Yesterday at the Alamo Drafthouse in Manhattan, I went to see Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos' new film. An adaptation of the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, the film stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, and Ramy Youssef. It's a dark comedy that is inspired by Frankenstein with a feminist enlightenment twist, and started off weird and got more deeper to watch.
In Victorian London, amidst a lot of steampunk imagery, Dafoe plays Dr. Godwin Baxter, a doctor with a scarred up face from his father's experiments on him as a child, who has created hybrid animals a la The Island of Dr. Moreau, like pig-hen hybrids or roosters that bark like dogs. He hires a medical student, Max McCandles (Youssef) to work with him on treating a woman with a brain injury (Stone), who is a grown woman with limited speech who acts like a baby, tossing things around and being immature. Early in the film, the woman's unusual backstory is revealed, where it turns out she was a pregnant woman who had died by suicide by falling off a bridge, only for Baxter to retrieve her body, and instead of reviving her, feeling it's not his place to bring back a suicide, decides instead to replace her brain with her living baby's brain, and resurrected her with electricity, bringing her back to life, as a woman with an infant's brain, and naming her Bella.
Bella's brain matures more, and through masturbating, she discovers she has a high sex drive, and though she has accepted Max's hand in marriage, she desires freedom, as Baxter has kept her as a prisoner of his home, and she wants to see the world and have adventure. So on a whim, she goes off with the rakish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo) to Lisbon, Portugal, and other travels, indulging in her sexual escapades and learning more about the world. And as she learns more, and meets intellectual types on her travels, she learns not just about pleasure and hedonism, but also about sadness and despair, and becomes more aware of her own feminist and philosophical thoughts, especially as she sees her sexuality and her mind as her free will to use however she wants, and how the men in her life keep trying to imprison her or keep her in her place as a daughter, wife, or plaything.
The film's first quarter is all in black and white, and then immediately switches to color once she has sex for the first time, as her awakening. I also just watched a video analyzing Pleasantville (1998), and the characters see swatches of color once they have more epiphanies and awakenings in their life, so there seemed to be some cinematic inspiration there, as well as, of course, from The Wizard of Oz.
Emma Stone is a natural comedienne, and uses a lot of slapstick physical comedy initially when Bella has an infant's brain, throwing things around and breaking things, but as her character grows and evolves, she becomes a more interesting person, slowly aware of the limitations that men want to put on her, and seeing herself as a free person with agency who cannot be trapped. Even when she eventually finds work as a sex worker in a French brothel, she is not interested in just being seen as a hole for men to use, but wants to engage with them with jokes and philosophy and chat, to make the play more fun and more worthwhile for her. It's nice to see Stone back on the big screen after a break during the pandemic and having a child, and her intelligence and sense of humor brought a lot of depth and thoughtfulness to her portrayal of Bella.
Mark Ruffalo is a lot of fun to watch in this film, playing a seductive cad who starts off a charming rogue, and over time, through frustration with Bella not having emotional ties to him and doing whatever she wants, starts breaking down and becoming more pathetic, and it's hilarious to watch. Ruffalo often gets cast as shy and bashful types, which seems close to his real-life persona, as he seems very humble about his success and career. A couple of times in films like In the Cut and Collateral, he played more macho cops, but that didn't feel as believable. Here, he plays a character more outright sexual and flirty, but the character becomes better when he starts coming apart, and Ruffalo's comedic chops come through, just being ridiculously funny to watch as he goes insane over this woman that he claims is the "the devil" because he cannot control her.
The production design has a cool steampunk look to it, with matte paintings of Victorian London in the distance on rooftop scenes, trams on cable cars practically appearing to fly above the streets, and warm colors for the seaside scenes in Lisbon. It can look a little overly whimsical, but not in an over the top Tim Burton kind of way, and I liked the dark fantasy world of it, finding the film more interesting as it progressed, as it went from having a ludicrous premise to being more about a woman discovering her own agency and philosophical look on life, which made it much richer to watch. I recommend this film as one of the highlights of 2023's year in movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment