Poor Things

My final review of the year! Thanks so much for reading. Stay tuned for my year-end best of list tomorrow, and other wrap-ups over the coming weeks.

Prior to Poor Things, I’d only seen two of director Yorgos Lanthimos’ movies. One of them is amongst my favorite movies I watched this year, and the other is amongst my least favorite movies of all time. In order to accomplish that, you’ve got to be a bold filmmaker. Lanthimos takes huge swings, couching his stories in the surreal and the absurd to incept his actual thoughts into your mind. Whereas some directors nudge you off-balance to make you more receptive, he body slams you a few times before pinning your eyelids open as he shows you his vision. Which is to say he tends to be an aggressive filmmaker, even as his stories are full of nuance and technical proficiency. They won’t be for everyone, but when they work, they really work.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) has a child-like demeanor, incredibly limited vocabulary, and a wholly uncoordinated movements. Yet she appears to be a young adult, maybe in her 20s? So we immediately know something is up,further driven home by the plethora of Frankenstein-ed animals by which she’s surrounded, such as a dog with the head of a goose and a rooster which barks like a dog. Her father is Godwin (Willem Dafoe), an older man whose face is crisscrossed with deep scars, the result of experiments his father carried out on him as a child. He is a surgeon and scientist, and he’s enlisted student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to note down many observations of Bella as she develops. Shortly after discovering the twisted truth about where she comes from, Max asks for her hand in marriage. Worried about his experiment escaping his control, Godwin has lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, with the most incredible mustache and accident) draw up a marriage contract. Intrigued by the need for such a document, Duncan whisks her off to Lisbon, and the previously sepia-toned black & white movie explodes into color, much as Bella’s experiences rapidly expand.

It’s important to note that shortly before leaving, she discovered masturbation: “Bella discover happy when she want”. She begins doing so often, and so it comes as no surprise when Duncan’s stated intent is for them to essentially go on a sex holiday before her wedding. Indeed, the first shot we see in Lisbon is looking up as her, nude and astride Duncan, nearing orgasm. “Why do people not just do this all the time?” she asks him post-coitus. All the while, we’re witness to her continued development and change and maturation as she's exposed to the world and its wide variety of people and ideas, and she applies her fairly unadulterated viewpoints to them.

There’s a ton going on here, at many layers, through all sorts of styles. At their core, they come back to various aspects of women’s liberation and men’s reactions to it.

As a babe in the woods, she’s seen as the most desirable object (emphasis on object) for various purposes: marriage, sex, and science. Not to mention incredibly easy to control. Her innocence and naivety and trusting nature and lack of understanding of the world is seen by these predatory men as a positive. Note that Max only proposes to her after discovering the true nature of her existence, seemingly taken with the idea of imposing his understanding of the world on her. However, both he and Godwin underestimate her agency, as in many cases she’s able to push or break social boundaries in order to get her way, and flat out overpowers them to run away with Duncan.

While Duncan wants to bring her outside of the controlled confines of Godwin’s estate, it’s always clear it’s 100% for his own purposes, and that he has no concern for her well-being or desires. When the experiences to which she’s exposed move outside of his own comfort zone, his selfishness immediately consumes him as jealousy rears its ugly head. He feels entitled to her and her body, ultimately putting him in the same camp as Max and Godwin.

Meanwhile, Bella is a force of chaos in the world. Her lack of exposure to what’s considered polite society means she’s constantly violating its norms, much to the horror of everyone around her. It’s a big part of why Duncan and Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) are initially interested in her, up until the point where she inadvertently reveals their hypocrisy by violating their own codes, causing them to snap. Her insistence on questioning everything lays bare the artifice of such customs to the audience. While that approach is nothing new, what makes it work is the men have no ability to correct her for fear of ruining their situation, as it depends on her naivety.

This is obviously a comment on the ways in which society is constructed to maximize men’s pleasures and freedoms at the expense of women’s, and how even those who think they mean well are part of the problem. It’s a look at control, and how people react when a woman challenges the foundations of that control from a place where it’s hard for them to deny her.

It also appears to be a condemnation of the societal expectation that men are attracted to younger women. From movies to sitcoms to real life celebrity couples to porn, it’s constantly reinforced that it’s normal and healthy and right for men to go after much younger women. By constructing a character whose brain is not that of an adult, Lanthimos shines a light on how creepy and unsettling it is, and peels back some of the dark (if subconscious) reasons for that behavior in the real world.

There’s also a way to read this as a take on the Christian creation myth and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It’s not even subtle: hell, Bella refers to her creator as “God”, a shortening of Godwin. Her existence is initially carefree and joyous and innocent. Her discovery of masturbation is eating of the forbidden tree of knowledge, symbolized by getting off with an apple the first time. Thus, her fleeing to Lisbon with Duncan is being cast out of the Garden. What really makes this, though, is that at first she’s exuberant and enthusiastic about sex, and wants to constantly engage in “furious jumping”. But her experiences slowly broaden her understanding of the world, and she transitions from a being solely concerned with earthly pleasures into being concerned with philosophical ones. The most upset we see her is when she learns that poor people exist, in disbelief that the world is such a terrible place that would allow people to be hungry and starving and sick. This is also her wrestling with the existence of evil. All of which slots together nicely with the place in which she arrives by the end of the film.

I haven’t even mentioned the comedy yet! This movie is hilarious. Not often in a laugh yourself to death sort of way, but in a wry, clever, just goofy and strange sort of way. Like, there wasn’t constant laughter in the theater (which was packed!), but there were a quite a few moments where we were all on board. Interestingly, there were many more scattered moments of astonished laughter slipping out of people’s lips. A big part of the joy of the film is the big, colorful, audacious production design. It felt like a steampunk world as designed by Wes Anderson. And the costumes were loud enough to match.

The performances are absolutely wonderful. To say that Dafoe, Ruffalo, and Stone are all outstanding actors is not at all controversial. Ruffalo gets the most consistent laughs with his smarmy, mustache twirling villainy, sure. But Stone displays an incredible gift for physical comedy, one which I don’t think we’ve seen her exercise before. The glee on her face as she knifes into a corpse, the awkward way she totters around the estate early on, and how immediately the expression on her face changes as Bella cannot help but express her every thought on her sleeve. As the film progresses, she slowly becomes more and more natural, hitting each stage in between with a subtlety you’re sure to miss unless you look for it. Until all of a sudden, you notice she’s walking and talking and acting like a normal human, and wonder when did that happen?

In a strange way, this might be one of Lanthimos’ more accessible films. He tends towards stories whose presentations are fairly pedestrian, but whose conceits are intense and upsetting and disturbing, which gives them the ability to worm their way under your skin. But Poor Things is quite up front about its weirdness, not pretending for a solitary second that we’re in the real world. In that sort of setting, anything unsettling goes down easier, because it feels like it’s of a piece with what we’re seeing. That being said, the plot distilled isn’t all that outlandish: it only becomes so when you flesh out any of its details.

While movies with this level of vision will never go away, it feels like a special point in time when it can get a substantial budget and a bunch of big name actors: in addition to the top line cast, I’ve yet to mention Margaret Qualley or Christopher Abbott or Kathryn Hunter. Even more special is that it’s playing theaters, and is making money. Last year’s success of Everything Everywhere All At Once was an important demonstration of the American public’s affinity for weird cinema with a heart. Whether or not Poor Things matches its financial success, it’s done enough to show that wasn’t a fluke.