Poor Things is one of the ten movies nominated for Best Picture and this year’s Academy Awards. This is my spoiler free review.
My wife and I went to see this film only recently. We had tried a few times before but something always came up. For a while it just felt like it wasn’t supposed to be. But we finally put our feet down and, thankfully, no appointments or anything else got in the way.
For the first half hour of this two hour and twenty-one minute movie, I had wondered what the hell I got myself into. It was mad like a hatter. This felt like a super avant-garde movie that was trying to be so nonsensical that it would be considered “art.” But as the movie went on, not only did the plot blossom, but everything else did as well. The reason for the odd and somewhat startling beginning made sense. The heavy use of the 8mm fisheye lens and the off-putting soundtrack that sounded like cat humping a violin all came into focus.
Poor Things is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos who brought us such cerebral offerings as The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Lobster. He is one of those directors who gets their name thrown all over a trailer. “Brought to you by visionary director Yorgos Lanthimos,” and your average movie goer says “who?” But your cinephiles push their Buddy Holly hipster glasses up the bridge of their nose and say, “oh yes, I’m a fan of his work.” Okay, enough making fun of cinephiles though, yes, I am one.
This stars Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, and Ramy Youssef. It’s also nominated for 11 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actress (Stone), Best Supporting Actor (Ruffalo), and Best Director (Lanthimos).
So what was I saying earlier? Oh yes. The first half hour had me on edge, but not for any sort of good reason. I was scared I was going to have to sit and watch almost two and a half hours of garbage. I was prepared to watch a film with talented actors that looked beautiful but lacked any sort of substance.
As the movie went on it all started to come together. I understood why the opening was so jarring. I understood why parts were in black and white and other parts in color. I understood the use of the fisheye lens and the odd musical score. I got it. Lanthimos is a mad genius and had this planned out from the very first scene.
There were a few scenes that had me worried but for other reasons. I was scared that this was going to be a creepy film. We ARE talking about a woman with the intellect of a child that has two fully cognitive grown men lusting after her. Do you see how that could have very easily been creepy?
So what’s this movie actually about? I’m so glad you asked almost five hundred words into this blog post. This movie follows Bella Baxter (Stone), a woman brought back to life by a Frankenstein adjacent doctor named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Dafoe), and how she relearns what it means to be human and what she wants out of life.
This film follows Bella Baxter as she goes out into the world and learns what it means to not only be human, but what makes her happy. At first what makes her happy is the simple carnal pleasures of life. Food and Sex, but not necessarily in that order. As she meets more people, she grows and as she does, everything in the movie from her dialogue to the cinematography evolves with her. By the end of the film the fisheye lens is a distant memory and the off-putting screeching violins are gone. The movie started chaotic because Bella was chaotic.
What’s most impressive and what earned Stone the Oscar nomination was that Bella’s transformation is very subtle. Just like you can’t say where one color in a rainbow ends and another starts, you can’t definitively say when she stops talking like a child or walking like a drunk stork. By the end of the film I was marveling at her and realizing that she changed right before my eyes and I couldn’t point to a single scene and say “there, that’s where it happened.”
This movie takes us from city to city and it was when she was in Lisbon, I believe, that I commented to my wife that this film looked like Wes Anderson and Tim Burton had a baby, then that baby grew up, tried drugs for the first time, and made a movie. The color palate gave me the Wes Anderson vibes and the fact that the sets looked like they could also be a hand painted community theater production gave me the feeling of Tim Burton.
But as much as I did enjoy this movie, especially after I saw where it was going, there were still issues to be had. I felt like each part of the film went on for too long. This could have easily been a two hour movie and nothing would have been lost. Each part of Bella’s adventure was the tiniest bit bloated and a little could have been taken out to tighten everything up. The cruise ship and Marseilles were the two parts that really could have had time shaved off.
Other than feeling a little too long, this was a well done movie. It made think and I greatly appreciated the transformation of Bella Swan, sorry, Bella Baxter. She was a different person from the beginning of the film and she earned every small changed that added up to her eventual metamorphosis.
Poor Things is critically acclaimed for a reason and though I typically hate Rotten Tomatoes, the scores are a pretty good metric. 92% for critics and 79% for the audience. So basically a low A- for a cinephile and a C+ for the layman movie goer.
As for me? This was a good time and while I had a lot of positive things to say about it, I’m not sure if I’ll ever watch this again. It’s just not one of those films that asks to be rewatched. Watch it once. Enjoy it. And move on.
Poor Things gets an 8.5 out of 11