Review of Barbie (2023) by Marty_Mcfly_Am — 24 Jul 2023

“Barbie” is the first live-action feature film after numerous computer-animated and television films.

After a shrewd promotional, marketing and commercial campaign that has raised expectations, expectations and a real Barbie-Mania, the latest film directed by Greta Gerwig ("Lady Bird" and "Little Women") is finally arriving in cinemas, based on the famous fashion doll line of the same name born from the mind of Ruth Hendler and marketed by Mattel since 1959.

“Barbie”, scripted with acumen and wit by the director together with her partner Noah Baumbach, is an ambitious film in which the homage to the most iconic doll of all time, is not only strengthened by an elegant aesthetic and a surrealist heart imbued with rich and cultured quotations and cinephile references, but also becomes an opportunity to reflect on what it means to be a woman today, as well as on the daily difficulties and struggles that this brings with it.

The work is not only celebratory, but it is also a mix of criticism (see the jabs at Hollywood, at Mattel – here in the figure of the CEO played by Will Ferrell, at all human contradictions) and social satire (the controversial standards of perfection and beauty associated with Barbie), as well as a cinema that speaks of female empowerment directly from the sensitive voices of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig.

In this brilliant, eccentric and imaginative film, the world's most famous doll experiences her personal growth, the transition from a utopian world to a real one, and essentially her evolution into becoming a human being and a woman.

The protagonist experiences the value of women on herself and conveys the impossibility of aesthetic perfection (and not only); and above all she affirms a strong sense of humanism that must be respected and carried forward. There can be no awareness, maturity and rebirth without (having first experienced) suffering and pain.

The film is enjoyable, funny but also unequal. It alternates very successful moments with less resolved ones.

Its most effective strengths are the irony, the pastel-colored photography, the softly pink scenography of Barbieland, the costumes, the convincing interpretations of the whole cast, the well-choreographed musical sequences between songs and ballets (there is also Dua Lipa – her hit “Dance the Night”), the soundtrack composed by Alexandre Desplat, some dazzling ideas of the enthralling screenplay (above all the incipit reminiscent of the monolith of “2001: A Space Odyssey"). Among the weaknesses, an excessive weight given both to the "subversive" aspect towards what the plastic Barbie doll has always depicted and represented (the ideal of the female body unachievable by consumerist and anarcho-capitalist behavior), and towards a specific didactic ambition which, if they could work to affirm the educational intent of the film, on the other hand greatly hinder the narrative fluidity, a greater inventiveness profuse in it, and ultimately the emotional charge.

Despite this basic non-balance and despite a mixture of genres, tones and registers that are not very cohesive with each other, the film is stratified and hides much more than what it shows.

In this sense, the concepts of existentialism and individualism are appreciable, which in some way have been argued and treated in the intertwining of events and characters: both Barbie and Ken undertake similar paths that will lead them to self-awareness, after having ventured into the real world and having discovered that it is a repressive patriarchal society, divergent from the matriarchal utopia of Barbieland; a real world in sharp contrast with a person's autonomy of thought, with respect for the other in his differences from us, and with the idea of what makes us human. Therefore, thinking of yourself as a self-determining individual makes you question the conditioning norms and expectations of society.

Furthermore, the script, directing style and staging also move in a functional way to the main ideological discourse that underlies the entire work (that simply being oneself which is already enough; or that fact that every girl is free to transform her Barbie fashion doll into something alternative to the blonde and elegant icon originally designed by Mattel), but despite this all along the way, they remain a little too much prisoner of these valid "messages" and of their own intellectual nature, leaving the ways in which the issues mentioned were dealt with were ordered and disorganized, as well as their insights were a bit incomplete and incomplete (especially in the central act and in the epilogue).

Net of this, net of renunciations and limits (also generated by the desire to speak to every generation), the film remains an entertaining, intelligent and humanistic entertainment that can be appreciated both in its visual-sound dimension, very accurate and refined, and in its more socially/existential "educational" one...