Emma Stone degrades herself in Poor Things, a feminist freakshow fantasy that proves to be nothing more than a wacked-out version of a 1970s erotic soft-porn film disguised as a commentary on sexual liberation.
To label the films of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos as bizarre would be an understatement. A vital part of the postmodern Greek Weird Wave, Lanthimos has somehow become the darling of Hollywood with Poor Things his second big studio picture to receive sizable awards acclaim. While previous film The Favourite successfully contained Lanthimos’ more bizarre filmmaking instincts to make for an unconventional yet digestible period movie, Poor Things features Lanthimos flying his freak flag fly to depraved, at times disgusting, and often eye-rolling results.
Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things stars Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a once dead aristocrat who is reanimated with the brain of her unborn child. Her “creator”, the heavily disfigured Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) allows the rapidly maturing Bella to develop her own emotional and moral faculties through experience and experimentation, especially regarding sex. This leads to travelling the world with unscrupulous attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) whose own penchant for excess withers in the presence of an unchained Bella and her insatiable, twisted appetite.
Lanthimos takes a surreal approach to the world-building of Poor Things beyond the vestiges of post-modern shite. Victorian-era period dressing and steam-punk flourishes combine in a madman’s vision of a world that is ugly in its gaudy interpretation of creation akin to a child’s vomit after eating a bucket of candyfloss.
Mark Ruffalo’s penchant to go over-the-top is well utilised in his portrayal of an egotistical brute, Ruffalo’s facial expressions perhaps the best thing about Poor Things. Willem Dafoe, meanwhile, adds another name to his collection of bizarre characters, with his disfigured madman doctor who is constantly referred to as “God” constantly advocating for logic and science while reshaping the world with his twisted experiments.
Cue Emma Stone. Where many have declared Stone’s performance as Bella Baxter to be one of the years’ best, it should instead be viewed as a high-risk yet shallow effort in which Stone degrades herself to playing soft-porn actress for the sake of a pro-feminist fantasy that, ironically, is created by men. A segment in Poor Things in which Bella becomes a sex-worker is straight out of a “Dear Penthouse” letter, so transparent are its motivations.
At times evoking Jodie Foster’s Oscar-hunting performance in Nell in her portrayal of an often-naked simpleton, what Stone as Bella Baxter truly represents is an inversion of the Disney princess. Instead of love, purity, and goodness as her attributes, though, Bella is a creature in which pleasure, temptation, and selfishness is the onus in a coming-of-age story that is all excess and no substance.
Lanthimos clearly wants to push boundaries with his work, and such approach in artistic expression is all well and good. Yet to label Poor Things anything other than arthouse trash is being charitable.
