Normally this time of year when I have off, I probably start hitting the movies on a more daily business. But after the Stacker Challenge and a few developments in my personal life, all of them good, I sort of want to take time off from the movie theater. But that doesn’t mean I won’t go out to see cool-looking stuff. Case in point: Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos had his own take on the Frankenstein story with his latest, Poor Things starring Emma Stone as the creation of a mad scientist trying to find her place in the world.
My first exposure to Lanthimos’s work was movies set in what looked like the real world but featuring actors behaving in absurd situations while showing little if any emotions. However, Poor Things is set in an absurd setting masquerading as various 19th century locations, and the actors actually show emotion. How does the rest of the movie turn out?
Bella Baxter (Stone) is, at the beginning of the movie, a childlike woman who can barely speak. There’s a reason for that: she used to be dead. I won’t say how she was revived because that’s one of the crazier parts of the movie and I don’t want to give it away. Suffice to say, the mad scientist who revived her, the heavily-scarred Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Defoe), is keeping her inside his house and under careful scrutiny, eventually bringing in an assistant (Ramy Youssef) to monitor Bella’s progress as she learns to do things like speak and move around on her own. She just will not be allowed outside the house except under extreme supervision. To ensure that, Godwin decides to let Youssef’s Max McCandles marry Bella under the condition that they both stay in the house as she continues to develop.
Small problem there: unscrupulous lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (a really slimy Mark Ruffalo) gets curious about the contract he drew up and manages to sneak in and convince Bella to come with him. Bella is, essentially, a grown woman with a small child’s mind at the start, and she’s just discovered masturbation. The Lothario that is Wedderburn thinks he’s getting someone for some hot sex that he can pass along, and even with her simple understanding, Bella seems to understand that she’s going to come back to the better man that is McCandles. In the meantime, she’s going to conduct experiments of her own and discover what the outside world is like.
It would probably be wrong to call any of Lanthimos’s movies “delightful,” but Poor Things comes closest. The screenplay comes from writer Tony McNamara, reuniting with Stone and Lanthimos after writing the script for The Favourite and generally tickling my fancy with the broad satirical look at Catherine the Great with the recently-ended Hulu series The Great. Stone, for her part, gives a great performance. Her Bella grows over the course of the movie, always doing as she sees fit, and often at odds with, at least briefly in some cases, with every major male character in the movie each of whom have a different way of trying to control the young woman, especially Ruffalo’s loathsome Wedderburn. Early in the movie, she walks stiffly, but as Bella’s mind grows, so does her physical coordination. Setting the story in the 19th century also works since it allows Bella to experience the various social movements of the time as well as the Victorian morals of the time.
Combines all that with the more surreal, dreamlike sets and Lanthimos’s usual camera tricks, and the end result is a real Oscar contender, particularly for Stone as Bella. The movie’s exploration of Bella as she learns about the world, develops a personality, and finds a place for herself in this world where she can maybe be happy makes for a nice experience. Sure, Lanthismos doesn’t make movies for everybody. They’re weird and often off-putting. But if you like his brand of weird and off-putting, then Poor Things is a great place to go.
Grade: A
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