The Paradoxical "Poor Things"
How could I continue my trend of feminist film critiques without tackling Lanthimos' latest, sensationally shot yet constantly missing the mark. Spoilers below!
Poor Things, much like a pouting puppy or an insecure girlfriend, demands to be loved— and when skimming the surface, you can’t help but give in. The delicious wit and orgasmic visuals of Lanthimos’ latest astound, every member of the cast and crew seem to have thrust their all forward to form an opus blanketed in the bizarre. The production team, facing stacked odds, play the role of the underdog: this lineup of majority men plan to make an undeniably feminist movie. They informed audiences as such with a trailer flaunting Emma Stone’s feelings of empowerment while starring as the titular poor thing, Bella Baxter. Lanthimos and co put up a solid fight, yet fall short of making up for the floppily feminist message. As a result, the movie winds up frustratingly contradictory: delightful yet disappointing, wonderfully performed but poorly put together. Your eyes plead with you to never stop watching, meanwhile your brain is begging you to watch a piece that lives up to the girl-power message it markets. A film built on a flawed foundation will inevitably fail its audience— the pleasure Lanthimos offers your senses a distraction, mull the movie over for long enough and that sensation quickly sours.
Creatively, the film is virtually flawless. Lanthimos’ eye for the unnatural shines through each shot. Deliberate and carefully crafted, his technique stands out as nothing short of masterful, from his lens selection (I’m personally fond of his fish-eye) to his slow and deliberate zooms. Each actor walks away a star in their own right. Emma Stone strikes as eclectically enrapturing, every bit of bluntness feels as sincere as Bella demands. Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn is just as delightful as he is diabolical or demented. His descent into maddening jealousy reminisces on Ryan Gosling’s Ken from earlier in the year. The two share a sass that diverts from the hyper masculine roles they’ve played in the past, a bit more flamboyance than filmmakers typically permit. Ruffalo’s strength lies in his short quips, he thrives when demanding Bella “shut the fuck up!” Margaret Qualley woos viewers despite lacking in screen time, and one cannot help but fall in love with Ramy Youssef’s shyly sweet Max McCandles.
The score especially shines— unsettling, yet containing a decidedly addicting allure. It leaves viewers craving the cacophony even after they’ve exited the theater, however an outside listen cannot fulfill that want. I once attempted to set the score as the background to my New York Times games, thinking its merit within the movie would equate to an enhanced puzzling experience. I was horrendously wrong, and only felt a sort of anxious fervor— thirty seconds had passed, and yet it seemed like a lifetime, all of my golden years spent on a Tuesday crossword (the second easiest puzzle of the week). Much like the experiments it accompanies, the brilliance of the score can only exist within the film. When introduced to the mundane world, the charm of its dissonant and fast-paced notes sour, demanding a more outlandish set of circumstances.
We begin in black and white, meandering around the menagerie created by Willam Defoe’s Godwin, or as our protagonist lovingly calls him, God. He bears an obvious resemblance to the biblical figure— Dafoe’s character specializes in experimentation, creating the grotesque out of the everyday. His latest experiment? The beautiful and seemingly stunted Bella, just as much as caged as his other creatures (a pig’s head on the body of a chicken, a goose waddling around on dog’s legs). Initially she lacks substance, stumbling from scene to scene, grunt after grunt punctuating her performance. The reasoning behind this reveals itself after half an hour spent puzzling: she behaves unlike a fully formed woman because she is not one, rather a baby’s brain inhabiting its mother’s body. Much like Frankenstein’s monster, an obvious inspiration behind the movie’s plot, God gifts her new life by reanimating her brain. This contention between mature body and child’s mind, or rather the poor handling of this nuance, lead to exploitation at the hands of men both fictional and actual.
Shortly after the reveal of Bella’s condition, she is swept away by the dastardly Wedderburn to see the world, which now teems with vibrant color. The production design, the elaborately built sets for every stop on the pair’s adventure, exhibit the bizarrely beautiful. Each familiar city becomes foreign, neon clouds pass through the frame as slow as molasses, populated with personalities as strange as the scars on Bella’s beloved God’s face. These surreal spots almost pass as an adequate distraction for the copious amounts of sex happening in the foreground.
I strongly believe a healthy medium must exist, that sex positivity is capable of on screen portrayal without plunging into exploitation. However, to extend that belief to Poor Things would involve ignoring the premise entirely— Bella Baxter, at least for the first forty-five or so minutes of the movie, lacks the capability of consenting to sex, much like a child. Her caretakers make this clear, the filmmakers make this clear: she is a child in a woman’s body, and consent is far more concerned with mental age, as physical, it depends on two informed parties. The movie opts to discard this inability to actually consent almost immediately as Wedderburn ravages her over and over. Her resulting pleasure seems to occupy the scene as the movie’s justification for this choice, as if to say “See! She’s okay with it, so it’s empowering,” but to accept this justification would be to say graphic sexual assault scenes have their place in cinema, an outlook I ferociously disagree with.
The sheer masses of men behind the camera are undoubtedly responsible for this choice. With the exception of Stone’s production credit, boys call the shots on Poor Things. This isn’t to say they fail in their roles— Lanthimos stuns as a director, consistently making daring choices that pay off and then some, and the cinematic choices made by Robbie Ryan as the director of photography make him a name worth remembering. Rather than failing themselves, they fail the women showing up to screenings, filling the theaters. They choose to tell a story that inherently touts feminism— cultural critic Roxane Gay defines a feminist piece as one “that illuminates some aspect of the female condition and/or offers some kind of imperative for change and/or makes a bold or unapologetic political statement in the best interests of women,” which Poor Things undoubtedly attempts. However, by choosing to leave women out of the decision-making process of this production, they counteract their own message, they compromise the best interests of women.
Bella barges her way through the world on her odyssey from experiment to woman, paving her path with broken-hearted lovers, half-chewed food, and experiences gained regardless of consequence. There exists a handful of men who take turns making her play the puppet, each of which watch her clip their strings in favor of her own autonomy. Though she loves McCandles she does not marry, though she does not her former husband Alfie Blessington she follows him regardless as he may have use in the answering of her questions. Her actions all spawn from within, her wants, once established, refused to compromise themselves for the feeble feelings of some guy. Except, she lives to be at the whim of man, she exists for a team of men to limit her to their perspective.
Poor Things would easily conquer even Barbie for the title of “2023’s Most Feminist Flick,” if Lanthimos had just strayed from his usual formula and hired a woman to man the screenplay. Instead, the script, already based on a male authored book, was penned by his collaborator on The Favourite, Tony McNamara. McNamara seemingly stakes his career on his ability to tell a female-centric story, clear from his work with Lanthimos to The Great, a TV show centered around monarch Catherine the Great that he himself created. There no longer exists a need for men to tell these stories, when heaps and hoards of women boast qualifications to write their own narrative. Poor Things cannot possibly scrub itself of the male influence— the story was developed by a man, his fingerprints visible in every plot point, every character, every thrust into poor Bella Baxter. However, if the almighty Lanthimos permitted a woman to translate the narrative from page to screen, she’d adeptly spot the more male-dominated take on “feminist” and respin it. Perhaps this version would be a world more worthy of Bella’s inhabitance.