Amid the torrent of hot takes regarding the blockbuster Barbie film, I noticed a lot of people I respect making critical observations. I also noticed that some of them had not seen it. So in my quest to learn the merit of the disparagement, I actually consumed it myself.
I highly recommend such a strategy for everyone seeking to know what they are talking about. So with eyes and mind wide open, I plunked down in an audience dominated by women, including my wife at my side, because a) I like experiencing and discussing things with her, and b) the word was that there was significance in the difference between men’s and women’s reactions.
There were three main concerns I had gleaned from the initial hubbub:
- Some dotted lines extending out from China on a rudimentary map seem emblematic of China’s disputed claim of islands in the region;
- One of Barbie’s female pals is portrayed by a trans actor;
- The plot apparently drips with aggressive feminism and nods to wokeness.
Chinese treachery, trans radicalism and woke poisons are three issues on my constant radar, so I was alert for whatever onscreen transgressions would unfold. Before we get to those answers, though, here’s what the movie is:
Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are Barbie and Ken, thrust into modern Southern California to address a breach between their cloyingly sweet doll world and today’s coarse culture. Like The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), it parodies saccharine obliviousness, mining some comic gems as Barbie endures the ogling of construction workers while the eternally marginalized Ken learns of the “patriarchy” that promises to empower him at last.
The stereotypes are so intentionally overwrought that hyper-analyzing them is an ill-spent exercise. The first two-thirds of the movie earns a certain goodwill by actually being funny. After that, the real-world doll conflicts become absurd in their excess; it felt like writers didn’t know what to do to reach a plot payoff. Such wanderings are not rare on film, especially in comedies.
The other change in tone arrives when Barbie decides to take itself very, very seriously, indulging in deep dialogue about the challenges of modern womanhood. America Ferrara as Gloria, a Mattel employee helping Barbie navigate the real world, delivers a soliloquy that has captivated and delighted millions of women of all ages in millions of movie seats over the last few weeks.
It is not a man-hating screed, but it does encapsulate and vocalize the tightrope walk of many women, especially in the professional world: “You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people.”
Then the crescendo: “But you have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault!”
As the teen girls, grandmothers and every generation in between burst into applause around me, I took a moment to process. While that’s a depressingly dark take on womanhood that plenty of actual women would distance from, it’s not as though those emotions are impossible to find. And guess what films often do? They put words into characters’ mouths to make a point from a certain perspective.
Gloria’s rant didn’t trigger me any more than the other evidence of writer-director Greta Gerwig’s strong-woman agenda, which, as the father of a daughter, I have some identity with. Unlike plenty of art that can be found today, Barbie does not club the audience with an ideological cudgel. It tries to be funny. It tries to be cute. It tries to delight a female audience. And it succeeds.
Conservative critics have succeeded in adding buzz for a film already destined to be one of the year’s top earners. So what about those earlier bullet points of disapproval?
The dotted lines, invisible to even the sharpest Chinese moviegoer, may well be a suck-up to Chinese censors. I had to look up the trans actor in the cast, because no one jumps out as an obvious man in a skirt and no mention is made of the issue. Such targeted messaging seems less egregious if no one in the theater notices it. And while the theme certainly pokes at modern womanhood and manhood, often with equal caricature, it does not scold with the moral condescension common to today’s woke cultural assaults.
Barbie is unlikely to embed into my top ten of the year. I’m not its intended audience. I’m a man. I’m more of a Mission Impossible/Oppenheimer person. But I could discern its purpose and appreciate the joy in the theater, an appreciation not lost on my bride. As we walked out, we talked about how it erodes from sharp satire into wackiness and preachiness, but ultimately it is giving people a couple of hours of enjoyment for their movie dollar.
In a culture filled with perversities, echoed from a Hollywood bent on insulting every traditional value it can find, skepticism and suspicion are to be expected. But ultimately, Barbie seems to fall short of the sins affixed to it by many. Not everyone will love the film, but when writers and actors emerge from their current labor strife, it will not take long for them to crank out product more deserving of rebuke.