geezer cinema: poor things (yorgos lanthimos, 2023)

Emma Stone is a much bigger star than I realized. I'd seen six of her movies before Poor Things, and if none of them knocked me over, a few were OK. She has a Best Actress Oscar, she was the highest-paid actress in the world in 2017, and in perhaps the most indicative fact about her popularity, she recently hosted Saturday Night Live for the fifth time:

Poor Things is my third Yorgos Lanthimos film. I liked The Lobster OK, didn't much care for The Favourite. I looked forward to this movie thanks to its mostly positive reviews, and I was rewarded ... the is easily my favorite Lanthimos movie as well as my favorite Emma Stone movie.

Stone is the biggest reason for this. She takes a role that could simply be Oscar bait and makes something wonderful out of it. She plays Bella, the creation of a Frankenstein-like doctor, with a baby's brain inside an adult body. Over the course of the film, Bella's mind grows as her experiences grow, and Stone is spotless throughout, believable as a baby, believable as an adult, with the transition being properly gradual. (Being able to represent the various stages of Bella is the Oscar bait ... making them seem real is the true acting triumph.) Here, she discovers dancing, and her joy is felt by us in the audience, although, in a recurring trope of the film, the man she's with (Mark Ruffalo) tries to control her actions:

The connection to the original Frankenstein tale is clear, and in many ways, Poor Things plays like a feature-length extension of the scene in Bride of Frankenstein where the monster meets the friendly blind man. But Lanthimos (and writer Tony McNamara, and Alasdair Gray, who wrote the novel on which the film is based) is up to more than just paying homage. Bella blossoms, she confronts society and insists on being in command of her life and actions. She does many things we might find abusive (at one point, she becomes a prostitute to earn money), but always she makes her own choices about what she will do. This frustrates the men in her life, who all want to put her in a cage that they can control.

But the film pulls back a bit from making too large a statement. The men tell her that society won't accept her, but most of that society is actually charmed by her. Her behavior, shocking as it often is, is rarely chastised by the elite people she comes across. Thus, Poor Things is a crowd-pleaser, because we see our own pleasure mirrored in some of the characters in the film. Poor Things works as a critique of the patriarchy, but it falls short as a critique of society as a whole (even though Bella eventually adopts socialism).

There will be stiff competition for the Best Actress Oscar ... not only do we have excellent performances from the likes of Margot Robbie, Greta Lee, and Natalie Portman, but Lily Gladstone looks to be entering the Best Actress race despite having more of a supporting role (and Gladstone's may be the best performance by any actor this year). But Emma Stone deserves to be talked about in their company. Of what I have seen, Poor Things is one of the 10 best films of the years.

[Letterboxd list of my top 10 films of 2023]