Chicago International Film Festival 2023 Review: Poor Things
Weird music! Bizarre dancing! A motorcar carriage with a horse head! Outlandish characters, both male and female! And all with a revolutionary spirit. Yes, Yorgos Lanthimos is the fairy tale maestro we not only want, but need. And “Poor Things” is what you get when the industry actually does a good thing and lets the director of enjoyably freakish odysseys like “The Lobster” and “The Favourite” off the leash.
Lanthimos is one of the few filmmakers working today of whom it can honestly be stated that such rarely bestowed creative freedom could result in nearly anything. In this case, it’s a darkly funny fable and more unexpectedly, a balm for our troubled world, where even stereotypes get a refresher, and a freer, more European approach to sexuality isn’t defined by the waist down, where thinking is just as essential as getting it on, even for women.
It wouldn’t have come off at all had “Poor Things” not also been a collaborative project with the movie’s lead Emma Stone, whose contributions are summed up in cold industry terms with a producer credit. Her previous work with Lanthimos has led to this, where she plays a woman named Bella who is driven to suicide by the patriarchy (what else?), only to be resurrected by a benevolently mad scientist played by Willem Dafoe with the brain of the fetus she was pregnant with.
Read it again, look things up, do what you need to do. I’ll wait. Dafoe’s moniker also happens to be God, which may seem far too submissive in its commentary on the state of things if this brilliant, progressive madman didn’t go by Godwin Baxter. Bella is expectedly full of innocence and whimsy, beautiful and unaware of it, protected and confined by Godwin and his assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) so her purity won’t be tainted by their staid, stuffy Victorian society.
Before you can say Born Sexy Yesterday however, Bella shatters it all by expressing her desires, much to the chagrin of her well-meaning self-appointed guardians, even demanding her own “grand adventure” shortly after she meets Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo taking his own uncharacteristically smarmy departure from his usual affability), departing on a hedonistic odyssey across the world. You’d have to see “Poor Things” to believe where this leads Bella, but for now she goes from fantasy object to fully realized being, quickly outpacing all the men who attempt to form and possess her in one way or another.
That it all works is due to the marvelous way Stone too is allowed to unleash her own creative energy, with Bella growing from childlike innocent to a sexual, then deeply conscious intellectual being who manages to face her trauma and the knowledge of how deeply terrible the world around her is with strength, humor, and later, wisdom. She anchors the film even when it lingers too long on one of the many worlds the movie explores. Her outfits are also practically characters in themselves, with costume designer Holly Waddington hopefully raking in all the awards for how she uniquely provides visual evidence of Bella’s growth in a fashion that would make Sofia Coppola proud…if she took her sartorial cues from Frankenstein, German Expressionism, and David Lynch.
Trust Lanthimos to make a film where the cast prepped by going to mortician school. Yet for all the delightful derangement, there’s a refreshing lack of resignation, with all those who should be various objects of pity returning the gaze of those who belong to that lauded polite society and laughingly opting out. With such a progressive bubble to serve for a home, who wouldn’t?
Grade: A-
