Grim Fairy Tale
Let’s get one thing out of the way: This work is a long way from the novel it’s based on, so I’m going to treat it on its own merits (and demerits).
And, while I’m not a man for “trigger warnings”, there are aspects of Poor Things that might have social consequences if you take your date/your family/your priest to see it: Much graphic body-horror and much graphic sex and much nautical swearing—some of the last depicted on board (simulations of) actual ocean-going vessels—plus every main character is a monster and/or does monstrous things. This is not Friends—The Movie.
Young Frankenstone
Throat-cleared, I’ll cough up my judgement: This is an arty film, but, even if you don’t like art-house, you’ll be entertained in some way. Because, for all its self-conscious grotesquery and semaphore-obvious messaging, it’s fun, and funny. Several one-liners and reaction shots—if not the copious physical comedy—made me snort loudly in the cinema. It’s good to look at, quirky, and well-acted—or, perhaps, “performed”.
I also found entertainment in the story’s central “plot twist”. It was a plot twist to me, but not to my viewing companion. I shouldn’t have been surprised, because the “revelation” is explicit and implied from the outset; though you might be distracted, as I was, by the volume of human viscera the director throws at you during the relevant segment of early exposition.
This neat, late non-surprise was not enough, however, to distract me from the clodstumping pseudofeminism of Poor Things’ final act. No matter how sympathetic you are its politics, you’d have to be deaf and blind to find the way it’s expressed subtle.
No Turn Unstoned
The other obvious unsubtle aspect of this film is its lead’s performance. Please understand: the script, the direction, and her presentation by the filmmakers—of which more later—ruled out understated anguish as an option. And the scenery was so loud that, even if the actors didn’t chew it, they’d be tempted to shout over it. From the moment of her “problematic” R-word introduction, Emma Stone was obliged to go, at the very least, Full Theatre Kid—if not Full Re-…
Tropic Thunder references aside, of course her performance as walking, talking experiment Bella Baxter is going to make Emma Stone an Oscar™ candidate (again). To reiterate, as when she previously won, the way she is made up, dressed, lit, shot, and choreographed are as much part of her character’s introduction and development as her own artistic choices.
Given how in-your-face her slapstick manner and couture shoulders are throughout, it’s a testament to the make-up artists and stylists, as well as to the way Stone exploits her own physiognomy, that the transformation of her face and hair over the course of the film was compelling enough to leave this boringly straight non-aesthete wittering about them both hours later. Stone morphs from Hollywood-ugly freak to Hollywood-gothic starlet.
TOP TIP
Don’t bet on her winning a statue though. Not because she’s not a contender, but because, if you’re a betting wo/man, and you like a flutter on non-sporting outcomes like Academy Awards, I recommend you take your punts on more obscure Oscar™ categories—if you see a film where the work done in that particular department is particularly fine. I still regret not slapping a fortune down on Richard King’s sound editing work in The Dark Knight, the excellence of which I remember commenting on at the time, but, sadly, not acting upon. So consider a better-value punt on Poor Things’ Make-Up And Hairstyling. You Heard It Here First1.
Ruffal-oh
Mark Ruffalo, who can act, spends too much of this film being distracted from his day-job by his having to sustain a Britoish accent. Given that there are so many other stars who could have carried off Duncan Wedderburn’s caddish ‘tache as well as Ruffalo without being harassed by this technical issue—some of them actually British men, men also good at all the other stuff that doesn’t involve sounding British—I wish one of them had been cast instead. It’s not as if the production lacks box-office draws already. This film is not realistic, but his globe-trotting vowels still dragged me back to reality too often.
There could, however, be an unrelated reason why Ruffalo got the gig—one that, when I thought of it, made mischievous sense: He’s well-known for having played the similarly-freakishly-older love interest to another bodyswap female protagonist in early-2000s romcom 13 Going On 30. The character he played then was the moral and temperamental opposite of Poor Things’ openly rakish an dissolute Duncan Wedderburn.
There are moments in the latter when he appears to be enjoying himself as much as he did in the former. One of those moments is not only a hinge around which the plot of Poor Things swings2…
…it appears to be a deliberate, inverted homage to a sequence that’s a hinge around which the plot of 13 Going On 30 swings:
Perhaps the teenagers who grew up crushing on cute, dorky Ruffalo, are now perhaps of an age cynical enough to appreciate cruel, dandy Ruffalo.
Willem’s scheme
Though not the protagonist, the entire story is driven by Willem Dafoe’s Dr Godwin Baxter, referred to often throughout with all the cryptic symbolism of a codpiece by the nickname “God”. Dafoe, in, I think, the single nod to the original source work’s Glasgow setting (or to the rabid nationalist cult that throbs north of England), plays God with a Scottish accent.
He manages this competently too, while being forced to act through a heavy mask of freakshow make-up. His character is not a good man, but we soon realise that he is the son of an even greater monster, and, in a fable full of matter-of-fact abominations, the most matter-of-fact revelations of such are Godwin’s own un-self-pitying recollections of the horrors visited upon him by his own father.
Despite this backstory, it’s a die-throw between Dafoe as Godwin and the two shoehorned-in black characters who enter from the wings later in proceedings, only to exit again shortly afterwards, which member of the cast is given the least scope for three-dimensionality.
The Beauty around the beasts
Watch the trailer (embedded at the foot of this stack) and I won’t have to tell you that, if you book tickets to watch the evil clowns in the foreground, you’re signing up for the spectacle of the anachronistic, gothic, steampunk, Victorian-melodrama big-top soundstages in the background. I don’t like soundstage locations, but Poor Things escapes the constraints that made the 20th-century work of the likes of Tim Burton so annoying to me. This is, I suspect, in part thanks to inspired lighting and the clever use of lenses, film stock, and angle.
Another factor that I suspect helps with this, and also gives the film a period feel, is its unusual, and changing, aspect ratio. Indeed, the film explored so many cinematographic variables for reasons of period and perspective and playfulness that, even when my attention drifted away from the proceedings themselves, there was usually something technical to boggle at or admire. As a one-time keen film photographer myself and a lover of wide-open old lenses, I was captivated by the unmistakable—and now unmistakably retro—bokeh of so many of the many shallow-depth-of-field shots.
Until I read the article I linked to above I wondered how intentional it was that the film jumped between different camera set-ups even within a single scene. Apart from the broad strokes like the migration from black-and-white to colour as Bella left home, there seemed no narrative or emotional justification for this blossom-hopping. The testimony of the makers supports that. So it really should have been annoying, but somehow it wasn’t. Perhaps even the film’s wider incoherence is also part of the reason it’s so engaging.
A Word about All That Sex
I wasn’t going to mention it again, apart from my simple, practical content warning, because it honestly didn’t seem important to me. But someone on Twitter drew my attention to some no-doubt-politically-motivated newspaper criticism of the quantity of sex in Poor Things. Both nominally liberal and conservative commentators in the UK are boringly obsessed with artistic depictions of intercourse and yet, somehow, never complain about any aspect of the same that might inspire real human beings to enjoy real sex more.
For the record, the sex is essential to the story and not shot to titillate, and I should have said something about how refreshing it was that Bella's sexual awakening comes, literally, at her own hands—rather than by her being lifted, Hollywood-trope-style, onto the nearest available piece of furniture by some smouldering hunk.
Even the way she talks about sex is, again refreshingly, matter-of-fact, to the extent of her naively clinical choice of terminology for various acts becoming a running joke.
[SPOILER IN NEXT PARA]
The film's treatment of the subject only becomes tedious at the end, when almost certainly for political reasons, the writer summons up Evil Men plotting to to remove Bella’s clitoris. This, however, is the sort of fictional coverage of sexual matters that newspaper opinionists are much more likely to approve of.
The Bodacity of evil
Poor Things plays Mengele-monstrousness for laughs. I’m a sensitive soul, but the gore and brutality are laid on so thick that I stopped wincing at them about halfway through. I suspect that was the makers’ intention. This is not a film that succeeded in repelling me or a film that inspired in me serious moral reflection; it bursts with horrors, but it’s not Saw-style torture porn, and treats butchery of the living almost as the set-up for gags rather than a scare tactic. Despite its terminal spasms of wokery, you might as well look for a Madonna-and-child in a Keith Haring mural as gaze into Poor Things for a real-world moral.
So I recommend Poor Things not because it says anything (morally) good or important, but because, like its central character, it’s an extraordinary mixed-up creation to gaze upon, it features extraordinary talents, and because, even as it irritates, it will make you smile at terrible things. I don’t like it when I do that, but there’s no denying that, when we smile at terrible things, we understand something about life.
This does not constitute investment advice. Your stake is at risk. Be Gamble Aware.
The script of this sequence is annotated by its author in my opening link.