Review: Poor Things: Yorgos Lanthimos’ Demented Comedy of Manners Is Surprisingly Human
It’s difficult not to be grandiose about a filmmaker like Yorgos Lanthimos. His movies aren’t just unsettling and transgressive, they’re operatic, even if they’re not necessarily loud. They hit you in a curious place where queasiness and hilarity co-mingle like two naughty kids on a schoolground. An existentialist at heart, his characters often fall prey to unforeseen forces beyond their control. Whether these forces take the form of vengeful witchcraft (The Killing of a Sacred Deer), an austere aristocracy ruled by an idiot (The Favourite), or cold dystopian society (The Lobster, Dogtooth), his protagonists are simply too powerless to fight back or change their fates; personal autonomy is a joke. Until now.Poor Things is the Greek director’s most optimistic film to date. A surrealist, steampunk riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it’s both a satirical take on gender politics and a traditional coming-of-age tale; well, sort of traditional. In his latest, Lanthimos takes aim at Victorian London, a culture which relies so heavily on social etiquette and overstuffed vernacular you’ll feel like you’re in scholarly prison. It’s a great irony that our guide into this world of social pretension is through the eyes of its most tragic victim, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). The prized creation of Dr. Godwin ‘God’ Baxter, a renowned surgeon with cavernous scars on his face, Bella was reanimated after her untimely death. Played with a hilarious rigidity by the always brilliant Willem Dafoe, Dr. Godwin is an odd duck who relapses into disturbing tales about being tortured as a child by his father, usually to the dismay of the listener. Without getting into her backstory and origin, suffice it to say that when we meet Bella she is a grown woman with the brain of an infant. When she’s not speaking in fits and starts, she bumps into walls, smacks people she’s introduced to, and spits out food she finds repulsive. She’s also insatiably curious about the world, jumpstarting her evolution into a fully-formed human being. Based on the 1992 Alasdair Gray novel and adapted by Tony McNamara, the movie opens in Dr. Godwin’s mansion where he lives with Bella and other experiments like a barking goose or a chicken with a dog’s head. Dr. Godwin employs his student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), to document Bella’s progress or lack thereof. As Max develops feelings for his new subject, she is whisked away by smarmy attorney, Duncan Wedderburn, played by a libidinous, egotistical, hilariously preening Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo, who usually plays the grounded everyman, knocks it out of the park as a man who feeds off his own emotions at every turn. After escaping the confines of Dr. Godwin’s black-and-white lair, the movie bursts with color, both pictorially and narratively. Traveling to exotic locales such as Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris, Duncan introduces Bella to life’s more delectable pleasures such as booze, shucked oysters, and ravenous carnality, the latter of which Bella takes to hungrily calling it “furious jumping.” The various locations are depicted as Terry Gilliam-esque wonderlands filled with puffy pink clouds, purple vistas and toylike trams in the sky. Much has been said about the movie’s explicit scenes of “furious jumping,” but Lanthimos isn’t trying to titillate an audience as much as demonstrate that sex, like any of life’s pleasures, is something that women deserve to enjoy on its own terms, just as men do. As Bella starts to understand herself and the world at large, deepening her education by reading Emerson and Thoreau, Duncan can’t believe he’s not the epicenter of her universe and falls apart. As he weeps and blathers and calls her the C-word, Bella remains unaffected, cutting him down to man-child size with her straightforward Victorian vernacular. Or as she says, “My heart has become dim towards your swearing, weepy person.” Ouch.Poor Things is an audaciously alive and wicked affair whose success mostly rests on the shoulders of its heroine. Emma Stone’s performance is so outlandishly brash but deceptively internal, it will be remembered for years. Stone loses herself in Bella and never deviates from her spiritual (and physical) trajectory. If she doesn’t get an Oscar nomination this year, then it’s official, the Academy lacks humor and brains (in other words, she might not get nominated).Don’t be dismayed by the cartoonish trailers, it’s more than a quirky slant on classic Universal horror films. In a sleight of hand, Lanthimos and McNamara weave literary and mythological allusions into the narrative while making subversive political statements. More importantly, it’s riotously funny, bursting with a perversity and zest for life that’s reminiscent of films like The Producers or Raising Arizona.Unfortunately, Poor Things lacks the condensed transcendence of the aforementioned films. They should’ve shaved a few minutes off the third act, which struggles to regain its fantastic pacing up to that point. The scenes in the brothel particularly feel more like “a statement” than an integral part of the story. Also, Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan are a little too enamored with the fisheye lens, a grating technique that doesn’t add to the movie’s inherent weirdness, but feels tacked on. Still, these are small quibbles for such a bold piece of filmmaking.There are many messages in Lanthimos’ latest, but one that sticks out the most is to “suck out all the marrow out of life,” as Bella’s favorite writer, Thoreau proclaimed. We might have evolved a bit since the Victorian era but we’re still tiptoeing around each other’s scruples as if they were minefields. This movie feels like a direct reaction to the things that are holding us back and separating us. It’s as if Lanthimos is telling us to recognize these constraints, but then move past them. Like Bella, we need to relearn how to live, laugh, learn and enjoy. Who knew that a brooding existentialist like Lanthimos had such a magnanimous heart?
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