As a filmmaker, Greta Gerwig is that rare talent that combines ingenuity and creative risk-taking with a film historian’s worth knowledge of cinema — real knowledge of its history and instinct of how it works. That “Barbie” is a visual joy and modern tour de force shouldn’t feel surprising, but it does. that’s because Gerwig isnt afraid of testing her capabilities, while relying on the strengths that made her so instantly well-loved: her complex female leads, her monologues on what it means to be a woman living in the world.
It’s a common misconception in cinema that realism is always more meaningful than fantasy, but in fact, quite the opposite is true. Fantasy, the depiction of it, is always more challenging than realism, because realism always has its source material to fall back on. We’ll always have the real world to draw stories from. In fact that’s the only good thing about the world most times (or at least that I’ve found): that it never runs out of stories. On the other hand, fantasy requires real ingenuity and creative force and vision to express an idea and make it real and communicable — something only few filmmakers understand, despite the plethora of fantasy and IP in today’s media and culture zeitgeist.
“Barbie” is that strange joy of contradictions: it’s weird wnough to warrant full use of its cinematic medium (literally, every frame is a photograph, but not in that isolating Wes Anderson way — in a way that feels inclusive, that wants audiences to join in and play), and more importantly, scenes shift and transform in the way only possible in the medium of cinema — the way that can only be described as movie magic. But it’s also grounded enough to be human and relatable (it is a Gerwig and Baumbach film after all). It’s a precarious, very tricky balancing act with very few successes. Gerwig manages it beautifully.
There’s a lot at stake for this Barbie, too. This being a Gerwig film, who’s an insightful and talented enough director to know a running fish-out-of-water existential crisis for what it is: pretty much just another day of being a woman. And she’s the type of earnest filmmaker to take us through that entire journey of self-realization and cruel coming-of-age, filling the screen with big emotions and monologues. She lets the tears fall and lets us watch. There is a dream ballet. And while some may find it preachy, I think the world has spent so much of its time and energy listening to the preachiness of powerful men who are really mostly mediocre — it’s high time they gave some of that attention to a young woman feeling big emotions, plastic or not.
After “Barbie” finished and I stepped outside of the cinema and into our own real world, it was predictably unmagical and boring. Pretty much the same as it was two hours before. And yet I’m reminded of a line from Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You that goes something along the lines of, “What if there was a beautiful world right under this one that only came to life when we were there for one another”, that the beautiful world we keep searching for all our lives was something we created ourselves. Maybe that’s as close to the utopia of Barbieland as we’ll ever get in real life: always just trying to build that better more beautiful world with every decision we make.
In any case! Cinema is back, baby. Maybe the world actually is healing. Happy watching, folks.
