Director: Greta Gerwig
Writers:Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach
Stars: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Issa Rae

Greta Gerwig is a director whose work as a sterling auteur has become a beacon of joyous wonderment through wonderful, fully-realised characters. With her longtime partner (and now husband) Noah Baumbach assisting with the script, Gerwig crafts a surprisingly silly story complete with all the machinations of a satirical sketch comedy.

Our heroine and titular character lives an ideal existence moving through the monotony of moments and motioning through a stunning environment (utilizing sublime production design that meshes with the perfect modicum of visual effects to provide maximum hilarity and intrigue).

Barbie’s infectious smile beams as she saunters through the carefree world, dancing and greeting her friends to her heart’s content only to discover that she may have a tiny grain of thought that threatens to cripple the very idealistic world that she lives in.

Lo and behold, Barbie’s journey begins as she is faced with a crippling existential crisis that forces her to journey into the real world and face the often sinister reflections of humans who have very different understandings of idealistic circumstances.

Barbie’s journey is made all the more poignant by her side-kick Ken, played to a punctual perfection by Ryan Gosling. Ken embarks on the journey with rose-tinted glasses of his own ready to completely revitalize his very existence through a fundamental misunderstanding (or perhaps a darkly comedic understanding depending on your outlook) of the way the real world works.

Through all of this adventuring, our cast of characters expands to incorporate a disillusioned teen, a yearning mother, and a corporation dead-set on maintaining a status quo and forcing Barbie back into her idealistic lifestyle.

Barbie is a stunning film, not simply in its stylish joviality but also in its astonishing contextualization of the deeper fundamental principles of life. The things that a toy can represent breach far beyond nostalgia, and capturing that iconography can be an uphill task for any artist, even one as richly complex as Gerwig.

What Barbie provides to the cinematic landscape should not be brushed over. How many films this ambitious are left half-finished in the wastebaskets of other writers? Barbie is audacious. It shoots for thematic connections in the zaniest way possible. It provides a world where a literal dance fight on an ethereal plane of existence can be a battle for the patriarchal takeover of the world.

It provides a world in which the revolution of ideals can exist simply in the heartfelt sharing of the female experience. It provides a world in which mothers and daughters can share a unique understanding of ambition through a nostalgic lens of generational sacrifice, where a passed-down toy can be a reflection of years of altruistic nurturing and yearning for the future.

All of this while smothering the audience in a joyous world of pink and horse jokes and gynecology questions makes Barbie one of the most ambitious films not just of this year but perhaps the last several. Certainly, much can be said for a commercialized product hypocritically imposing its anticapitalist views.

Some can be said as well of its tones being too widespread, too far-reaching, to ever congruently fit together (indeed, our anticapitalist chase sequence with its buffoonery choreography doesn’t quite live in the same world as the Billy Eilish accompanied somber revelations at the film’s end).

But Barbie is a hallmark of the year not because of its reserved nature, but because of its bombast, and for its exuberance, I believe it should be celebrated.