'Barbie' review: Uneven blend of candy-colored fantasy, cultural critique

Two movies centering on life-changing creations arrive on screens this week: “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s biopic about the father of the atomic bomb, and “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s comedy about the curvy blonde doll. The former wrestles with morality and the threat of nuclear apocalypse — but who would have guessed that the doll would be the more complicated topic?

“Barbie” may look like a pink-and-pastel fantasia, but it’s also an attempt to parse the significance of the most iconic and controversial toy in the history of modern childhood. Though she began her full-figured existence in 1959 as an alternative to the infant dolls that trained girls to be mommies, Barbie today is more often blasted as an anti-feminist, shamed for her impossible beauty and blamed for everything from eating disorders to internalized racism. Yet she still sells by the millions. Tackling all of this would be a challenge for any movie, let alone one produced by Barbie’s owner, Mattel, Inc.

Gerwig tries, packing “Barbie” with campy humor, musical numbers and whimsical stage sets. There's also enough cultural critique to fill a graduate school seminar. The result is one ambitious but highly uneven film.

Gerwig and co-writer/partner Noah Baumbach have dreamed up a clever conceit: Barbie (Margot Robbie, born for the role) lives in an artificial world where women rule. Living under a female president (Issa Rae) and an all-female Supreme Court, guys like Ken (Ryan Gosling, not born for the role but all the funnier for it) are mere decorations who sit around and idolize the women. (All Barbies are Barbie, by the way, just as all Kens are Ken; this makes for amusing end credits.) “Thanks to Barbie,” says our deadpan narrator, Helen Mirren, “all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved.”

Ah, but when Barbie’s tippy-toe feet suddenly go flat, she must venture into the real world to find out why. Here, things are reversed: Barbie experiences her first sexual assault (a construction worker slaps her butt) while Ken, tagging along, discovers the joys of patriarchy. Lording it over a newly diminished and disempowered Barbie, Ken delivers what may be the film’s most trenchant lines: “How’s that feel? It is not fun, is it?”

Disappointingly, “Barbie” cribs heavily from “The Lego Movie,” casting its hero as a plaything who meets her owners — Ariana Greenblatt as a furiously woke teenager and America Ferrera as her Barbie-loving mom — and inserting Will Ferrell as the blustering head of Mattel (which must have decided that a little mockery was worth the product placement). Meanwhile, there’s so much talk about Barbie’s relationship to feminism that Barbie herself never quite emerges as a flesh-and-blood character.
That may be the movie’s fatal flaw. Barbie cannot and must not be clearly defined; that would only limit her possibilities and put her back in a box. In the end, Barbie remains what she was at the start: a symbol, open to virtually any interpretation at all.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com