~Review~
An undeniably lavish and frequently hilarious voyage, its choppy waters promise a fun time although its thematic ambitions are in danger of being lost in the undertow.
"I have found nothing but sugar and violence. I find it quite charming."
2023
USA/UK
Fantasy/Drama
Written by Tony McNamara
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Yorgos Lanthimos is best known for absurdist psychological dramas, usually blackly comic, often hard to watch - films that made him the first director in what is now called 'the Greek Weird Wave'. But those films came directedly from his own imagination, written by Lanthimos himself. Poor Things, like his previous film The Favourite, is written by the Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara and is based on a 1992 novel by the Glaswegian author Alastair Gray. Perhaps because of these other creators' fingerprints, Poor Things is a very different Lanthimos joint: a colourful, fast-paced comedy punctuated by splashes of the director's recognisable brutality and absurdity.
Beginning in a fantastical Victorian London at the home of Willem Dafoe's unhinged surgeon Godwin Baxter, medical student Max McCandles is asked to record the process of Baxter's latest experiment: Bella Baxter. Bella appears to be an adult woman, but acts like a toddler. She develops at an accelerated rate, and is soon aching to see the world, tempted away by Duncan Wedderburn, a ridiculous, slimy and horny cad played with relish by Mark Ruffalo. Thus ensues a round-the-world trip in which Bella's child-like mind casts into sharp relief the injustices of the world, particularly the attempts by men to control her and assert their superiority. Whereas Lanthimos has in the past zoomed into the trauma of individuals, this is an epic tale. If there is one word that describes Poor Things, it is opulent. The beginning section's black & white aesthetic bursts into colour as Bella arrives in Paris. The camera frequently switches to a fisheye or a pinhole lens. Almost every scrap of dialogue is overwritten or over-performed with preposterous accents and costumes to match. Along with all these heavy servings of elaborate design is heaped generous portions of comedy, dousing every scene in strangeness. Poor Things is chewy, richly textured and always fun to watch, skipping between scenes at a thrilling speed.
All that humour digs into serious issues, most surrounding women and gender. It is a strong effort, and succeeds in granting its protagonist genuine agency. Emma Stone, also a producer here, gives truly distinctive character to Bella, who emerges with absurd innocence but creates herself with a solid sense of self. It is probably Stone herself on which the film hinges, as she elevates that opulence above and beyond stylistic affectation. However, as an essentially infantilised character, positioned as woman-archetype, it is equally possible to find her swept away by the madcap style, in which case a darker reading of those deeper themes arises.
The issue is that Bella is used. Used by the male characters, but more importantly used by the male director and male writer. Alastair Gray's original novel suggests that the account of Bella's story may only be the fantasy of Max McCandles - it contains within it a question at the crux of the film's major flaw: who is actually telling Bella's story?
Does she convince as a sexually liberated woman? Or does her incredulity at the fact that people aren't just having sex all the time sound too much like a male fantasy? Does her time as a sex worker empower her to, as she says, take control of her body as a means of production? Or does the fact that she is directed to this work out of destitution tell a different story? Poor Things has divided critics because these questions are not straightforward to answer. Few critics believe the film is feminist, some because they find Bella languishing under the male gaze, some because they find the film to be too complex and weird to be so neatly categorised. It is not only gender that reflect a certain prejudice - the framing of Bella as experiment, as a child's mind in an adult's body, implies to some extent that she is disabled. Although the other experiments of Godwin Baxter - namely, Franken-animals such as a duck with a dog's head - seem to want us to discard any latent similarities to real-life disability, the fact that she is referred to by one character as a "retard" makes it impossible to ignore the connections. Just as an infantilised woman herded through the story raises uncomfortable questions about gendered exploitation and control, using a disabled body as a canvas upon which to explore social issues will likely offend those with experience of disability.
It is clearly possible to watch the film without drawing these conclusions, but it's hard to tell for whom Emma Stone will rescue the film. She delivers in every scene but at times her opportunities are cut short: in order to wheel through so many ideas, short shrift is given to many. Most shockingly, Alexandria (Egypt) is given a mere few minutes to be cast as a hellish pit of poverty, in which the people will surely kill and rape the upper-class Bella if she were to set foot there. Heartbroken by the suffering of these people - having thusfar existed only in the wealthy echelons - Bella attempts to provide a token of justice by giving away money to the people of Alexandria. Lanthimos clearly intended to lampoon Bella's simplistic ideas about charity, but this section is severely truncated and feels tokenistic in itself. For a film in which heterosexual intimacy is exposed for its various pleasures and pains to great (and often hilarious) effect, the late inclusion of a lesbian relationship feels incidental - again, well intentioned (it offers the most tender moments of the entire film) but in its brevity it can feel unthoughtful or worse.
These criticisms don't necessarily overshadow the great strengths of Poor Things. The largest section of the film, an elongated sparring match between Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo, touches on a wide range of meaningful gendered clichés, all heightened to that opulent absurdity and dispatched with razor sharp wit. It is only next to this that other parts of the film are found wanting. Gray's novel on which the film is based was called "a magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book" by the London Review of Books. Lanthimos' Poor Things could well be described the same way. The slow-brewing cunning of Lanthimos' earlier films is here replaced with a (dare we say) childlike excitement. It wants to impress, to thrill and surprise - and it delivers on these intentions in spades. It also wants to interrogate the deep wounds that scar our world and it does so with such pageantry that it is distinctly possible to find these intentions undermined. The central theme of women's liberation will not linger in the memory anywhere near as long as the astounding visuals of this stylistic tour-de-force.
