114 min | PG-13 | July 21, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A doll achieves consciousness in a plastic paradise and goes looking for the woman playing with her in the real world. Ken tags along and discovers patriarchy. One of them takes the lesson too far.
Barbie lives in Barbie Land. Every day is perfect. The president is a Barbie. The Supreme Court is Barbies. Then she starts thinking about death and her feet go flat, so she travels to the real world to find the human whose anxieties are bleeding into her plastic life. Greta Gerwig builds a candy-colored comedy about a toy and uses it to interrogate what femininity costs and who profits from selling it back to women.
Margot Robbie plays Stereotypical Barbie with a brightness that slowly cracks. She registers each new emotion like a malfunction she cannot name. Ryan Gosling plays Ken as a man defined entirely by whether Barbie looks at him. He discovers patriarchy in the real world and imports it home with the fervor of a convert, and Gosling commits to the absurdity without ever winking. America Ferrera plays Gloria, the Mattel employee whose buried frustrations drive the plot, and she delivers a monologue about the impossible contradictions of being a woman that anchors the whole film. Kate McKinnon plays Weird Barbie with the deranged authority of the doll every kid mangled with scissors.
Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach construct Barbie Land as a soundstage fantasy with painted skies and water that is clearly plastic. The production design refuses to hide its artifice. Doors open onto flat backdrops and Barbie floats from her house to her car because dolls do not walk down stairs. That commitment to the logic of play turns the visual style into an argument. The film looks like a toy because it is thinking about what toys teach.
This is a studio blockbuster that bites the corporation funding it. Mattel appears as a tower of clueless executives, and the film mocks the brand while wearing its colors. The contradiction is the point. Barbie wants to sell you the dream and dismantle it in the same breath, and Gerwig holds both ideas without collapsing either. The result is a comedy with real ideas underneath the pink.