Barbie (2023, Greta Gerwig) (Patreon)

52/100

"I feel kind of ill at ease. Like, I don't know the word for it, but I'm...conscious, but it's myself that I'm conscious of?"

Barbie might well be the most laboriously self-conscious movie ever made. (Yes, I've seen Todd Haynes' entire filmography.) Which makes it a fascinating cultural object, to be sure, but watching Gerwig and Baumbach pre-emptively fend off a trillion testy thinkpieces isn't really my idea of a fabulous time. The film never stops overtly positioning itself, to the point where Sasha's accusation of beauty-standard fascism—a pre-digested critique that feels obligatory even in this Mattel-sanctioned project—gets preceded by her friends saying "Give it to her" and "Destroy Barbie." The need to address everything results in disparate ideas being unproductively jammed together; "frustrated Mom picks up Barbie her daughter long ago outgrew and infects the doll with irrepressible thoughts of death" is a potentially funny and fruitful idea, and so is "Ken visits the real world, discovers patriarchy, and institutes it in Barbieland," but neither one really complements or informs the other, and both are left woefully underdeveloped from a narrative standpoint. (Also, both-sidesing the latter by making Barbieland an oppressive matriarchy in which the Kens all feel ancillary and undervalued kinda kills the black comedy.) I'd be more forgiving of all the working-through-our-anxiety gymnastics had I frequently laughed, but the only thing that struck me as genuinely funny was (ironically) the continuation of that self-consciousness bit quoted above, when it becomes gender-stratified: "I feel what only can be described as admired. But not ogled. And there's no undertone of violence." "Mine very much has an undertone of violence." More often, the ostensible humor tilts toward dopey ("beach you off," dance-fight) and lazy (the opening 2001 parody, everything involving Will Ferrell), leaving the admittedly eye-catching set, production and costume design to do most of the work. Robbie's solid, Gosling's certainly game, Ferrera's stuck almost literally playing a position paper. (And isn't that really just Gillian Flynn's Cool Girl monologue all over again?) Really wish that Gerwig had collaborated on the script for White Noise, rather than just playing Babette, so that I could feel even more equitable about my willingness to trade Barbie for White Noise without a moment's compunction.