The most surprising thing about Barbie is that the joke gets old so quickly. Then, after it stops beating the audience over the head with its obviousness, it settles into a self-assured groove. It's the rare case in which the third act is actually better than the first two. The jokes land harder once it sheds the need to be all things at once - a twist neatly mirroring the film's central crisis moment.

As it plays out, the first half of Barbie is surprisingly drab. It's a feat of production and winking self reference that threatens to turn into a painful civics lesson and a generic every-genre-all-at-once lecture. It's not nearly as weird or jarring as it needs to be, and ultimately, the Barbie world is as lifeless as the titular character.

But then, something interesting happens: Barbie actually starts landing some punches. It's no accident that a turn happens with the introduction of a fairly obvious twist - the introduction of a strange character played by Rhea Perlman. And Perlman is the perfect actress to fill such a role. She's small, unglamorous, and crone-ish, consistently cast as either a venomous tough or as a matronly sieve. In Barbie, she's a literal chorus, and her existence in the film suggests a knowing concession between the Corporate Barbie toy empire and the relationship that so many women have with her, and themselves.

These are the topics that have long churned in Noah Baumbach's films combined with topics that have defined Gerwig's features, yet the movie doesn't work like anything the two have accomplished separately. Barbie feels like Ladybird by way of The Life Aquatic, and when it allows itself to go full-blown existential, it manages a sort of cinematic brilliance that it's rival blockbuster (Oppenheimer, of Oppenheimer, looming so large over everyone's attempt at pretension) simply can't manage. The film has deep flaws, but heart is not one of them.

It's a magical thing to see Margot Robbie cry, and while her performance really isn't particularly consequential to the plot, it does present emotional heft to a screenplay that is both dullard and brilliant by design. Robbie, like Charlize Theron, is a beautiful blonde archetypal actress who just happens to be profoundly intelligent and intense, even when the film literally mentions exactly how we are not supposed to look at her as "average" while begging us to see her as just that. It's a neat trick to pull off a genuinely flattering disrobing of stereotypical beauty. It's a joke Robbie is in on, and a passive exclamation point that co-star Ryan Gosling owns.

I like watching actors having fun onscreen. I actually never expected to experience this in Barbie, especially when it shoehorns in less-than interesting roles for Will Farrell and Kate McKinnon and quickly exhausts its post-subtlety messaging. Farrell and McKinnon are supposed to be two anarchical characters. Both fall flat. We've seen it all before, and here they lack any acidity whatsoever. Their roles feel tired after countless Toy Storys and Lego Movies treading on the politics of child/adult expectations of reality. They almost seem like add-ons from the corporate execs they lampoon - especially troubling in that McKinnon is supposed to represent anarchy. But Robbie and America Ferrera eat up the screen, both inhabiting a particular idea that seems to have genuinely spring from Gerwig's best instincts. There are scenes that - in an overwrought and exaggerated cinematic world - seem to actually exist in real life. To get caught by surprise seemed impossible as the first act ground to a halt.

Barbie is a little too blunt for its own good, which strangely ends up being a good thing. At just under two hours, the bludgeoning messaging stops being funny and you feel the fatigue that we're supposed to understand is the source of Barbie's angst. In that, the ending isn't a reach so much as a confident nod to where Gerwig has taken the audience. If it's rare to see a actresses having fun in a Hollywood film, it's especially rare to see a female director genuinely flourishing by being just exactly who she is.