Artwork by Michael DiMilo
The Wide Wild World: Film Review of Poor Things
By Geoff Carter
The films of Yorgos Lanthimos tiptoe the blurry lines between fantasy and reality as they explore the tenuous relationships between subjectivity, reality, and existentialism. They are beautiful, but anything but typical. His films The Lobster, The Killing of Sacred Deer, and The Favourite explore, through varying degrees of the fantastic and surreal, how societal expectations—and ambitions—are colored by the inner lives of their characters.
His latest film, Poor Things, continues in this vein of examining human psychology through the lens of subjective imagination. In this project, the world of the film is viewed through the eyes of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), an unusual young woman whose lack of speech, social graces, coordination, and mannerisms are more typical of a child. She stomps through the house, breaking china, wetting herself, acting exactly like a five-foot something toddler.
Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), an esteemed surgeon known for his radical experiments, is her kindly and overindulgent guardian. Results of his work are everywhere. Chickens with pig’s heads and a goat with a duck’s head—along with Bella—wander aimlessly throughout the grand mansion. The doctor himself is hideously scarred. He tells his student and assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youseff) they are the results of cruel experiments his father performed on him. The good doctor is sanguine about his dad’s handiwork, always defending their value to science and shrugging off their effects on him.
Baxter enlists Max to monitor the academic and social progress of Bella, his latest experiment. Max takes on the task even though Baxter refuses to reveal the nature of Bella’s condition and watches her language and social skills develop rapidly. Unable to contain his curiosity, Max discovers that Bella is the product of a brain transplant. After he recovered the body of a pregnant suicide, Dr. Baxter transplanted tbe fetus’ brain into her mother’s body. Although childlike, Bella has an insatiable curiosity which is whetted when she meets Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a debauched and sleazy lawyer who persuades her to run off with him. Although Baxter had previously forbidden Bella to leave, he tacitly allows Wedderburn to abscond with her even she and Max have become engaged.
And so begins a grand adventure for the young and brashly curious Bella, hungry for knowledge of the wide wide world. As the pair travels to Lisbon, the film changes from black and white to color as the landscapes and set pieces become beautifully contrived and fantastically colored landscapes. It becomes obvious that Duncan and Bella are not traveling through any sort of objective reality. They are moving through the fantasia built in a (emotionally) young girl’s imagination. From impossibly beautiful sunsets to airborne cable cars to a ship that looks as if it came straight out of a Peter Max painting, Lanthimos externalizes Bella’s subjective world—the sources of which become evident during the closing credits,
While in Lisbon, Bella discovers oysters on the half-shell, dancing (performed in her own singular way), tries to make friends (but is overridden by Duncan), and dives headlong into the pleasures of the flesh. Unencumbered by societal expectations—or even the most basic of manners—Bella begins to understand the subtleties of the world without filters or preconceptions. She has no prejudices or expectations; she simply takes the world as it comes. As Bella is exposed to the world—especially from books—her outlook becomes increasingly sophisticated and insightful. Afraid (rightly so) that she is growing bored of him, Duncan tries to control her. When she donates all his money to the poor, leaving him penniless, the two end up destitute in Paris, where after weighing the advantages of financial independence, Bella decides to become a prostitute. Disgusted, Duncan Wedderburn leaves Bella (much to her relief).
She starts taking classes and befriends Toinette (Suzy Bemba) and comes under the guidance of Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter). Bella then articulates her desire to become a doctor like Godwin Baxter, the man she calls “God”.
After creating Felicity (Margaret Qualley), another young woman in the same mold as Bella, Baxter discovers he is terminally ill and dispatches Max to find Bella and bring her back. He eventually does find her, and so Bella returns to see her mentor one last time. The plot takes a few more unexpected—and delightful—turns before coming to its fitting conclusion.
The plot, however, is secondary to the film’s examination of psychology of power, sexuality, and gender. Seeing the oppression of women through the fresh eyes, the tabula rasa, of Bella’s young and eager mind allows the viewer to strip away the conventions of ingrained behaviors. Bella is a young woman but does not act like one. She is as assertive and bold and intelligent as any man. She refuses to be subjugated. This thematic is curiously—and coincidentally—similar to the year’s big hit, Barbie. Both feature marginalized women who assert themselves as individuals in oppressive patriarchies.
Poor Things is a fascinating blend of science fiction (Frankenstein), fantasy (Edward Scissorhands), and feminist doctrine (Barbie). At the beginning of the film, it seems as if we might have seen this film before, but it transcends its predecessors. Parts of it, like the surgically altered animals, are darkly comic. Other parts are deeply moving. Lanthimos has created a world that resonates with wonder, heartbreak, ecstasy, and horror. It is—in almost every sense—a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, the triumphant emergence of a woman independent of all societal pressures and expectations, an individual framed only by her own judgement and conscience.
Emma Stone’s performance as Bella is an incredibly well-measured and calibrated characterization spanning an entire childhood and adolescence within the span of the film. She evolves from a stomping and spoiled toddler into a thoughtful, compassionate, and independent young woman. Stone conveys Bella’s every experience, from her sense of wonder and exaltation as she discovers and begins to understand the world around her to the moment she begins to understand the cruelty, injustice, and suffering inherent in all existence, when her wonder turns to anger, indignation, and then resolution. It is a fearless journey of awakening navigated through Bella’s fantastic existential growth that Stone renders in Bella. She makes the unbelievable believable.
The supporting cast also hand in bravura performances. Ruffalo’s Wedderburn is a sly scoundrel whose pompous and overbearing preening is as hilarious as it is pathetic. Dafoe’s Baxter’s singular focus and oddly perverse experiments are at first very odd and somewhat gruesome, but later, as we discover the circumstances of his own upbringing, Baxter becomes sympathetic and even an object of gentle pity. All the performances are excellent.
Poor Things is about self-discovery, control, possession, love, and growing up. It is a feminist declaration. It is a dark, dark comedy, but above all, it is a beautifully rendered vision of what the wide wild world looks like through the eyes of a child, and what it could be for all of us.