Poor Things

Poor Things

Director ~ Yorgos Lanthimos

Writers ~ Tony McNamaram, Alasdair Gray

2023, Ireland-UK-USA-Hungary

Stars ~ Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe

Like ‘Barbie’ for Goths and Tim Burton fans, ‘Poor Things’ is similarly a tale of gender existentialism, of a woman finding her place in a patriarchal world. It also reminded me a little of Ransom Riggs’ appropriating old photographs to generate a narrative for ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ and the work of Walter Potter. It has excellent Bafta award- winning set design by Shona Heath, James Price and Zsuzsa Mihalek, a brilliantly wonky score by Jerskin Fendric, and is afflicted with fish-eye lens. If at first it seems dangerously close to a male fantasy of creating and maltreating a child-woman, it soon becomes apparent that this is not a ‘Weird Science’ fantasy but more musing on nature and nurture.

 

Dr Godwin Baxter (yeh yeh: God.) makes Bella Baxter, Frankenstein style, utilising a suicide victim, but it is evidently more interested in the creation of a daughter-figure rather than the impulses of a dirty old man. In fact, the film walks this fine line deftly until Bella’s curiosity is insatiable and she is able to assert herself. And these are not men to hold her back. As an examination of Bella’s self-discovery, it never allows her to be a victim even when she chooses prostitution as an option to maintain freedom. Her tale is just blithely stomping through patriarchy and class and blithely not acknowledging their attacks on her curiosity, whether carnal or intellectual (although we get more of the former demonstrated rather than the latter). Her tale is not one of overcoming suffering and abuse; we have that in Godwin’s hints of his childhood.

I am aware of critical heralding of Emma Stone’s Bafta Award-winning performance and have heard anecdotally how it annoyed others. She certainly gives it her all as she stomps and furious jumps her way through experience and naïveté in a manner more defiant than innocent. But it is Mark Ruffalo’s turn as a conceited lothario that surely steals the show as he goes from cocksure seducer to broken man in Bella’s wake. Their dance scene is a highlight.

There is of course a lot absent from the novel – Scottish politics for one; faux-Victorian London in place of Glasgow* – and the longer the film goes on it surely loses its argument for its length. It feels an act too long and Bella’s conclusions get increasingly muddled. The most glaring moral failing is that Bella discovered and melted down over class guilt of recognising poverty and yet the film achieves her happy ending by sidestepping any awareness she has developed and leaves her lounging wealthily in an English garden, blissfully privileged and ignoring the truths that made her so outraged. (This is not the same as the book.)

There is black humour, of course, but the tone here is more in the amusing absurdity of Godwin burping gigantic bubbles at dinner. It is not nearly as acerbic and finely tuned as ‘The Favourite’ ~ another Tony McNamara script ~ but perhaps Lanthimos has never worn comedy so clearly on his sleeve. Or rejected the dark comedic potential of cruelty so readily, for that is not Bella’s way. Danny Leigh writes, “Like The Favourite, his new film comes to feel like a costume drama for an age that thinks itself above costume dramas.” Yes, but this is a fantasia and just falls short of steampunk; it is not so much a metafiction commenting upon itself rather than a series of amusements full of fantastical and/or incongruous detail.

It’s a heady confection whose oddness is always engaging, and yet there is the sense that this is less than the sum of its considerable parts. Or that its goofiness falls just short of greatness. Perhaps the gleeful chaos of this picaresque bildungsroman achieves more diversion than conclusion. Perhaps a near miss, then, but the aesthetic and the picaresque chaos of Bella’s self-discovery offers many treats, not to mention a widening of Lanthimos’ range.

 

·         * In his ‘Little White Lies’ interview (No. 101 Dec ‘23/Jan’24), Lanthimos talks of how the Scottish element of the novel felt like another book, and so they focused on Bella. This also led to the change of ending. Regarding the change to London, Lanthimos says that, “Well, I think Alasdair probably wouldn’t be very happy about that, because he was a very proud Scotsman.”