Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have always been divisive, with films like Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer either completely working for people (like me) or falling completely flat on their deadpan faces for others. Then The Favourite came out and garnered a lot of awards attention (Olivia Colman won Best Actress and the film was nominated in nearly every major category). While The Favourite has its odd moments, it’s positively mainstream for a Lanthimos movie, which is why it disappointed me. I was afraid that Lanthimos had lost his weird edge. Then Poor Things kicked in the door holding a chicken dog, peed on the floor, tried to punch a baby, and let out a noxious burp bubble into the air.
In other words, Poor Things is wildly strange all around. It’s also the funniest, most well-acted, and inventive film of the year. (It’s also my personal favorite, and it won Best Picture from the Indiana Film Journalists Association.)
Poor Things is hard to summarize, but here goes: Emma Stone plays Bella, a Frankenstein’s Monster-ish creation of scientist Baxter (Willem Dafoe). She begins the movie as an adult with the mind of a baby, but as she matures at a rapid rate, she decides to see the world with one of the best cinematic rapscallions of all time in Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, in a shockingly funny performance). Bella sees the best and worst of the world, and it’s all presented in fantastical, horrible, and hilarious ways.
I typically do not like writing plot summaries (you can always just Google it or watch a trailer or something), but I liked the challenge of it for this one since I liked it so much. This movie simply works on every level for me in a way that I haven’t felt since Stanley Kubrick’s films (more on that later).
The writing (Tony McNamara, adapting the novel by Alasdair Gray) is the standout element, as the entire film is quotable. It’s funny, but the straightforward, child-like dialogue of Bella also points out many of the ridiculous elements of humanity. And while it’s all quirky and funny, I still cared about most of the characters, though they could be framed as villains in other films (especially Dafoe’s character).
It takes skill to deliver the funniest lines of the script, especially in Lanthimos’s signature tone. And Emma Stone is perfect. She has to play an adult baby, a prostitute, and a scientist all in one role. Her performance as an adult baby alone is adwards-worthy, the rest is just a bonus. And Mark Ruffalo is an amazing foil to her. It’s funny when he just goes along with Bella’s oddness, but it’s the best when she finally breaks him, causing him wonder, “What the fuck are you talking about?” multiple times throughout. His transformation throughout the film is equally impressive and amusing.
The writing and acting are so great in this film, it almost seems to be a waste that the music and production design are so unique, as well, because they are nearly an afterthought when they would be the standouts in other, weaker films. The discordant score captures the unsettling mood of each scene. And the creatures (what other film has a chicken dog walking around with no one talking about it?) and set decoration complete the picture by creating a world that is recognizable but also fantastical.
All of this is enough to make this one of my favorite movies in recent years. But it’s the Kubrickian element that I think will cement this among my all-time favorite films. Lanthimos is no stranger to the Kubrick comparison. Anyone who uses deadpan humor, tracking shots, and slow zooms gets compared to Kubrick at some point. This is why I usually don’t like calling things Kubrickian these days. While Poor Things does have all those Kubrick-like elements, I label it as Kubrickian for what it represents in Lanthimos’s career arc.
Poor Things isn’t actually similar, story-wise, to anything Kubrick would make. But it is the kind of movie he would make. Kubrick, while toiling around in similar thematic areas with his films, never tried to make the same film twice. And Lanthimos appears to be on that same track. The fact that I didn’t love The Favourite now seems like a good thing. If he kept making movies like The Lobster over and over, it would get tiring immediately. To go from Sacred Deer to The Favourite to Poor Things shows a willingness to go to new, interesting places, much like how Kubrick could go from Barry Lyndon to The Shining to Full Metal Jacket. The style may be similar, but the content shows a desire to keep things interesting. And for Lanthimos, that also means getting very weird sometimes, and that works for me.
Random Thoughts
I only focused on Stone and Ruffalo, but truly every performance in this is great. Dafoe is amazing, of course, and Ramy Youssef has many great moments reacting to Dafoe’s craziness.
This is a gloriously demented mashup of Benjamin Button, Jack, and Forrest Gump.
“Fate had brought me a dead body and a live infant. It was obvious.”
“It…was?”
“She grabbed my hairy business!”
“I was chloroforming goats all morning. I may have ingested too much.”
Lanthimos is truly like Kubrick. It’s not just that their films share some superficial similarities, it’s the tone in which they are made. This very much strikes me as the type of film Kubrick would make if he were still alive.
I worry myself in typing this, but Yorgos Lanthimos gets me.
I am so happy to live in a world in which a company is willing to give this lunatic a lot of money to make hilarious shit like this, which is a film that dares to ask, “What if Dr. Frankenstein was good at his job?”
The segment of her just wanting to eat, drink, and fuck reminded me of when Bender became a human on Futurama.
I never knew I needed to hear Mark Ruffalo say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” in a British accent.
“Hope is smashable. Realism is not.”
Usually, I think movies don’t justify their length, but I could watch Emma Stone break down situations in a deadpan manner for five hours, at least. My favorite was her working out how it made sense to start working in a Parisian brothel.
Her first customer kind of looks like Will Forte from the plane sketch in I Think You Should Leave.
“Hence, I seek employment at your musty-smelling establishment of good-time fornication.”
“She is no different to the chicken dog.”
“He has cancer, you fucking idiot.”
This is the most exciting character Ruffalo has played in years, maybe ever.
