I’ve been crying for the last seven days straight. If you think that sounds hyperbolic, I’d wager that you haven’t seen Barbie yet. How anyone can come out of a theater playing director Greta Gerwig’s latest without tears staining their face is far beyond my comprehension. (Well, unless you’re a whiny right-wing pundit; then you’re just sobbing because you’re a baby the size of an adult man.)
Barbie is a movie that surpasses audience expectations by imbuing its beloved plastic doll with enough empathy and emotion to soften the reasonable critiques of its inherent capitalism. If the movie were merely a straight comedy, it would be much more difficult to contend this bright pink money train as more than a cash grab. But because Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s screenplay is so magnificently layered, Barbie the movie gets to be just as impactful as Barbie the toy.
The film creeps up on you, as Gerwig’s films (she previously directed Lady Bird and Little Women) always do. Scenes that somehow seem to hold the immensity of mortal existence are condensed into nimble vignettes that arrive far sooner in the film’s runtime than you might expect. But even with Barbie’s unconventional pacing, Gerwig and Baumbach save their most heavy-hitting line until the film’s final minutes. It’s an observation about aging and the beauty of humanity that is so plainly true that most of us wouldn’t even think of it, because we spend our lives steeped in its reality. But in the Barbie screenwriters’ careful hands, this line becomes an all-time great piece of cinematic dialogue, the kind that will be studied for generations to come.
As the film draws to a close, everyone in Barbie Land and the Real World finds their happy ending. Ken (Ryan Gosling) learns that he can shine outside of Barbie’s shadow; Gloria (America Ferrera) and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) reconcile their strained relationship by restoring Barbie Land to its matriarchal glory; and the Mattel execs are assured that a self-aware doll can still make them money. But Margot Robbie’s Barbie isn’t positive that she has the same fate.
“I’m not really sure where I belong anymore,” Barbie says to her cohorts, both real and synthetic. “I don’t think I have an ending.” Through the crowd surrounding her emerges Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman)—or rather, the ghost of Ruth Handler, as Barbie enjoys debating the true permanence of death—who developed Barbie in 1959. “That was always the point, I created you so you wouldn’t have an ending,” Ruth tells Barbie. Together, the two of them leave Barbie Land hand-in-hand, to converse in the softly-lit realm between the two worlds.
Barbie, no longer feeling like just a doll, wonders whether there’s anything left for her in the home that she’s known ever since she was manufactured. “Ideas live forever, humans not so much,” Ruth warns Barbie. But filled with a new, distinctly ephemeral confidence, Barbie wonders if there is a way for her to become a real person, instead of the image of one. Barbie, still assuming that she’s beholden to her creator, asks for Ruth’s permission to become human. It’s here, at the apex of Barbie’s emotional climax, where Gerwig and Baumbach twist their knife for the ultimate bit of poignant, painful beauty.
“You don’t need my permission,” Ruth tells Barbie. “I can’t control you any more than I could control my own daughter. I named you after her: Barbara. And I always hoped for you like I hoped for her. We mothers stand still, so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.”
That final sentence, delivered with a heart-wrenching, familiar warmth by Perlman, is Barbie’s most profound line. It understands that mothers are always moving forward in their own lives, but eventually, they let go of their children's hands to let them flourish. These words exceed even the passionate feminist monologue Gloria gives to her daughter and the other Barbies, and affirms Barbie as a film that is as much about the unique gift of womanhood as it is about the inherent difficulty of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Furthermore, it’s a piece of dialogue that can be appreciated by every single viewer, regardless of their gender. It only takes being the child of a mother for Perlman’s words to resonate, and even those who may have strained relationships with their mothers can appreciate how the line values both parent and child alike.
As if that moment hadn’t already triggered gushing sobs, echoing throughout the theater during both screenings of Barbie that I’ve been to so far, Gerwig takes it one step further. Ruth asks Barbie to close her eyes, and Barbie sees all of the splendor of being a woman play out before her. Old home movie footage of mothers and daughters growing up together blends into scenes of young girls blowing out birthday candles. Teenagers graduate high school and become young women, they get married, and they frolic through life with their own daughters, mothers, and friends at their side, well into old age. It’s nearly impossible to capture this gorgeous montage, set to Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?,” with the written word. In signature Gerwig style, it envelops you and releases you back into the world a changed, more compassionate person.
Until this point, Barbie spends the film becoming familiar with the equal pain and exquisiteness of being alive. Early in her journey to the Real World, Barbie sits at a bus stop and looks around, taking in the people around her. She sees as much strife as she does happiness, watches as the wind blows through the trees, and starts to cry—until she turns over to smile at an older woman, sitting next to her on the bench. “You’re so beautiful,” Barbie tells her, smiling. The woman looks back at Barbie and responds to her with a soft grin: “I know it.”
Combined with Barbie’s climactic journey through the human experience—and Ruth’s astonishing line about the nature of motherhood—the bus stop affirms the film’s reverence for older women. Gerwig herself has called it “the heart of the movie.” Barbie, free from her neon world where no one ever ages, can still easily telegraph the loveliness of the woman sitting before her. By the time she must choose whether or not to become a real person some 100 minutes later, she’s faced the insidiousness of American patriarchy, and acknowledged that humanity goes hand-in-hand with death. And still, knowing the potential horrors of the world that awaits her, Barbie understands that there is no greater blessing than being alive. She will age, and she will die. But she doesn’t need to be the idea that lives forever now that she knows a memory can persist just as eternally.
This ending is Gerwig’s third triumph as a director who trades in thoughtful stories about mothers and daughters. Her affection for older women, and how they move through life with history at their backs, has become somewhat of her calling card. She did it with her first solo feature, Lady Bird, semi-autobiographically exploring the complicated dynamic between a Sacramento teenager and her working-class mother. Gerwig did it again with Little Women, transforming a piece of classic literature—which had already been adapted countless times over—into a singular portrayal of the beloved story of motherhood and sisterhood. And with Barbie, Gerwig marries the resonance of her solo directing debut with the contemplative spin on a pre-existing intellectual property of her sophomore film, for a truly unforgettable portrait of womanhood, unlike anything she has done yet.
Perlman’s climactic line is a revelation, thanks to Gerwig’s knowledge that filmmaking can be a therapeutic exercise. Gerwig knows how to shatter us, and piece us back together before the theater lights go up. That’s what movies are all about; they hold a special ability to fundamentally restructure their audiences. And if she can do that with Barbie, a doll as adored as it is abhorred, there’s no telling what kind of repose she might bring to the world over her hopefully long career behind the camera.
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Read more of our Barbie coverage HERE.
