laughs and elaborate set-pieces with the occasional break for sincerity. Gerwig is not as accomplished with this approach as she was out of the box in Lady Bird. I can’t believe I have to say this, but the emotional beats in a Greta Gerwig movie don’t work. They’re either didactic or ungrounded in a character that hasn’t bridged the gap between her plastic beautiful world and the real grimy one. Rhea Pearlman plays Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, or maybe her ghost, and whatever is actually happening with this character is too unclear and thus overshadows what she’s imparting to Barbie in the film’s nakedest pitch towards the heartstrings. The characters of Gloria and Sasha are complete misfires who would have been better off in deleted scenes, especially Sasha who moves from the ‘Barbie is an anti-feminist symbol of unattainable beauty’ stance to gawping along in the back of Barbie’s car on the return trip to Barbieland.
While Barbie is the first Gerwig film to not trigger vast swells of complex emotion, it makes up for this by being the funniest. The Kens are constant figures of good-natured fun, even after they’ve been transformed into guitar-playing bros. Led by Gosling’s wide-eyed lunkhead, they’re all pathetic and needy and thoroughly discounted by their Barbie counterparts. If the film doesn’t totally convey why the Kens are so successful transforming Barbieland into a frattish landscape of mojo dojo casa houses, it doesn’t have to work hard in conveying how easy it is to distract and usurp them. Ferrell’s as funny as he’s been in years as he returns to his staple character of moron with too much power and an inflated ego, while McKinnon and Michael Cera as Ken’s friend Allan are both hilarious outsiders exasperated by so much of Barbieland. Gerwig’s camera finds visual gags in the world itself and in characters like Emerald Fennell’s Midge, a pregnant doll with no lines that everyone’s freaked out by. Befitting a comedy, Barbie is oftentimes infectious through its use of a knowing, poppy soundtrack and several dance sequences, one of which harkens back to the prologue’s thumb-in-the-eye approach to naysayers as an intra-Ken battle turns into a Golden Age of Hollywood production number.
It was perhaps impossible that Barbie would measure up to Gerwig’s first two films, each one of the best of their respective years. Barbie won’t get to those heights with this viewer, but it is a fun experience that struggles to find its message between corporate interests, poorly calibrated tone, and a version of feminism that has little room for anything other than beauty and excellence. Nonetheless, far worse films have entered the billion dollar club. If this is what Gerwig wants to do with her career, better her leading expensive films than the Michael Bay’s and David Leitch’s of the world. B