Let’s Talk About the Directing Masterclass That is “Barbie”

“Barbie” is one of the best comedies that’s come out in years, and Greta Gerwig’s direction is some of the most cinematically accomplished and painstakingly detailed in recent memory. It’s easy to lose sight of this among its broad jokes, slapstick, and over-the-top acting, but “Barbie” transforms easily through a range of different comedic approaches.

Margot Robbie plays the famous toy Barbie, who lives in Barbieland alongside all the other Barbies, Skippers, and Kens made by Mattel. Their lives are perfect and every day is the best…until Robbie’s Barbie starts experiencing existential dread. She feels anxiety and wonders about death. Suddenly, her perfect Barbie-ness starts slipping away.

She’s tasked with traveling to the real world to find the girl whose angst is changing her. Ryan Gosling’s Ken tags along because tagging along is his entire purpose, but in the real world Barbie’s anxiety only multiplies and Ken is thrilled to discover patriarchy.

The film’s dense but light, packed with a ridiculous number of jokes (that all work) and maintaining an irrepressible forward momentum. It’s feminist and makes a point of taking what’s expected to be subtext and just making it the text because, well, the expectation that women should make their lives subtextual is a fundamental problem. That’s not even my claim; the film comes right out and says this and if you don’t think it’s effective, look at the complete meltdown of conservatism happening right now in the U.S. over a film about a toy.

“Barbie” isn’t just subversive, it’s disruptive. That’s some difficult territory when it comes to a movie about a toy and the multinational company that makes it, but the film thankfully acknowledges some of this at various points and treats reasonable criticism as complex and legitimate. That doesn’t erase all problematic context, but it does allow “Barbie” to be many things – including something that’s disruptive and confrontational.

It manages all this because “Barbie” is one of the most accomplished comedies you’ll ever see. You could teach a course on it for the amount of film history folded in. Cinephiles who are turning their nose up at it because “ew, pink” (it’s a color, get over it) are missing out.

The mentality of “Barbie” isn’t that of a toy ad or corporate synergistic comedy, it’s that of an aggressive work of disobedience. It feels like a new entry in the punk-rebellious vein of Cathy Yan’s “Birds of Prey” (in which Robbie also starred) and Rachel Talalay’s “Tank Girl”.

There’s an incredible amount of Kubrick to it as well. That’s easy to point out because the opening is a riff on the famous caveman sequence of “2001: A Space Odyssey”. What becomes hidden by putting this in plain sight is that as an entire film, “Barbie” most closely resembles “2001”…but you know, if it was funnier. Structurally, “Barbie” is “2001” to an eerie degree, right down to an awe-striking ending that contemplates the nature of mortality in the face of the incomprehensible divine. “Barbie” does that? Yeah, “Barbie” does that.

Thematically, it’s an inversion of Pygmalion (think “My Fair Lady”) and a mirror for “The Philadelphia Story”. The pink-and-neon design of Barbieland re-purposes lessons from Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and somehow blends this visual approach with a spectrum that runs from “Earth Girls Are Easy” through “Clueless” to “The Red Shoes” in order to create a tongue-in-cheek topography for a city of life-sized play sets.

When our heroes make it to toy company and Barbie manufacturer Mattel in the real world, its enclosed cubicles and slapstick stand atop Jacques Tati’s “Playtime” as its chase scene and visual puns incorporate Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” and satire leans on work like Jamie Babbit’s “But I’m a Cheerleader”. The cartoonish elements and Ryan Gosling’s performance as Ken are heavily informed by the over-the-top physical comedy of Stephen Chow. Its meta comedy feels like a natural companion to Penelope Spheeris’s “Wayne’s World”. Surreal, out-of-reality moments draw achingly from the design of “Singin’ in the Rain” and “An American in Paris”.

Even if you’ve never seen any of these films, “Barbie” is hilarious. It doesn’t require recognizing these things to work; it works because Gerwig has already done the job of understanding them. These aren’t cheap references to evoke an empty moment of brief acknowledgment, as so many meta comedies chase. No one’s coming to “Barbie” looking forward to their Tati, Kubrick, and Powell/Pressburger references. Instead, these ingredients are all incorporated, fused and evolved into something else that is whole in and of itself. Few directors can call upon such a vast array of cinema that they can infuse each moment with just the right amount of Monty Python or Mel Brooks or Marx Brothers.

Most comedies do the one type of comedy they’re aiming for as well as they can, tackling a few other approaches as a scene or actor’s talents lend. “Barbie” is so successful because it can be any comedic approach at any given time. It can be stagy wordplay, cartoonish effects, slapstick, French consumerist satire, a comedy of manners, on-the-move banter, bleak comedy, surreal, gentle, tragicomedy, farce, deadpan, absurdist, and it uses all these paintbrushes in endless combinations to shift rapidly and unexpectedly from one to the next. Yet it all still feels smooth in its delivery and subversive in its impact.

“Barbie” is a masterclass in knowing what the hell you’re doing. It is near-impossible to land this rangy of a comedy. It came out on the same weekend as “Oppenheimer”, and a lot of people will argue Christopher Nolan is the greatest filmmaker alive. He does what he does very well and he’s one of my favorite directors; it’s possible for two people to be excellent at the same time. And yet I have seen very few directors do what Gerwig has managed. Comedy this flexible and adaptive might be the single hardest thing on film to get right. It comes along so seldom that “Blazing Saddles” and “Duck Soup” long outlast nearly every drama that was made in their eras.

“Barbie” is colorful. It’s a comedy. It’s directed by a woman. All those things can make us let go of the importance of something for very different reasons. Conservative politicians aiming to clash over its feminism will try to wear everything about it into a tired thinness that saps it of consequence. But the accomplishment of this level of direction cannot be lost. It would be such a denial of what film can be for us to dismiss the rarity of what Gerwig’s done here.

And while “Barbie” points out – among other things – that women shouldn’t have to be exceptional to be recognized, heard, and deferred to, when any artist does something this exceptional they also need to be celebrated. We need to talk about Gerwig, Sarah Polley, Chinonye Chukwu, Cathy Yan, Claudia Llosa, Anvita Dutt, Isabel Sandoval, Celine Sciamma, Lucrecia Martel, Ava DuVernay, Chloe Zhao, Jane Campion, and so many more the way we talk about Spielberg and Cameron and Scorsese and Nolan and Villeneuve. We need to do this because we know the average male director – the Farrelly brothers, Michael Bay, McG, Len Wiseman, Seth MacFarlane – we know average male directors better than we know exceptional women directors. Unremarkable men in their field are better known to us, are more household names to us, than the best women in their field. What Gerwig’s done in her choice of comedy is taken on one of the toughest, rangiest, most demanding jobs cinema has to offer, one that does not forgive missteps or mistakes, and she’s landed it in a generationally rare way. That is accomplishment, and it ought to far, far surpass the awe we so readily offer men when we do less.

“Barbie” is in theaters. Please exercise caution regarding the extent of COVID in your area.

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