When Emma Falls In. . .You’ll See
Claiming that Poor Things, the latest film from oddball Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, is a feminist reworking of the classic story Frankenstein, as many have, is neither particularly accurate nor especially insightful. For starters, it tends to overlook the fact that Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley, a woman who embraced and epitomized most of the ideals that one associates with feminism long before anyone began to apply that particular terminology. More importantly, while the film, an adaptation of the 1992 novel by Alastair Gray, does take its initial cues from that landmark horror narrative, it soon spins off into weird and unanticipated directions to become its own decidedly bizarro thing and one of the most provocative and outrageously entertaining films of the year.
The central figure in this mad cinematic odyssey is Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young Victorian-age woman who, we soon discover, has attempted to commit suicide by flinging herself from the Tower Bridge in London and whose near-dead body has been retrieved and revived—via methods that will take a while to be fully revealed—by the brilliant-but-crazed Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who looks after her along with loyal caretaker Mrs Prim (Vicky Pepperdine) and outcast research assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Yousef). While physically adult, Bella initially has a childlike intellect that begins to grow in nature about the time that she discovers the joys of masturbation. Eventually, Max falls in love with her and God allows them to marry, on the condition that they continue to live with him at his vast and remote townhouse.
Unfortunately, this union is hampered by the arrival of Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a bouncer solicitor who turns up to handle the paperwork for the upcoming marriage, only to seduce Bella and run off with her throughout Europe. It is only after they have departed that Duncan discovers to his vast discomfort that Bella is not the pretty, pliable thing that he mistook her for—she has a mind and a voice of her own that she isn’t afraid to use and clearly does not give a shit how her words and actions go over with the rest of polite society, especially Duncan, with whom she soon grows disillusioned. A series of disasters lands the two of them in Paris, where Bella soon turns to sex work as a way of making money. In the eyes of most, this would seem to be her nadir but the experiences she has allow her to grow and develop in unexpected ways that help her to finally figure out who she really is and to discover her own destiny.
In essence, Poor Things is a coming-of-age film in which an individualistic young woman tries to make a go of it in a male-dominated world that is simply not equipped to handle to idea of a female with a mind of their own who isn’t afraid to use it. The joke here is that as she grows both in intellect and self-confidence, the attempts by society as a whole to try to shame her and tamp down her spirit only push her further away from them and make her even more determined to find herself. Indeed, some of the funniest and most insightful moments in the film come during the scenes in which Wedderburn tries to hold dominance over Bella and she barely even acknowledges, let alone responds, to his attempts, driving him to fits of pique and distraction that make him seem far more infantile that Bella has ever appeared.
With such past films as Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite, Lanthimos has long established himself as a director willing to tackle borderline surreal narratives, albeit with sometimes mixed results—I really liked Dogtooth and The Favourite, loathed Sacred Deer and found myself perplexed, if not exactly bored, with the others. This time around, he has found the perfect project for his peculiar artistic vision—one fueled by dark humor, unusual visual stylings, wild narrative swings and moments of unadulterated weirdness—and the result is by far his strongest film to date.
The screenplay by Tony McNamara is undeniably strange and bizarre (including a few twists that I have not even hinted at yet) and at times almost feels like a particularly inspired goof on Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves but you never get a sense that he and Lanthimos are trying to be weird just for weirdness sake—all of the strange turns allow to further know and understand Bella as she goes on her journey of self-discovery in a way that might not have been possible in a more straightforward film. Even the hallucinatory visual style employed here, with its mix of color and black & white photography and deliberately distorting lenses, helps to put us in Bella’s shoes by making ostensibly recognizable sights come across as odd and unfamiliar.
The film is also blessed with a wide array of impressive performances that manage to find and maintain exactly the kind of offbeat tone needed to make material like this work without devolving into mere curiosity. As the monumentally sleazy and self-absorbed Wedderburn, Ruffalo has never been looser and funnier than he is here but he does it in a way that never devolves into caricature while reminding us that any number of the theoretically outdated attitudes that he embodies continue to thrive today. Playing his direct opposite—a man who is outwardly monstrous but inwardly capable of learning, growing and accepting, Dafoe is a supremely compelling hoot in the early going but becomes more sympathetic as things progress and lends an unexpected and welcome poignance to the closing section. Kathryn Hunter is quite good as the Madame of the brothel where Bella is employed, as are Jerrod Carmichael and Hanna Schygulla as a pair that meet Bella along the way and accept her on her own terms. There is also a very funny supporting turn from Margaret Qualley, the details of which I will leave for you to discover.
The best performance—indeed, one of the very best performances in a year filled with great ones—is the one turned in by Emma Stone, whose work with Lanthimos here and in The Favourite has made for one of the most unexpected and rewarding actor-filmmaker collaborations in recent memory. The role of Bella is one that requires a performer with no small amount of fearlessness about them to make it work and she has it in spades. Physically, it is a strange and demanding part and watching her in the early scenes, she gives a convincing and very funny depiction of someone who has not quite gotten used to the mechanics of the human body and is still clomping around while trying to figure out the controls. (Her work here is so expressive that it makes you want to see what she could do in a full-on silent role.) At the same time, she convincingly charts Bella’s mental, physical and sexual development and her growing sense of self-awareness in ways that are often very funny but also gave both the part and the film an emotional depth that ultimately make it into more than just a goof.
Needless to say, Poor Things is a film that may not be for everyone—some viewers may just find the whole thing to be too odd while those boo-birds who complain that there is just too much sexual activity in films for their refined tastes may find their heads (and possibly other body parts) exploding at some of the sights on display here. For the rest of us, the film is much like Bella herself—always surprising, thrillingly alive and pretty much unforgettable.