I saw BARBIE over the weekend, and I have to say, I can't really think of the last time that I cried so much in a movie.
This is not what I expected to have to happen at a movie about Barbie. Even halfway through the film, which was delightful, I did not see it coming.
But in retrospect, it's all right there waiting.
I've been thinking a lot about how writer/director Greta Gerwig primed us for such a deeply emotional experience without giving away at any point that we were headed there.
Here's five moments that I noticed which seem like key beats in that journey.
1) The 2001 Opening
Starting a film about Barbie with a 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY homage is random and hilarious. And the execution is just spot on. It's an absolute delight to watch.
But Gerwig sits on that moment of the girls smashing those dolls a long time, longer than she needs to. And they look truly furious.
In a sense that only adds to the sense of delight. But it also underlines the girls' rage and pain. And I think it's there to open us up to the possibility that that this story could offer more than we might think.
2) The Barbie Land Opening
Gerwig does something similar in the "proper" opening of the film. We are toured through a day in the life of Barbie and Barbie Land. And once again, it's hilarious in a thousand different respects. There is so much here to delight in. (Gerwig loves to use the comedy of the situation, which is really the comedy that we come to this film expecting, to hide where she's really going.)
But Barbie Land is also overwhelming. No one has any privacy. And how many times does Barbie have to deal with people saying "Hi, Barbie!" to her forcing her to respond? I want to say it's over one hundred. (It can't be, can it?)
Until the dance at the end of that first day, Barbie takes it all in without a note of exhaustion. This is just her life and isn't it hilarious, is what the story is presenting. Meanwhile it's creating in us a sense of disquiet, a feeling that something is wrong. Again, priming us for a different, deeper kind of experience.
When Barbie asks "Do you ever think about death?" in a sense we're back to the laughs, and the film points us to think the story is going to be Barbie dealing with her problems, not her world. But in the end that's all going to come back around.
3) The Older Woman
When Barbie and Ken come to "our" world, once again Gerwig gives us lots of funny bits, particularly around Ken and his joy at learning about the patriarchy (and horses).
Barbie's experience is much more unsettling to her. One of the great choices that Gerwig makes in this film is to allow Barbie to be authentic and present to her experiences. Things impact her; they beg questions that she considers. Why is she having these feelings? Why are people treating her in this way?
(Compare that with Buddy the Elf from ELF. He, too, is from a fantasy world and enters our world an innocent. But self-awareness and self-reflection is something he learns only very slowly.)
Gerwig and Robbie are careful not to make the objectification Barbie immediately feels too serious. That first section on the beach ends, in fact, with Robbie standing up to the construction workers and saying she and Ken have no genitals.
Then we get this moment where Barbie simply sits by herself on a city bench, taking in what she's seeing around her. She's really feeling things.
Then she turns to look at an older woman, who looks back at her. And it's another one of these moments that goes longer than you would expect, which allows us to really be with them in that moment. (Robbie and the other actress—Ann Roth—are so good.) Then Barbie simply says, "You're so beautiful."
It's all so unexpected and genuine. Once again, it primes us for the depth of emotion that this film is going to deliver.
And also once again, it ends with Gerwig covering her tracks. The older woman stares at Barbie for a second, her face unreadable, and then says, "I know!" They laugh, and so do we.
4) The Box
At the midpoint, the Mattel execs bring Barbie back to headquarters. And in response to her questions and anxiety, they tell her reassuringly that all she needs to do is get back in the large box they have waiting for her in the corner of the room.
It's a very funny idea that they would have a human-sized box for a human-sized Barbie. It's yet another of a million ways that Gerwig adapts the ideas of the Barbie doll into the film.
But it's also an incredibly immediate and disturbing metaphor for the experience of women that the film is actually exploring through Barbie's journey. And Gerwig leans into it in wonderful ways: we actually see Barbie get into the box, which is in an of itself unsettling. Then the cords that hold the dolls slowly begin to tighten around her wrists, underlining what a nightmare this is.
This is a brief moment. The box is never returned to. But the visual metaphor it offers absolutely captures what this film is really about, and where it's going.
5) The Speech and the Character Head Fake
At the end of Act II, we come to the point that this whole film has been building toward, Gloria's speech about being a woman today.
Even as it begins, with Barbie having given up and Gloria and her daughter Sasha unsure what to do, Gerwig gives no signal that this is going to be that kind of a moment.
Instead, Gloria just starts talking about her own life, and the contradictions of it. It's thoughtful, but she's just thinking off the top of her head, reacting to Barbie's collapse.
Only very slowly does it start to pick up steam. One contradiction leads Gloria to another, and another. America Ferrera as Gloria delivers a master class in how to make a speech feel organic and of the moment.
And each new thought is put simply and concisely. Gloria is talking about her experience, but the particulars of her life have been stripped away to give us just the essential contradictions, which makes what she's saying immediately accessible and relatable to the audience. Without even knowing how it happened, suddenly we're right there in the middle of it with her, and she's talking about our lives. And the emotion of it all just rises up.
(As someone who wept profusely watching this, I was reassured to read Gerwig's anecdote that when filming the scene she noticed men on the crew crying, too. 'They have their own version of this sense of being trapped,' Gerwig said.)
Part of what makes the scene land so hard is the quality of the writing and performance, that simplicity and resistance to any language or affectation that would make the scene seem artificial or monologic.
And the other part is that Gerwig gives this moment not to Barbie but to Gloria. Given the content, this moment absolutely couldn't be delivered by Barbie, right? There's just too much life experience behind it.
But still, in a film called BARBIE, you definitely don't think the big moment is going to come from someone else. And so we don't see that move coming.
And at the same time, the script has been setting us up to be open to this moment all along.
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Lots to be learned here. Here's three of my takeaways:
If you know the expectations of your audience—this movie is going to be silly; the protagonist always gets the big speech/moment—you can use those expectations to surprise them.
Comedy can be a great means of distracting your audience, and a great place within which to hide things.
A visual metaphor can do much work to express the deeper conflicts or themes of your story.
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There are so many great writing techniques in this film. I hope to write about some more over the next week.
(Other things I'm planning to write about soon—GOOD OMENS, Season 2! STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS meets LOWER DECKS! OPPENHEIMER!
See you there...)
