The Film Experience

No two people feel the exact same way about any film. Thus, Team Experience is pairing up to debate the merits of this year’s Oscar movies. Here's the last discussion, between Mark Brinkerhoff and Nick Taylor on Barbie…

NICK: Hi Mark! We’re coming to you live and in color - but mainly in pink - from Barbieland for today’s split decision. This is the only one of these where I get to be on the side of positivity, so if the runoff of good vibes is Too Much, forgive me. Either way, I’m very excited to talk to you about Barbie. I’m not sure this makes it into my top 10 for the year, but it’s almost certainly the 2023 film I’ve watched the most, and I think it’s a total delight with as much on its mind as any of Greta Gerwig’s previous films, albeit in a very different key from Lady Bird and Little Women. I’d say more, but I don’t want to start our chat with a three-paragraph monologue. So, Mark, what’s keeping you from feeling the Kenergy?...

MARK: Ken—or the Kens—is not what is keeping me from loving Barbie. In fact, the Kenergy dream ballet sequence may be the highlight of the film for me. (It’s just so visually dazzling, well-imagined and *fun*; how could you not?)

But the film as a whole, though easy to like, is a case of diminishing returns (for me)—big and bold swings from the outset, leading to increasingly less satisfying ones toward the end. Sadly, I didn’t connect with that the Mattel honchos, corporate drones and employees. No, not even with newly minted Oscar nominees America Ferrera’s now famous feminist monologue (though obviously she makes excellent points).

What I am missing here? Am I just the Weird Barbie of this Barbenheimer year?

NICK: The monologue is not my favoritest scene in Barbie, though Ferrera acts her way through it pretty well, and everything around it as far as deprograming the other Barbies is quite funny. Her inspiring speech is slowly turned into hocus-pocus anti-patriarchy magic, or easily digestible slogans. I'm not sure the CEO fully coheres as a character either, even with some generous caveats about how corporate feminism can be comically incoherent to observe. Maybe it's Will Ferrell's improv that sinks it, maybe the character as written, maybe both, but I do think Ferrell gets a lot of funny asides, like when he brings up Proust Barbie or knowingly talks about Ruth Handler's ghost having a permanent residency in the Mattel offices.

And who knew we'd get Ruth Handler's ghost in this movie! Or that the way Gerwig initially frames her as a wise, guiding sage would be so thoroughly and casually undercut by her comments about tax evasion? Suddenly her aphorisms don't quite sound right, and our Stereotypical Barbie has enough self-awareness to know not to treat this woman's words as gospel, even if she is The Creator.

TLDR, even the stuff I'm less psyched about with Barbie still gives me a lot to chew on. When I first saw it, I remember describing it as Jo March's "women are…" speech in her attic, delivered in brightly saturated colors and broadened out for contemporary audiences while still holding a melancholic edge. I love that this film is interested in exploring what it means to be an individual under matriarchy and patriarchy, and that it's just as interested in being funny when it gets more "serious", And goddamn is this movie funny. Everything with Gosling and Kens is a clear highlight, but so many visual gags and line readings are burned into my brain, like Hari Neff screaming "FLAT FEET!!" or the way Robbie returns to a stiff, plastic posture out of sheer despair when she's crying after Ken takes over and throws her clothes out.

You said it was easy to like Mark, but did you have fun? And did the gender stuff or any of the complications I mentioned really resonate for you?

MARK: Did, and it certainly did; all due credit to Gerwig and Robbie for, frankly, an incredible feat of gamesmanship. (They make it look so easy-breezy, when of course it’s anything but.) And no shade on Ferrera—at all—who is a wonderful and underrated/underutilized actor rightfully given a showcase scene in a pop-culture sensation that, in turn, became its own pop-culture sensation. (It’s obvious that the monologue alone clinched her the Oscar nom, God love her.) Nevertheless, Barbie largely starts to go off the rails as soon as Stereotypical Barbie collides with those in the real world…or the reel world, as it’s depicted.

I, for one, couldn’t wait to get back to Barbieland and was dismayed that the Mattel execs, like the team of Agents from The Matrix, somehow managed to infiltrate even that fantasy land with their bad mojo. Alas, as much as I l-o-v-e Gerwig’s filmmaking, there’s something overstuffed—metaphor upon metaphor—about Barbie that exhausted me a bit. This kept it from being for me an endlessly rewatchable classic.

Do we agree that Gosling is the film’s undisputed MVP?

NICK: Gosling is fantastic, and it’s ridiculous he isn’t a lock to win the Oscar. He’s so game, and so funny, and seizes every showcase sequence handed to him with such joy. I can’t wait to see him perform “I’m Just Ken” on Sunday before an adoring crowd of billions. All that said, I don’t know if I’d call him the MVP. Robbie’s even more sensational to me, navigating a very tricky arc of a cultural concept stepping towards personhood with such sincerity, humor, and sadness. I don’t think the film would work without her. Greta Gerwig’s hold of tone, self-aware but not ironic, silly and stupid and clearly full of ideas like a kid playing with dolls, feels equally important to making Barbie remotely successful. I swear I’m not listing the film’s most high-profile snubs to make some kind of point, and their producer credits nabbing them Best Picture nominations seems like just rewards for how they’ve shaped and carried this film in other ways.

But come on! What is happening here. Annette Bening and Yorgos Lanthimos are talented artists who should already have Oscars, which makes me feel better about wanting to snatch their nominations away from them.

To single out praise for an element that was actually nominated - besides Gosling - I really love the sets. The architecture and city zoning of Barbieland has a tangible, dream-logic sense of how things should look and how they’re organized. Even the surrealist touches of Weird Barbie’s home link back to a regimen being destabilized. And I just love the plastic waves on the beach. It’s so fucking goofy in the most inspired way.

Is there a part of the film that stands out to you? I get the sense from our conversation that you have goodwill towards a lot of features of Barbie without the whole adding up to a good time. And that does make sense to me, if the Mattel execs and the parables on parables keep weighing the thing down.

MARK: Indeed, the goodwill is not lacking—with Gerwig, Gosling & Co., it never is—though, yes, the sum is lesser than its (doll) parts in this case. I totally agree that the production design is beyond inspired—tactile, textural and terrifically pink and pastel. While it’s clear that the Oscar for Best Production Design is probably Poor Things to lose, I do hope that Barbie has a real shot at it. (Somehow seven-time nominees Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer have never won an Oscar, not even for their stunning work on 2012’s Anna Karenina. Wild.)

Beyond the sets, the also Oscar-nominated costumes are to die for—from the early ‘90s neon to Ken’s floor-length fur coat. (What else can you expect from Jacqueline Durran?) Speaking of costume designers, I really love the legendary Ann Roth’s cameo with Robbie. In fact, it’s the little moments, the funny asides, the throwaway lines, that especially deliver. At the end of it though, I was left not exactly *wanting* more but...expecting better?

Change my mind, like the leagues-wiser Barbies with their patriarchy-infected Kens, I ask you.

NICK: The resolution of Barbie’s arc really worked for me. Her decision to become human, filmed in that shifting pastel void and played so beautifully by Robbie, is such a gratifying culmination of her arc. I thought her last scene with Ken was similarly ideal at resolving their arcs, though the way we leave Barbieland with Helen Mirren’s narrator winkingly telling the audience that someday the Kens will have as many rights as women do in the real world was… I have had many conversations with a friend who thinks the broadness of Barbie’s politics means it opens itself up to more critical readings of Barbieland’s matriarchy (among other things) than the film is ready to acknowledge. I’m not saying Gerwig & co. don’t “get” the joke of that line, but as much as I appreciate the different wrinkles of sincerity and irony across the film, that line is not my favorite. That’s where I would expect better, even after so many viewings.

You know what is perfect though? That closing line. No notes.

MARK: Notes? Only that I hope beyond hope it’s "I’m Just Ken" that wins Best Original Song. If it can’t be "", that only seems just. But seriously, I do think that closing line, for a doll with no genitals, is an absolute scream. And with that I say that Barbie is laughing all the way to the bank.

Thanks for the giant blowout party with all the Barbies and planned choreography and a bespoke song in written form. See ya, Nick!

Previous Split Decisions: