Emma Stone’s Big, Weird Oscar Contender Is a Kinky Delight
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a handful of very different movies over the past decade and a half, but his pet themes have a way of recurring in every one. To take a just a few examples: His breakthrough movie, 2009’s Dogtooth, was a hermetic fable about a tyrannical couple who keep their three grown children trapped in a locked compound, feeding them lies about the world beyond their gates. The Lobster, from 2015, took place in an allegorical alternate reality where single adults who fail to find a romantic partner are legally compelled to be transformed into animals. The Favourite, Lanthimos’ biggest international hit and the movie that won Olivia Colman a Best Actress Oscar in 2019, was a hyperstylized historical drama that played 18th-century court intrigue for the blackest of comedy.
Poor Things, Lanthimos’ adaptation of a 1992 novel by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (the screenplay is by Tony McNamara, who also co-wrote The Favourite), can be seen as the culminating expression of the filmmaker’s longtime obsessions: the horror of being trapped in a closed system, the individual’s often self-destructive quest to break free from said bondage, the warping effects of intergenerational trauma, and the capacity of the human body for transformation. Poor Things is a feminist recasting of the Frankenstein myth, a gorgeously designed setting for the jewel that is Emma Stone’s lead performance, and not just my favorite Lanthimos movie I’ve seen yet but maybe the only one of his I’ve really liked. Though its disparate storylines don’t all cohere, making for a slightly lumpy third act, Poor Things is a kinky delight to watch, a movie about the search for pleasure that serves up plenty of it along the way.
If you haven’t read the book, it takes a few scenes to piece together Poor Things’ macabre premise. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a facially disfigured scientist living in a fantastical version of Victorian London (there are horses and carriages on the streets, but also, somehow, airships in the sky?), has transplanted the brain of an unborn baby into the body of a recently deceased woman, then reanimated the resulting creature, whom he’s bringing up as a kind of adopted daughter in order to observe the results of his forbidden nature-versus-nurture experiment.
Bella Baxter (Stone) starts out as the adult-bodied owner of that infant brain, playing with her food and toddling uncertainly on stiff legs. Under the tutelage of Godwin (whom Bella calls “God”) and his young assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), she rapidly advances through mental toddlerhood and childhood to adolescence. But once Bella discovers masturbation, or as she calls it, “working on myself to get happiness,” Godwin loses his hold over what he thought was a perfect blank slate. The moment Bella has sex for the first time, with her creator’s libertine lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), the film suddenly snaps from crisp black-and-white to luscious color. Bella decides to explore the world and her own budding autonomy by running away with the boorish but sexually tireless Wedderburn on a decadent pleasure tour of the European continent.
Bella’s experience-hungry spirit, her inability to plan ahead, and her insistence on immediate gratification of every desire from custard tarts to oral sex, take her to some unexpected places: a luxury hotel in Lisbon, a cruise ship bound for Egypt, a French brothel. Along the way, she will swap sexual partners several times, discover the existence of suffering and poverty, and develop a personal philosophy of sorts based on the reading suggestions of an older lady she meets at sea (German cinematic legend Hanna Schygulla, who played many such sexual pilgrims in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder).
True to the Romantic spirit of her era (if not to its accompanying systemic misogyny), Bella’s first principle is that of absolute personal freedom. For the succession of men who want to tame, entrap, marry, and “civilize” her, this makes her a contemptible “whore,” but for the few people who understand her (and for the viewer), Bella’s refusal to recognize the existence of social constraints is refreshing and even revolutionary.
The production design by Shona Heath and James Price may be Poor Things’ most accomplished visual element. In their whimsical rendering, the cities Bella visits are frankly artificial fantasies, studio sets with painted backdrops that turn Bella’s erotic Grand Tour into a sumptuous pastel playground. Holly Waddington’s splendid costumes give the sets a run for their money. Like the movie’s blunt-spoken heroine, they gleefully transgress the rules of their historical setting, combining giant leg-of-mutton sleeves with skimpy silk hot pants, all in electric shades of absinthe green, royal blue, carnation pink, and neon orange. If you’re tired of desaturated period films that make the past look as drab as a trodden-on newspaper, you’ll welcome Poor Things’ reimagining of the 19th century as a display of colors straight from a platter of petits fours.
My main critique of Poor Things would hold equally true for most other Lanthimos joints I’ve seen: I found myself distracted by the director’s insistence on highly stylized camerawork, most notably the fisheye shots that appear for no apparent narrative reason in nearly every scene. Who, if anyone, are we to imagine is behind the lens viewing events from that proportion-warping perspective? What does it add to our experience of any given image to be reminded that it, too, can be filmed in fisheye? The Favourite, a movie many viewers responded to passionately, kept me at arm’s length with its addiction to the very same visual tic. Perhaps being kept at arm’s length is the point, but I would argue that the misanthropy and frequent cruelty of this filmmaker’s chosen subject matter eliminates the need for such directorial distancing.
Mark Ruffalo is at first deliciously over the top, with a British accent so bad it must be intentional (though his Frankenstein’s monster of an accent in the Netflix series All the Light We Cannot See puts in question how deliberate his choice here may be). But while it’s fun to watch him gnaw on the tasty-looking scenery, Ruffalo’s hamminess starts to grate a bit when his character lingers after wearing out his welcome with both Bella and the audience. Meanwhile, characters played by Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley appear too late in the movie to get much of an arc, though the fate of Abbott’s creepy control freak makes for the last knife-twisting joke. Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef are touching as the detached scientists who are turned humanists by their observation of Bella’s journey toward personal independence.
But it’s Stone whose technically astounding yet thrillingly unhinged performance lets this high-concept project achieve liftoff. Lurching through the film on limbs that move like she’s half zombie and half baby, taking in everything she sees through nonjudgmental eyes the size of saucers, or engaging in the brisk sexual congress she refers to as “furious jumping,” Bella is an indelible creation: She’s Frankenstein’s monster in satin bloomers, Pygmalion’s Galatea leaping off her pedestal to take off at a full run. If for no other reason, watch Poor Things for the chance to see an actor at the top of her game build a character literally from the ground up, growing from infancy to strong-willed womanhood using no effects more special than the body and face God(win) gave her.
