Supported by
‘Poor Things’ Review: Monster Mash
Emma Stone runs amok with Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe in Yorgos Lanthimos’s off-key Victorian-era riff on “Frankenstein.”
transcript
‘Poor Things’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The director Yorgos Lanthimos narrates a sequence from the film in which the characters played by Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo share a dance.
“I’m Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of ‘Poor Things.’” “Understand we never lived outside God’s house.” “What?” “So Bella’s so much to discover. And your sad face makes me discover angry feelings for you.” “This is a scene that takes place in a restaurant in Lisbon, where Bella Baxter and Duncan, played by Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo, are having dinner. And there’s other people dancing. During that, the music attracts Bella, and just instinctively, gets up and starts wanting to join the dance. It’s a very funny, awkward, physical situation where Bella has never really danced before, and it’s very intuitive, what she does. He’s not a good dancer. He’s trying to keep up with her. We had a lot of help from Constanza Macras, who did the choreography. So the dance, because she’s done it for the first time, it just felt like it should be something quite primitive, slightly baby-like, but then it quickly develops into something that she wants to take hold of and lose control of her self. And Mark, in real life, is also not a great dancer. And on the other hand, Emma is a really good dancer, so we kind of used that dynamic as we were building the choreography. And it actually became funnier than what we thought.” “What do you keep doing that for?” “A man over there repeated blinks at me. I blink back for polite, I think.” [MUSIC PLAYING]
“Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s visually sumptuous and gleefully clever new movie, is so very pleased with itself that it makes a review seem superfluous — well, almost. A phantasmagoric take on the classic Frankenstein story garnished with sour laughs, it tracks the adventures of Bella (Emma Stone), a strange Victorian woman with a childish temperament who has a freakish history, peculiar habits, bizarre surroundings and an attentive if altogether unusual guardian, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe).
Baxter is a renowned, extravagantly unorthodox scientist whose fondness for slicing and dicing the living and the dead makes him seem more like a bespoke butcher. Together with Bella, a maid and a menagerie of his repulsive animal experiments, he lives in an opulently appointed London mansion filled with curiosities that houses a lab in its lower depths. There, he dissects corpses to read their secrets, and a giddy Bella sometimes joins in the fun. When a visitor drops by, Baxter admits that Bella, too, is an experiment, and soon the truth comes out: After finding her corpse, he reanimated her by swapping out her brain for that of a fetus.
Certainly Bella appears full grown from stem to stern, with a curtain of dark, severely parted hair that cascades down her back. Yet there’s an obvious, unsettling disconnect between her body and brain. At times her syntax and lurching bring to mind a toddler — Stone gives Bella the herky-jerky instability of a child finding her sea legs — though in moments she also suggests a damaged animatronic doll. Bella is messy, curious, impolite, violent: Right after she meets a stranger, Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef), she smacks him for no evident reason. Bella, you see, is very much a work in progress. She’s monstrous; she’s also a woman.
Written by Tony McNamara and adapted from the 1992 Alasdair Gray novel of the same title, “Poor Things” gets its weird on from the get-go. Working in a flamboyantly expressive key, Lanthimos deploys all the elements at his disposal — prosthetics, costumes, meticulous production design and pushily showboating cinematography — to create a familiar yet alien world of calculated dissonance. Baxter, for one, is a crazy quilt of horror, much like Frankenstein’s monster. The child of a scientific madman who experimented on him, he has a face that looks like it was chopped into ragged pieces and then stitched back together by a nearsighted tailor. The parts don’t fit, but they don’t fit with exacting precision.
Bella does grow and her fortunes also change courtesy of two suitors: the earnest and toadying McCandless, whom Baxter hires to document her development, and an oily, smooth-talking huckster with nimble fingers, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). After Duncan tickles her fancy (and other parts), Bella sets off with him across land and sea in an episodic adventure that expands her horizons and revs up the story in earnest. She learns about the world’s pleasures and cruelties, and in classic Bildungsroman fashion develops intellectually and morally (kind of). She converses in complete sentences, reads Emerson and meets a mischievous dowager (Hanna Schygulla) and her jaded companion (Jerrod Carmichael).
Advertisement