Poor Things (2023)
Always carve with compassion
"Poor Things" includes four elements of film which you rarely seen together: it is very uncomfortable, very self-pleased, very funny, and very, very good. None of them can be separated, and much of the movie's appeal relies on its courage to go where you think it won't. It has all of the constructed, airless design of a Wes Anderson movie but without the preciousness—there is a scene where our heroine says "I must go punch that baby.”
"Poor Things" is possibly a great film, but it was made for an audience not yet born. It is unsettling, oversexed, discordant, and yet I was charmed. Its appeal comes from director Yorgos Lanthimos' willingness to mess with our understanding of what is appropriate, as if he's fiddling with knobs on an old TV.
Emma Stone--in what surely must be her greatest and weirdest role--is a resurrected women fished out the river by a mad scientist, Godwin (Willem Dafoe), who is basically a mashed-together combo of every role Dafoe has ever played. He calls his creation "Bella."
Though physically an adult, Bella has no memory, no learning--a blank slate through and through. "Poor Things" is her saga of self-discovery, which is first done through the seeking of sensual pleasure and escape (this movie has many, many sex scenes), and then through a deeper understanding of identity and place in the world. Eventually Bella defies Godwin and heads off on a world tour with one of the great skeezy fops of 2020s cinema, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Ruffalo uses this bizarre antiquated English accent--it's either designed to show that Duncan is a fake Brit, or is simply odd beyond our ability to comprehend.
The film is structured like a 18th-century European novel of self-education, or as we would put it today, a coming-of-age story. Bella is such a newborn that she does not feel the need to conform to Victorian notions of womanhood. Her real innocence disregards the feigned innocence that patriarchal society demands of women, both then and now. Critic Keith Harris points out "Poor Things" things is the Fall of Man story but in reverse: Bella becomes a person through knowledge and sex--which she refers to as "furious jumping."
Yet "Poor Things" is not just the story of Bella's education, but our own. The film teaches the audience how to watch it. This is not a piece of avant-garde cinema, but it is brazenly weird beyond normie sensibility. Bella speaks in sentences which could only be assembled by a Martian who knew English but had never visited Earth: “I have adventured it and found nothing but sugar and violence.”
In its own way, this film is demonstration of the revolutionary possibility of mainstream art.
People tend to stick to environments they can choose and control. They live in fenced-off yards, with walls they built themselves. Competent art allows us to safely, vicariously cross those boundaries: what if I was a pirate? What if I was a spy?
Great art goes beyond this, though. Great art fiddles with those metaphorical TV knobs I mentioned above. The ending of "Return of the Jedi" messes with us because we're expecting Luke to kill Vader. We are surprised and moved when he refuses to fight, and entices Anakin towards redemption. That's George Lucas fiddling with the knob: what is expected? What is acceptable?
In filmmaking, some knobs are simple, like choices made about music or costuming or accent. Some knobs go deeper. They lead us to profound questions: This film is good in a different way than other good films I've seen--is it possible my beliefs about what makes a good movie are wrong? What does this film say about my moral notions? What does this film say about identity? Lanthimos is turning the deeper knobs.
Yet this alone would not be enough to recommend the film. There are unlikable movies that challenge us, that experiment and offend to serve a greater point, and there's a place for that. But "Poor Things" hits differently: I don't just respect it, I like it.
What saves “Poor Things” from over-cleverness is its heart. Below the river of idiosyncrasy is a real insight into the human condition, and how the intersection of identity, power, and sex shapes us--and every role is played by actors who understood the freaking assignment. If Frankenstein was a fairy tale princess. FURIOUS JUMPING.
