Movie review: It's 'Barbie,' but the right-wing freakout is very much about Ken

“Barbie” has simultaneously been the target of a right-wing hissy fit and the film with the biggest opening weekend box office of 2023, with $337 million in worldwide receipts. Watching Fox News and Ben Shapiro and the rest of the right-wing media wage a campaign against a cultural product and fail so resoundingly has been a true joy over the past week. But what about the movie itself? I went to see it for myself and find out.

It’s hard to strip out the political from the entertainment side of the movie’s experience, but I’ll start with the latter. How does “Barbie” work as a pure entertainment experience? Well, it’s a hit for a reason. It is legitimately funny—many of its jokes didn’t just land, but came from far enough out of left field that the laughter in the theater was audibly surprised. The movie is also consistently witty, and visually so, with its opening section in Barbie Land simultaneously referring to how children play with dolls (they don’t walk down the stairs or open the car door, they just sort of descend from the house or enter the convertible from above) and how women are supposed to float through life without ever showing the effort of the demands society puts on them.

It is also touching at times, with America Ferrera’s wistfulness and yearning for a better relationship with her moody tween daughter, along with her generally unfulfilling life, giving the movie a heart that Barbie’s journey of self-discovery could not. You’ll hear references to Ferrera’s big monologue on being a woman in our culture, and it’s good, but what’s remarkable about it is that Ferrera makes it work. The words in the monologue are things even the most casual feminists have been saying for decades, but in the context of the movie and the character, and with Ferrera’s stellar delivery, it feels revelatory.

But surprisingly, many of the movie’s most startling scenes are about men.