Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to The Favourite, is an act of restitution to Emma Stone, who was the best thing in that movie and yet lost out at awards’ time to Olivia Colman. Queens (as Colman was) trump upstarts.
Stone does not lose out this time (in between writing and posting this, she has won the Best Actress Oscar). She is not just the focus of the movie but increasingly its purpose, once Lanthimos’s huge arm-sweep of influences and genres have bedded down.
It’s Frankenstein meets Alice in Wonderland in a world styled by Jan Svankmajer and Jonathan Miller (both did Alice movies), Bertrand Bonello at his most decadantly fin-de-siecle (see House of Tolerance), Fellini in carnival mode, Douglas Fairbanks Sr’s mad silent epics, perhaps some Martin Scorsese and Powell and Pressburger (Wikipedia insists – I can’t see it) but possibly above all Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Thank god that in among all this lavish display there’s Alasdair Gray’s original novel, his dry Scottish voice adding a leavening of acerbic humour in what is otherwise an exercise in phantasmagorical high gothic camp eventually yielding diminishing returns.
Put another way – there’s a lot of it and it goes on too long. But watch it for Emma Stone, but also Mark Ruffalo and, eventually (and too briefly) Christopher Abbott. Also Willem Dafoe, though acting isn’t easy through all the prosthetic layers.
Dafoe plays the Dr Frankenstein character, Doctor Baxter, a brilliant but disfigured London-based surgeon who pulls a drowned woman out of the River Thames, renames and re-animates her, using the brain of her unborn baby as a replacement for the ruined adult one.
Bella (Stone) is a “pretty retard”, as Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), one of the doctor’s students – the Igor figure – describes her, but she learns fast and goes from grunting and brutishness to picking up language and working out the ways of the world.
Muscle memory must be at work because Bella has soon discovered sex, which, allied to her childlike and forthright disposition, turns out to be the fuel that will power the rest of the movie. Poor Max falls for hot, too-available Bella. Bella agrees to marry him but then runs off to the fleshpots of Europe with lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo), an expert at the “furious jumping” she’s suddenly become almost entirely fixated on. “You would be advised, if it’s not too late, not to fall in love with me. I have very little to offer in the way of constancy,” Wedderburn advises Bella, in classic roué fashion. But he can offer bedroom satisfaction and that’s enough for her.
We get a lot of Emma Stone’s breasts in this movie – breasts as arthouse signifiers and as erotic focus – but then there’s a lot of everything. The performances are all large, grandiose. And Stone is spectacularly good as Bella, the role giving her an opportunity to play almost every aspect of a human character as the near-animal Bella mutates into something recognisable, eventually becoming a highly sophisticated operator, though never quite losing that childlike edge.
Ruffalo’s Wedderburn is something out of a comic opera – a buffo lothario with wavy hair and wet lips. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ruffalo so loose and funny. Dafoe, on the other hand goes for uptight and tragic. With his face all tracked with suture scars, the good doctor is both the monster and its creator, a bestial and analytical figure, the man who would probably have become Bella’s lover if, we later learn, he hadn’t been rendered a eunuch by his father whose awful experiments on the young Baxter are one of Alasdair Gray’s running jokes.
A superheated exercise in gorgeous gothic excess is what Lanthimos is giving us, a world away from the austerity of Dogtooth, his breakthrough, with DP Robbie Ryan (who also did The Favourite) giving us rich and wonky black and white in the film’s early stretches, before things eventually break out into colourscapes to take the breath away.
Exaggeration is the guiding principle, sonically delivered by Jerskin Fendrix’s score, which either plinks and plonks or growls darkly.
If there is a point to it all it may be to demonstrate that there’s nothing quiet as stultifying as polite society, or as soul-sapping as good manners, particularly as they apply to women. Bella is a naive creature of god careening through the world and reminding it that base desires are something to be reckoned with, and sophistication is no lasting substitute.
In case you were instead admiring the gorgeous scenery and brilliant performances, the film’s shock finale – enter Christopher Abbott and a real plot twist – are a bracing reminder that being pretty, female and the mistress of your own destiny comes at a cost. Here be dragons!
Poor Things – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
