Barbie: A Kind of Review

I just watched Barbie for the third time, and I have to say that the film gets better with each viewing. The jokes are still funny, and I always find something I didn’t catch before.

Greta Gerwig excels at capturing details as a screenwriter (she co-wrote Barbie with her partner Noah Baumbach) and as a director. Her loving attention to detail was present in Little Women (her masterpiece), too, which you can see in the way she shot the March family home during and after the sisters’ childhood—during there’s a fulness, as people are always crowded in and using all the rooms; after there’s an absence, someone (or some unnameable thing) is always missing.

She uses that same attention to detail in Barbieland, a place we can think of as a village in Sweden where all the Barbies (and Kens) live separate from yet are vaguely aware of the Real World (that’s our world). And because the film has the tone of a screwball-comedy, the “portal” that opens between Barbieland and the Real World doesn’t come across as a cheap and completely stupid plot point.

Barbie doesn’t just get you thinking about what it means to be human, but what it means to have and be an idea. Is the capacity to make meaning really what distinguishes us from Barbie? Are human ideas just as limited as a doll’s understanding of our world?

3 things I think you should know:

• Ryan Gosling’s facial expressions, alone, are worth the cost of a ticket.

• Greta Gerwig is so smart, and listening to her talk about her movies is sometimes as enjoyable as watching them.

• Stereotypical Barbie’s (Margot Robbie) last line is still funny, even after you watch the film a second or third time and know it’s coming.