OR, The Bride Of Frankenstein Goes On a Picaresque Adventure!
I usually find picaresque movies tiresome: I couldn't find any interest in what happens to Barry Lyndon, and why did we have to watch Forrest Gump running across America for no reason? Bella Baxter's cross-Europe adventure has points to make, and only wears out its welcome after a worthwhile journey, like a great cruise with one too many ports.
Emma Stone is brilliant as Bella, a woman created by mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Over the course of the movie Bella emotionally develops from a pre-sentient baby to a fully formed intellect. Her subtly organic performance evolves along with her character. It must have taken careful calibration, but the result doesn't feel calculated, it feels natural, like a flower opening. Bella's look - long uncut hair, no makeup, and untamed eyebrows -suggests a person who doesn't look like anything for anyone. When she wears makeup for the first time late in the movie, it's shocking, and if an actress can convey "I feel weird wearing makeup", Stone does it.
Bella begins life as a science experiment only, on high-contrast black and white film, living in "God's" sprawling townhouse like a preemie in a well-appointed incubator, or a newt in a terrarium. (For Lanthimos, a director whose use of extreme fisheye lenses, abstract music, and fantastical production design is distracting and abstruse, calling the mad scientist/father figure "God" is a little on the nose, don't you think?) "God" contains her to the townhouse, attempts to kindly control her, but he comes to love her like a daughter and subsequently permits most everything. "God's" kindhearted lab assistant Max (Ramy Youssef) falls in love with Bella as she gains self-awareness. When Bella is given some liberty in her intellectual adolescence, she escapes into the real world with Baxter's lawyer, the dissolute cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo).
This same story could have been told if Bella Baxter was a time traveler, or an escaped cult member, or an alien in woman's clothing, or a cat transformed into a person: how does an adult raised in seclusion react to being dropped into the patriarchy the rest of us have been soaking in our whole lives? Actually, the cult survivor example (see The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) wouldn't apply here because Bella is the alpha of her story. Cult members are dominated by their leader. Bella never responds to the implied or direct oppression of men. She just does what she wants, whenever she wants, and doesn't care what you think.
The men of the world are represented by Wedderburn. He spirits her away from her seclusion, because he finds her to be an intriguing object, then a sex object, then a puzzle to be solved, and finally he attempts dominance over her. But her indifference to his (implied) patriarchal role is her superpower: he is amused, then confounded, then enraged, then destroyed by it. He expresses this emotional chaos by drinking and impotently lashing out at everyone else who opposes him. These moments are used to comic effect, especially when he lamely attempts to murder an elderly lady, who strikes him in the throat with her cane. As he's dragged away, he chokes "I'll be in the bar..."
Speaking of chaos, it's unfortunate that, until the last minutes of the movie, the story sidesteps an important and inevitable truth of women who defy their men: physical and mental abuse. Bella repeatedly embarrasses and defies Wedderburn in public, in private, and steals a fortune in gambling winnings from him. Wedderburn repeatedly soars into a rage over her ignorance of her supposed obligation to subjugate herself to him. Yet he never strikes her. In one scene, when she behaves poorly at a restaurant, he drags her away and squeezes her biceps too hard, but that's it.
As I said above, she is immune to the patriarchal control that men take for granted, so mental abuse doesn't work on her. But I kept waiting for Wedderburn to strike her, at moments when anyone would expect a man like Wedderburn to do so, and it never happens. In fact, there's a moment featured in all the promotions for the movie where she slaps him across the face, and it's played for laughs: he's so surprised to be abused by a woman that he forgets to feel any pain, he looks sideways for a moment and just says "Ow."
That's the question I would put to the moviemakers: Wedderburn is central to Bella's relationship to Men and the world overall. Therefore, it's out of character for Wedderburn to not beat "his" woman. If you're trying to tell the story of the human condition, it belongs in the movie. Especially when he physically lashes out at everyone else in the movie? Are we supposed to believe he attacks everyone else because he has realized attacking Bella would be ineffective? If so, I didn't connect those dots. Maybe making him also a punchline muddles the metaphor.
(I was glad not to be thinking of Ruffalo's 5+ performances as the most famous rage monster in movie history, Bruce Banner/The Hulk. I only hope Lanthimos wasn't either. )
Dafoe is terrific as the scientist who comes to love his experiment like a father and daughter. The character is an exploration of the Dr. Frankenstein idea: Why would a scientist attempt to reanimate a man from dead body parts? We learn that Baxter himself was the subject of his own father's inhumane experiments, that amounted to torture and mutilation. Dr. Baxter himself looks like Frankenstein's monster, with giant scars criss-crossing his face, and an inhuman jawline distorted by we-don't-want-to-know-what. Baxter reveals these inhumanities scientifically, as if they were irrelevant to any emotional attachment to his father. However, unlike his own father's experiments on him, Baxter is kind to the point of 'spoiling' his daughter/experiment, both figuratively and scientifically.
This review is incomplete without discussing the rampant nudity and all the intercourse. Bella discovers her clitoris when she's barely an adolescent, and after she escapes "God"'s townhouse with Wedderburn, she wants to explore the pleasures of the real world. This consists solely of gorging herself on delicious food until she (literally) pukes, and having an infinite amount of intercourse. Emma Stone is very naked many times in the movie. We see everything except Ruffalo's penis in one intercourse montage. After she finds herself penniless in Paris with the useless Wedderburn, she immediately turns to whoring to make money. As Bella is ignorant of all learning and has no skills, she's not qualified for much more than manual labor, and whoring is the best-paying manual labor she can get. The movie doesn't bother to show her applying for anything else. I can't call out the movie for cynicism when I complained so much about the lack of abuse four paragraphs ago.
The lessons she learns from the johns, the madam, and the whore with a heart of gold who goes down on her arrive at the point where Poor Things starts to belabor its point. The movie is not slow, not too long in hours and minutes. Poor Things explores ideas about women and men and their place together in new, interesting, and fun ways, but by the 100 minute mark, the points all feel made already. In the last half hour, Bella discovers that the only way to escape Marriage is through violence. The bow tied on the movie at the end feels very convenient, tidy, and out of character with the rest of the film.
My Stub Hubby grade: B-plus. On a frigid, windy, 9 degree night at the Beacon Theater, Pittsfield. 2 hours, 21 minutes. Rated R for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity (Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, many French whores, and full frontal nudity of four or five French johns), disturbing material, gore (mostly eviscerated corpses in a surgical theater, but also two brief explicit surgery scenes on live patients, and Bella stabs a corpse in the eyeballs repeatedly)...and language.
Rated R [barely] How did this movie avoid an NC-17 or whatever is above "R"? We never see actual penetration, I guess that's the line they didn't cross. Movies like this make the ratings seem silly. There's plenty of comedies with zero sex or violence or gore, with three swear words that are also "R"!
OSCARS WATCH: You know how The Academy has occasionally rewards long-overdue performances to veteran actors for roles that we all agree aren't as good as their classic stuff? Al Pacino in Scent Of A Woman, Sean Connery in The Untouchables? Emma Stone could be the same thing, in reverse: she won the Oscar in 2016 for La La Land, a charming but slight rom-com, then went on to far superior work in The Favourite, and Poor Things, and...who knows what's next. If she only wins that one Oscar, the Academy may look back in embarrassment that they pulled the trigger so quickly on Stone's career.