more like good things
Is Emma Stone's 'Poor Things' A Front-Runner For Best Picture This Year? Here's What The Reviews Say
You might not know Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos by name (unless you're super cool, congrats), but you've heard of his work before. After breaking out with the deranged family drama "Dogtooth," he gave us banger after banger with films like "The Lobster," "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" and "The Favourite."
He's back with an adaptation of acclaimed novel "Poor Things," and the reviews are all positively glowing. So much so, this has the feel of a real Oscars contender.
The film premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival (that's where these reviews came from), and will come out in theaters on December 8, 2023. It stars Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael, Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley and Kathryn Hunter. Here's what critics have to say about the film.
The premise
Ever since breaking through internationally with "Dogtooth" in 2009, Yorgos Lanthimos has been making uniquely strange films. But there's strange, and then there’s the nonstop bonkers brilliance of "Poor Things," an audaciously extravagant adaptation of revered Scottish writer Alasdair Gray's novel, spun out by the Greek director and his screenwriter, Tony McNamara, into a picaresque feminist Candide. Stuffed with rude delights, spry wit, radical fantasy and breathtaking design elements, the movie is a feast. And Emma Stone gorges on it in a fearless performance that traces an expansive arc most actors could only dream about.
An "Alice in Wonderland" reanimated on the operating table of eccentric scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) in a highly theatricalized version of Victorian London, Bella evolves in this subversive twist on Mary Shelley from a Frankenstein experiment with — literally — the mind of an infant into an inquisitive girl with a hunger for sex and adventure, then finally, a fiercely spirited, independent woman. She throws off the constraints of "polite" society to take charge of her desires, her body and her identity as a fully formed free thinker who refuses to be any man's territory to be conquered.
Alasdair Gray's 1992 comic novel "Poor Things" is a work of peculiar, obsessive genius, a book-within-a-book-within-a-book that satirizes Victorian Britain's seemingly conflicting preoccupations with decorum and grotesquerie, all while teasing the modern reader's own tabloid-trained taste for the lurid. In an adaptation at once liberal and faithful to the novel's fastidious construction, unhinged humor and revolting body horror, Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara (whose lascivious wit was so integral to the success of their previous collaboration "The Favourite") have shed its ornate literary affectations — and, in a move that may infuriate some Gray loyalists, its specific Scottish burr — without simplifying the plunging philosophical questions contained within its jokery. What makes a life, or indeed a human? Who gets to give life and take it away? Is adult behavior just learned repression? And how do they make the pastry so crisp?
It's stunning, and raunchy
Boldly realized with taffy-colored production design, brain-bending sets stuffed with enough easter egg unrealities to fill the most difficult 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and wildly over-the-top Victorian costumes that look as if made by a schizoid seamstress on too many tabs of acid, "Poor Things" is also hysterically funny and the raunchiest movie you're likely to see all year.
A more significant change is that the tone is far more fantastical than it is in the novel. Gray balanced the strangeness of his gothic yarn with deeply researched descriptions of the injustices of 19th-Century society, and that's what gave the book much of its ironic humor and satirical power. Lanthimos, on the other hand, has transplanted "Poor Things" to a steam-punk wonderland of garish colors, masked-ball costumes, squawking music, and obviously artificial, picture-book backgrounds: imagine a Terry Gilliam film multiplied by a Wes Anderson film and you'll have some idea of the lavish freakishness in store. In the process, the narrative loses some of its emotion and a lot of its politics. Traces of Gray's views on feminism and socialism are still visible, but it can be hard to spot them amid the endless sex scenes and the retina-scorching production design.
Expect killer performances
But, as with "The Favourite," selling this heightened world comes down to the performances. Stone aces a cut-glass English accent, as well as the evolution of a woman who goes from being a rapacious consumer of experience (booze, sex, cakes, dancing) to someone who lives on her own terms, sets her own social mores, and determines her place within society. Though the latter tries to subject Bella to the male gaze, she resists via her inability to feel humiliation or shame. She approaches fashion, sex, conscience and charity all in the same way: whatever works for her.
Stone has sturdy support from her costars. Dafoe remains a master of eccentricity, while Youssef is winsome, sincere but not saintly. Arriving late in the picture, Christopher Abbott does an appropriately slimy villain turn and the great Kathryn Hunter is a prickly mix of motherly and menacing as a heavily tattooed Parisienne madam. Only Mark Ruffalo, as a sleazy hustler who sweeps Bella off her feet (as much as she can be swept; she mostly just enjoys the sex), overdoes it, tipping the scales toward daffy farce.
What makes "Poor Things" such a knee-slapper, despite the dourness at its core, is Stone's off-the-wall performance, at first, as an overgrown baby, and then as a woman with no filter, whose frank and logistical thinking irks not only the men around her but "polite society" at large. While there's certainly no real-world equivalent to describe Bella — the process by which she was born is pure science fantasy — it's hard not to find hints of reality within the way Stone plays her, lacing each of her words and observations with a cutting (if naive) frankness.
Also, expect a lot of fish-eye lensing
As with "The Favourite," Lanthimos makes extensive use of fish-eye lenses. Here, the effect is to beckon you into a giant Victorian goldfish bowl that he fills with wonder and weirdness. A horse-drawn trap turns in the street to reveal a fake horse's head at the front and a chugging engine behind.
"Poor Things" bursts with an absurd perversity that is riotously fun to watch. But only because such provocation is not merely for the sake of itself. The movie also possesses a deep heart (this is Lanthimos's most earnest and romantic picture to date), driven by its love for its unique central character and her quest to live life precisely as she sees fit, expectations and manners be damned. The world here is not the most traditional of Victorian settings, but one more fantastical with pink and purple cotton candy skies and looming, lavish sets that establish the tone of the larger-than-life story. There are times when the more formal filmmaking choices, such as a frequent use of fisheye lenses, feel like gilding the lily, but that's a minor quibble.
Apparently it's like 'Barbie'?!?!
Somewhat surprisingly, "Poor Things" feels like it is in conversation with Greta Gerwig's "Barbie," right down to Stone's robotic, doll-like physique. Where "Barbie" feels shallow and tentative in its understanding of what it means to physically grow up, "Poor Things" is bold and radically (at times uncomfortably) honest. It will satisfy fans of Lanthimos's previous work and perhaps win over new viewers who are desperate to engage in the kind of coming-of-age stories that propel the genre forward.
TL;DR
Expect an Academy Award deluge.
Everything in it — every frame, every image, every joke, every performance — gets a gasp of excitement.
Greek weird wave director Yorgos Lanthimos hits his stride with his strangest yet most deeply satisfying comedy fable yet.
"Poor Things" is a fantastical observation of how sin seeps into the once tough shell of youthful jubilation.
