I remember when I first laid my eyes on a Barbie as a 7-year-old girl. The slender figure, the symmetry, the long, blonde, shiny hair, and the perfectly tailored tiny dresses. She was soon to become my best friend—until she became a reminder of everything I will never be. And it was with this reluctant excitement about my former best friend that I went in to watch Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
With Margot Robbie as the lead, cast as Stereotypical Barbie, Ryan Gosling as Ken, America Ferrera as Gloria, Helen Mirren as narrator and many other big names, Barbie is a movie that gives you flawless performances and is a pink visual delight—but we already know that going in, that doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the director’s work.
I was more interested in what it would invoke in me now, as a 20-something woman who very much lives in the real world, with no chance of escaping to the women-ruled Barbie world. And what you come out of it feeling takes a little bit of time to settle in. As I write this, it took me four tries to even gather my own thoughts on the movie. And the impact of the movie sets in in stages, all of them equally important.
First comes the immediate delirium you feel. The movie can almost feel like a fever dream, it is so pink, so in your face and the world is so well crafted that it picks you up from your seat and places you inside it. The singing, dancing, and general lightness of the movie is infectious, and for at least three-fourth of the movie keeps you feeling like you did when you sat down to play with your Barbies.
Then as the delirium fades, it’s the brilliantly smart dialogues of the film that have you smiling. Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, her partner and co-writer, have not pulled any punches. The movie is hilariously self-aware. It constantly makes fun of its own subject at one point even implying that casting Margot Robbie, the ethereal blonde beauty might be defeating the point of purpose of the commentary they’re making.
The next stage involved justifying to myself why I loved the movie so much. I found myself saying ‘it's not doing anything new’, ‘it's not adding to the conversation’, ‘it was great entertainment, sure, but…’ My justifications for watching the movie involved reasonings such as great performances, great writing, all the pink, but not once did I say what it made me feel. Which was the whole reason I went in to watch the movie.
And then came the last stage, which, in a full-circle moment, echoes what Gerwig is saying with this two-hour pink-fantasy journey she takes us on. The hall was full of 20-something women, in varying stages of their life, and there was not one moment where it did not feel like we were all there together to watch the movie. The laughter was loud, the dismissal of Ken and his ‘real world’ ideas even louder, and the acceptance of him when he found his way—deafening. The message of the movie is not unfamiliar to any of us, it's not unfamiliar to even the movie space with ‘girl-fail feminism’ being one the most discussed theme—nothing we ever do will ever be enough. Ironically, it's this simplicity of message that most reviews are complaining of, that it falls short, that it gets lost in its own nostalgia. But the 7-year-old girl’s heart is full. Gerwig brings the ‘mushy, complicated and sad’ parts of being human to our favourite doll, but gives Barbie the agency to truly be whoever she wants to be—a stereotypically pretty doll, the weird Mohawk-having doll who is constantly in a split (literally), or a Birkenstock-wearing ‘ordinary’ human.
