Hilarious, incisive and full of visual splendor, Poor Things may not be for everyone, but it might Lanthimos' high water mark.
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I'll be the first to admit that sometimes I miss a movie, including Oscar nominees and winners. Never out of any sort of disinterest or malice. Life happens and sometimes a movie I've been meaning to watch slips by. One such movie is today's movie 2023's Poor Things. A movie that reuninted Emma Stone with director Yorgos Lanthimos and gobbled up a bunch of Oscar nominations and wins including another Best Actress from Emma Stone that she seemed embarassed to have won. Which means I have the enviable position of getting to watch an acclaimed and popular movie after its hype and backlash have already crested and fallen with fresh eyes.
The Setup
The movie centers around Bella Baxter, a woman who was brought back to life by her Frankstein-esque guardian Godwin. But the more that Bella learns about herself and life the more she wants to explore the world and challenge the pre-concieved notions of her society and especially anyone who wants to keep her pinned down.
Poor Things is one of my favorite kind of movies. And fantasy/genre comedy that's meant as an absurdist commentary on society. This is a genre that was much more prevalent in the 70s when you'd movies like Being There, The Ruling Class and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie were being made and it's a genre that doesn't get made because it involves high level production value that doesn't necassrily make money. But said movies are often amazing because they use their elevated concept/premises to point out the absurdities of our own world.
And I think Poor Things threads the needle by making it disgestible for a broader audience thanks to Lanthimos' slapstick/silly sensibilities.
The hook here is that Bella as an adult is learning and relearning how people and society works for the first time with an almost child-like simplistic view of everything...that also points out exactly how silly a lot of our societal expectations and niceities are (an ongoing theme in Lanthimos' work that I swear I'm going to do a full write-up about at some point).
Bella's sexual awakening is a very good example. By chance Bella discovers that she can achieve pleasure by stimulating herself, she takes to it wherever she pleases. Which is is definitely a joke when she's doing at the dinner table. But it moves more towards commentary when Bella, who has been promised to marry her Guardians apprentice, literally nicknamed God, decides that she wants to have an adventure with a known playboy played by Mark Ruffalo...who ends up being just possessive, if not infinitely more so than the former fiancee once Bella displays any semblance of autonomy.
What I think is so clever here is that this story's villains are all cartoon characters while Stone's Bella, who is certainly deadpanning for comedy's sake, comes across as perhaps cold and brusque, but not unreasonable. She sees no reason to lie about anything including her intentions and actions, which hurts a lot of fragile men's feelings (Ruffalo in particularly plays this baby man type of character very very well). Every "hurtful" thing she does is out of disregard for a societal limitation or ignorance.
The thread here is that this actually makes her not only more open-minded than the majority of people around her, but also perhaps a much better person than she was before.
That's what the movie is doing thematically and I think it's one of the strongest and most focused in Lanthimos' recent filmography. This is also the most visually imaginative and colorful Lanthimos' work has been.
A signature aspect to Lanthimos' visual style, up to this point, has been very flat coloring where the primary colors are black, white, with shades of yellow and red based on the lighting or to heighten emotion. This is also bolstered by very industrial buildings and locations.
But here we're going trough a world full of colors that Bella is eager to explore including brightly colored steam punk visions of European cities and ships. Which not only merges nicely with Bella's own personal expansion and appreciation of the world around her, but also provides a solid contrast to her more oppressive environments that are defined by one color.
There's something about period pieces or fantasy that unlocks visual splendor in Lanthimos' work compared to grounded visuals of his films taking place in the modern day.
A lot of the critiques I've seen of Poor Things have to do with what's seen as a backwards approach to feminism citing Bella's exploitation as a sex worker or the movie not being as "deep" as it is somehow alleging.
And I'm going to disagree pretty hard with that. An ongoing/recurring element within the film is Bella's own desire for freedom and progressive liberation being exploited by people looking out for themselves. Which is going to sound all too familiar to anyone who's spent time in and around people who label themselves feminist. Too often, afflicted groups in society find their efforts for progress weaponized against them personally.
Ruffalo's playboy is a perfect example. Ruffalo's Duncan Wedderburn is introduced as a depraved rake. A rake who uses Bella's newly discovered sexuality as an in to...have sex with her a whole bunch. But no sooner does he claim ownership of her than Wedderburn starts blaming Bella for everything with no regard for her mental state and wants and views the same kind of sexual depravity he clearly engaged in before he met Bella in his woman as unacceptable.
Whether it's the guy who talks about sexual liberation to sleep with women or the guy who talks about an open relationship and then asks pissed when the woman acts on it, Ruffalo is that guy. And Bella, rightly, kicks him to the curb for mistreating her and never gives him another thought.
Which turns her towards a brothel where she quickly learns that having sex for money both means that she has far less autonomy that she wants because "that's how the system works." Which means her introduction to socialism via a female lover is another awakening.
By the time she comes back Willem Dafoe's "God" and Ramy Youssef's Max (her ex-fiance), she finds herself attracted to him because he doesn't judge her, and openly talks about how he is jealous that Bella has been with other men, but doesn't judge her for it (hey emotional maturity being a giant turn on how about that?)
Even when her ex-husband, from her pre-brain transplant shows up, she immediately recognizes how cruel and controlling this man is, and escapes violently because she both wants to be a better person and knows she doesn't want to just bear her life. She wants to enjoy it. Hence why her story ends with her husband and her female paramour enjoying beverages in the garden while her maid is treated as an equal and her abusive ex-husband has been lobotimized.
I think it's a misread on the film's ultimate message to view Bella's mistreatment and exploitation as implicit approval. Because when literally having her understanding of society removed, Bella doesn't accept herself as lesser or beholden to men. She views herself as autonomous and will reject anyone who wants to tell her otherwise.
The Verdict: Maybe Lanthimos' Best
Hilarious, incisive and full of visual splendor, Poor Things may not be for everyone, but it might Lanthimos' high water mark. 9/10
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