Barbie
Barbie’s coming-of-age story that had so much more promise
Metadata
| Director | Greta Gerwig |
| Year | 2023 |
| Writer | Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach |
| Stars | Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera |
The Movie in 3 Sentences
Barbie follows Stereotypical Barbie as she leaves the perfect pink world of Barbieland and enters the real world after developing anxiety, flat feet, and thoughts of death. Her journey exposes her to patriarchy, beauty standards, corporate control, and the messiness of being human. What starts as a toy-based comedy gradually turns into a self-aware coming-of-age story about identity, disillusionment, and what it means to become a person rather than an ideal.
Beyond the kitsch and campiness, though, I didn’t really see the appeal. The movie was marketed as a fun, quirky satire full of movie references, and for a while it was exactly that. But somewhere along the way it gave up on satire and started delivering its ideas through increasingly over-dramatized speeches, culminating in an ending that was clearly trying very hard to make the audience feel something but mostly left me confused.
The politics of the movie also felt oddly muddled. One side is portrayed as clueless, insecure, and desperate for attention, while the other becomes manipulative and vindictive in response. The film repeatedly takes aim at mansplaining, yet often explains its own themes to the audience in an equally patronizing way. Much of what the movie declares is never fully earned by what it actually shows; instead, it seems to rely on the audience arriving with the correct prior experiences and assumptions already in place.
As someone who loved Lady Bird and Little Women, I mostly came away hoping to see Greta Gerwig return to the kind of emotionally precise, character-driven filmmaking that made those movies so good.