Barbie's moving montage features real women from the lives of cast and crew
Barbie Land advisory: This article contains spoilers for Barbie.
Barbie's emotional montage sequence holds special meaning for the cast and crew involved in the bubblegum pink production.
Toward the end of the film, which follows Margot Robbie's central doll as she malfunctions and experiences a very human existential crisis, Barbie learns that the mysterious woman she encountered at Mattel headquarters is Ruth Handler (played by Rhea Perlman), inventor of the Barbie (and Ken) doll. Having experienced all the joys and sorrows of what it means to be human in the real world, Barbie is no longer sure where she belongs. She and Ruth enter into a dreamlike white void of a room, where Barbie comes to the realization that she wants to be human. Before she makes the leap, Ruth says, she has to understand what it is she desires, cueing footage of home movies and Billie Eilish's affecting "What Was I Made For?"
Director Greta Gerwig has confirmed that the sequence features the friends and family of the cast and crew. Notably, it features only women — mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, and friends, some of whom are still here, some of whom have passed — to help Barbie fully grasp the scope of womanhood and humanity. To be human is to experience life's beauties and pains, beginning with girlhood to the more weathered stages of adulthood. (In one scene that Gerwig has called the "heart of the movie," Barbie remarks to an older woman at a bus stop, played by celebrated costume designer Ann Roth, that she's "so beautiful," prompting an endearing "I know it!" in response.)
Gerwig put out a call earlier this year to cast and crew who wanted to submit footage of loved ones, describing the sequence as a way to make an otherwise impersonal story feel personal. "With something like Barbie that's such a behemoth of an international brand and icon," she told journalist Andrew Freund (who, like some on the EW staff, shared a late mutual friend with star Scott Evans included in the montage), the scene was a way to say, "This is only ever made by human beings," Gerwig said. "Movies, dolls: Human beings make them. There was something about Ruth Handler, inventor of Barbie, this idea that she made the doll Barbie for her daughter Barbara, and just that human connection."
"Every film I make has to come from a personal place," Gerwig added. "I've always wanted to have a 'film by' [credit] and have a card with every single person who worked on a film because what I love about movies is it's a collective art form." Because that isn't an option, Gerwig saw the montage as an apt alternative to pay homage to all involved.
"With these movies," she said in a separate interview with ReelBlend Podcast, "you want to embroider them with as much actual heart [as] you can because they're only ever made by people. I'm a big believer in people being able to feel stuff like that through the screen." Gerwig also told TIME that the sequence was a means of "sneaking in humanity to something that everybody thinks is a hunk of plastic."
It's clear Barbie came from an intimate place for all involved. During EW's Around the Table with the cast (above), Gerwig spoke about mining from her own childhood to bring the utopic Barbie Land to screen — namely, in the creation of the whimsical transportation sets that help the characters get to and from the real world. "I remember as a kid building basically that, like a diorama that moved, and I put pencils and a scrolled piece of paper that I'd taped together," she recalled. "And then you move the pencils and the background goes."
The movie, she said, allowed the production crew to tap into long-forgotten versions of themselves. "Everybody who works on a movie on some level is the kid making something strange on the playground [and is] like, 'I made this!'" Gerwig added. From set production to stunt coordination, everyone was incredibly passionate and excited about what they were creating and felt like children again, Robbie, also a producer on the film, said. "It's like they were finally flexing these amazing muscles they have."
Being on set "felt like being in a toy box," America Ferrera, who plays human Gloria, added, heralding the "magical" artistry that went into every frame at a time when CGI and digitization rule big screens. "To approach this movie about toys with that spirit of everything being something that looks like someone made it — it was moving to be on those sets," she said.
It's an off-camera nod from Gerwig that speaks to the underlying humanness at the center of a movie about a plastic doll trying to find her place in the world: "There are Barbies all around us."
Barbie is in theaters now.
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