Where to begin?

If anyone had told you at the start of 2023 that the highest-grossing film of the year was going to be a film based on a female doll that first appeared in 1959, you'd probably have them trucked off to the funny farm. And yet that is what has happened with BARBIE. Somehow, perhaps through osmosis, Gerta Gerwig, one of Hollywood's great female directors of this age, known for films like 2017's LADY BIRD and 2019's LITTLE WOMEN (a great adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's literary masterpiece), has made the world's most famous doll become a huge deal, through a mix of goofiness, gaudiness, a certain amount of camp, satire, and pointed jabs at society.

Mrs. Gerwig has also managed to do so with a few references to films of the distant and not so distant past. Take the very opening scene, in which little girls of a previous "era" used to play with baby dolls, giving them the idea that the only ideal for a woman to be when she grew up was to be merely a mother. But then Barbie comes along, and inspires them to destroy the past to create a better future. Gerwig does this in clear but witty homage to the "Dawn Of Man" sequence that opens up director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, with Barbie standing in for the monolith, and the awestruck little girls standing in for the man-apes. Gerwig even went to the trouble to use both the portentous opening of Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and the Kyrie from Gyorgy Ligeti's "Requiem" from Kubrick's film (getting the hearty approval of Kubrick's family in the process).

After that, BARBIE goes into the adventures, and misadventures, of the world's most famous doll, in the personage of Margot Robbie (as the so-called "stereotypical" Barbie), and Ryan Gosling (LA LA LAND; FIRST MAN) as the original Ken. Robbie's existence with the other Barbies throughout time in Barbieland (which looks like a crazy amalgam of Hollywood, Venice, LAX, and Palm Springs rolled into one), finds her making her way into the Real World of today, and finding out, much to her shock, that being the ideal of perfection not only isn't all that it's cracked up to be, but that male patriarchy is the essence of everything in that world. In the meantime, Gosling's Ken, through reading about male patriarchy in high school books, leads a revolt with the "other" Kens to turn Barbieworld into "Ken's World", a symbol of male testosterone excess. The end result is crazy chaos, involving not only Mattel's CEO (Will Farrell), but also a mother (America Ferrera) and her daughter (Sascha Greenblatt), and Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), the actual woman responsible for having created the original Barbie.

With all these crazy things happening in the span of just under two hours, it is not surprising that some of the acting is rather overripe, and the jokes and sight gags don't always work. But given all this, and the fact that it sometimes seems on the verge of falling totally apart, the film stays on track due to Mrs. Gerwig's imaginative direction, and, most especially, Robbie's performance as Barbie, where she evolves from a stereotypical figure to a genuinely human one If some of the shots Mrs. Gerwig and her co-screenwriter Noah Bumbach take on the clichés of the status of men and women in the real world can sometimes border on blatant point-making, many of the others are so spot-on that one cannot help laughing at them once we get them.

Gerwig's film references, besides the aforementioned "2001" homage, include two more Kubrick classics (DOCTOR STRANGELOVE; THE SHINING), plus THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, THE WIZARD OF OZ, GREASE, and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, to name just a few. In the end, however, BARBIE is a totally original and insane piece of both old and new Hollywood at its best. For this, Gerwig, Robbie, and Gosling, along with the droll narration of Dame Helen Mirren, deserve tons of credit, as they managed to make what could easily have been an unmitigated disaster into a memorable and wholly unexpected smash spectacle.

BARBIE gets a '9' rating from me.