The Time Has Come To Give Ryan Gosling An Oscar

Baby Goose steals the show in Greta Gerwig's weirdly winning riff on dolls and dying.

Warner Bros

“Hey, do you guys ever think about dying?” Margot Robbie’s Barbie asks in the middle of a fully choreographed, Barbieworld dance number set to a bespoke song.

Cue record scratch, the music cutting off, and all the other assembled Barbies and Kens stopping to stare.

This is the existential crisis that will drive Barbie to escape Barbieworld, travel to the real world to discover the patriarchy, and return to Barbieworld to try to rescue it from mansplaining and the male gaze in Greta Gerwig’s new Barbie movie. That a Barbie movie is built around the lead character’s sudden recognition of her own mortality is a beautiful conceptual joke in and of itself — either a delicious nugget of humanity managing to sneak through the corporate soul-crushing machine that teamed a toy company and a Hollywood studio, OR a particularly shrewd example of Gen Z weird marketing, like the official Twitter account of Moonpies tweeting “dicks out for impostor syndrome” or whatever.

People all over America who have never heard of Greta Gerwig or encountered the phrase “stuffed-crustussy” are well aware of the Barbie movie (including my 10-year-old stepson, who doesn’t understand why it’s rated PG-13). It’s fun to imagine them wandering into this thing and being instantly bewildered, little girls and their parents wearing pink velour to a multiplex screening of an extended riff on the last 30 years of feminist literature. Is that subversive art or just ingenious commerce? It’s a wonderful art prank either way, a bait-and-switch for cause. And even the averagest of strip mall soda chuggers don’t seem to have minded (judging by Barbie’s record box office and “A” Cinemascore).

(Please don’t tell me about the “rightwing backlash,” which seems to accompany every marketing campaign these days, it’s as boring as it is overhyped).

Maybe it’s just that Greta Gerwig co-wrote Barbie with her partner Noah Baumbach, who last year adapted White Noise for Netflix, another movie obsessed with death and consumerism and the connection between them. It’s understandable that they maybe ended up crossing the streams a little bit.

Either way, it makes for a wildly watchable, and dare I say it, ultimately heartening movie. I’d never recommend making a movie out of a toy to anyone, but when you have one of the best directors working (this is Gerwig’s third solo feature, after Ladybird and Little Women, all three absolute home runs) and two of our best actors, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, along with a supporting cast of heavy hitters, from Simu Liu to Issa Rae, maybe it should be no surprise that it works.

It’s still a surprise how well it works. Margot Robbie, who has played Sharon Tate in a Tarantino movie and the Joker’s girlfriend with equal aplomb, is maybe the only actress with the looks and the range pull off the role of a Barbie doll on an emotional journey — from recognition of mortality to acknowledgement that she’s been living in a sort of manufactured Matrix, to acceptance of an arbitrary universe. Robbie manages it all without a single sour note, a stunning achievement. And yet if she’s the cake, Ryan Gosling’s Ken is the frosting.

Maybe it’s that Ken’s journey is a little less expected, and a little less necessary, that allows it to be more fun. Ken, we’re told at the outset (by Helen Mirren, as our voice-of-God narrator) basically doesn’t exist in Barbieworld until Barbie pays attention to him. This makes him deeply insecure, and his status as a basically superfluous character gives him the freedom to be a doltish himbo who’s constantly experiencing complex feelings for the first time. He’s entirely earnest in his conviction that he wants to be Barbie’s number one guy, even as he doesn’t quite know what that means or why he wants it. Barbie doesn’t kiss him and she lives alone as the ultimate independent, successful woman, and anyway neither of them have functioning genitals. What is time in Barbieworld, anyway?

There are two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary aspects of the Barbie movie: one in which Gerwig attempts to wrap her mind around the complex legacy of Barbie and what she means, and another in which Gerwig leans into the absurdity of a high concept about two genital-free dolls discovering the real world for the first time, Pleasantville style. The second is, maybe understandably, a lot more fun. It affords Gosling countless brilliant line reads, like thinking the patriarchy was going to much more fun when he thought it was about horses (“man extendors,” as the movie refers to them).

The first, which feels like Gerwig thinking out loud, is essentially a recap of the 50 or 60-year-old argument over whether Barbie is a symbol of female liberation — being the first doll that wasn’t a baby, that showed little girls that life was more than motherhood, who was childless, unmarried, and liked to party, etc — or of subjugation — promoting unhealthy beauty standards and the idea that looks are inseparable from worth (and that Barbie was based on a German sex doll named Lilli, though the movie never mentions this part), etc.

Addressing those arguments about Barbie is maybe necessary, and it’s the kind of soul searching any thoughtful artist would do before taking the job of making a Barbie movie (which in a vacuum feels like the dictionary definition of selling out). But if you’ve been anywhere near academia in the past 30 years, it’s mostly all stuff you’ve heard before.

The plot is essentially that Barbie’s sudden preoccupation with death (the conceit most recognizable as a Baumbach contribution) creates a rift in Barbieworld, leading Barbie to escape to the real world to figure out what’s going on. Ken stows away with her, and together they discover the concept of the patriarchy. They both get “redpilled,” for Barbie more in the original Matrix sense, of discovering the horrors in the real world outside of her manufactured bubble; and for Ken more in the post-Matrix sense of becoming an alt-right manosphere masculinist reactionary sort of dude. Upon his return to Barbieland, he turns Barbie’s dream house into his “Mojo Dojo Casa House” and the whole place becomes a living energy drink ad. In this, Gerwig often out-Idiocracys Idiocracy (the ultimate parody of aggressive dude marketing, though it isn’t actually a very good movie).

After Ken (now wearing a big fur coat and three watches) turns all the Barbies — former lawyers, writers, presidents — into glorified “brewski beer” waitresses, Barbie has to bring in a human (played charmingly by America Ferrara) to deprogram them. Ferrara’s character (the human puppetmaster behind Barbie the doll’s existential thoughts) achieves this in a lengthy, heartfelt monologue about how it’s “literally impossible to be a woman” — being expected to “stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood,” and so forth.

It’s arguably the low point of the movie, because it’s the part that most feels like homework (or quote-bait). It’s also a collection of broad generalizations, and Greta Gerwig is at her best (which is to say arguably the literal best of any filmmaker working) when she’s being specific. Luckily Gerwig does just that for the vast majority of the film. This includes creating competing theme music for the matriarchal Barbieworld (“Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls) and the patriarchal rebrand (“Push” by Matchbox 20, which the meninist Kens force their girlfriends to listen to them strum on the beach). It’s funny to think of Matchbox 20 as the mansplaining anthem, considering I remember it mostly as the kind of heartthrob pop for which listening to could reliably get you called a pussy in high school.

That this musical choice is strange, unexpected, and just kind of odd in that very specific way is most of what makes it funny (and very fitting, in a way, if you interpret the root of reactionary masculinism as a sort of self-hatred for having “feminine” thoughts and feelings). Like most fiction, Barbie is much better when it’s asking “what if” than when it’s trying to define “what is”; when it’s allowing itself to be the product of one weirdo’s imagination rather than trying to be emblematic of all womanhood (now that truly is literally impossible).

Where the Barbie character has to do the heavy lifting of trying to acknowledge her complicated legacy with all womanhood’s infinite reactions to her (and her equally complicated iterations), Ken has the freedom to just be a parody of fragile masculinity. That’s probably why Gosling stands out as the movie’s most consistently enjoyable element. (And that’s a big part of what white male privilege actually is — the freedom to have your words and actions be interpreted as reflecting just you, and not as a stand-in for all white maledom).

What makes Greta Gerwig so brilliant is that she actually manages to steal the movie back from Gosling in its final moments. This when she manages, with the help of a pitch perfect cameo from Rhea Perlman as Barbie’s creator Ruth Handler, to connect Barbie’s identity crisis to motherhood, mortality, and functioning genitals (with Barbie’s trip to the gynecologist as the coup de gras). These feel like artistic choices and intellectual connections that only Greta Gerwig could’ve made, and the elegance with which she makes them is what makes her damn near above reproach as a filmmaker.

It’s tempting to credit Mattel’s suits for allowing a Barbie movie to be a PG-13 riff on feminist discourse and existential angst (not to mention letting it call them out directly for having an overwhelmingly male dominated C-suite). Maybe they did it on purpose! Maybe they just fucked up! Either way, about the best you can say for them is that they were smart enough to let the creatives take the wheel, and we’re all better off for it.

Grade: A

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Also! New Frotcast just dropped! Laremy makes lists! Matt does characters! Barbenheimer and the Twitter rebrand are discussed! You’ll love it!

I’m still in catch-up mode over here, but I’m planning to have Oppenheimer and This Week In Posters as soon as I can. Thank you for your patience and patronage, I love you all.