Retired Middle School Teacher liked Barbie

Expectations weren't high for this one, and Greta Gerwig's Barbie was, for awhile, only what I expected. It starts as an elaborate comedy sketch as Barbie and Ken leave their perfect Barbie world for a visit to our real one. My own 8th grade drama class wrote the same sketch with fairy tale characters around ten years ago.

But then we realize that the core of the story is the estrangement of tween-age girl Sasha and her mother. Sasha now will have nothing to do with her old Barbie doll or her mom. The anxiety of middle school, the mother's sense of loss, and Barbie's shock and pain turned this comedy sketch into something I recognized as real. Barbie, embodied by Margot Robbie, sheds tears, a new experience for her, as Sasha attacks her for ruining girls' lives.

Ken has been only Barbie's accessory in Barbie Land where every night is Girls' Night, but, in the real world, Ryan Gosling shows the awareness dawning that a man is empowered simply by being male.

Gosling provides a lot of the comedy in this movie. Simu Liu as his rival Ken looks like he's having a lot of fun, and the two of them lead a cast of great dancers in a parody of an 80s power ballad. I'm also delighted to see Michael Cera back on screen as Ken's "buddy" Allen, a doll introduced then ignored in 1966. Cera was a comedy genius in the raunchy but touching Superbad ten or so years ago.

America Ferrera as the mother of Sasha delivers a soliloquy worthy of Shakespeare, cataloguing the ironies and paradoxes of what's expected of women in our society.

The movie has political resonances without even trying. Since the 1970s, one of our political parties has successfully branded itself as the party of hard men with the women who adore them, and has branded the other one as the party of effeminate men and shrill angry women. The schema is intellectually shallow, but emotionally deeply effective, hitting us in our sense of self. In the movie, the conflict of boys v. girls plays out in a cartoonish way and reaches reconciliation. If only it can be so.

One very simple line probably should be recited regularly by every young couple: Ken cries that "it's always 'Barbie and Ken.'" Barbie, on her way to enlightenment, teaches him, "No, it's Barbie, and it's Ken."

There's an odd moment when Barbie, dejected, sits at a bus stop next to an old lady. Barbie brightens and says, "You're beautiful!" The old lady says she knows. It made me think of how Barbie's story parallels that of the Buddha, who was raised a prince in a walled garden, shielded from illness, poverty, old age, and death.

This silly-seeming entertainment resonates.