Film Reviews: The Absurd Vulgarity and Unrelenting Patriarchy of "Poor Things"
Yorgos Lanthimos' film masquerades as a feminist Frankenstein but is, in actuality, quite the opposite.
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Warning: Spoilers ahead!
Let me start out by saying that I loved Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, which I thought was a sublimely ridiculous, evisceratingly funny, and superbly acted take on lesbian desire, royal pathology, and period drama. Though I knew, based on the trailers, that Poor Things was going to be, if anything even more bizarre, little did I know what I was letting myself in for. What I did not expect was to feel quite let down, not just because the film is so relentlessly and distractingly grotesque but also because its own refusal to reign in its self-indulgence undercuts its own supposedly feminist message.
At the center of the film is Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone. At first she appears to be a young woman with some severe developmental problems, but it is ultimately shown that she was once a very pregnant Victoria Blessington, who took her own life but who was discovered by Willem Defoe’s Godwin Baxter, a noted surgeon with his own deeply scarring past. Struck by the genius idea of implanting her unborn child’s brain in her body and bringing her back to life, he ends up creating a sort of Frankenstein’s monster. Soon enough, however, Bella has begun to mature at an accelerated rate and thus begins questioning the limits her father–whom she calls “God”--puts on her. Upon the arrival of the rakish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, however, she throws off the shackles of her maker/father and sets out on a journey of sexual discovery.
As with so many of Lanthimos’ other films, Poor Things is filled with vulgar excess. It’s there from the very beginning, in the way that Stone’s Bella lopes around the house, her infant brain clearly at odds with her grown woman’s body (she’s even referred to as a “beautiful retard.” I kid you not). It reaches its apotheosis, however, when Bella, having grown weary of Duncan and his efforts to control her every movement, decides to take up whoring in Paris. She approaches her new profession with all of the detachment that she does everything in her life, but her distance is in marked contrast to the earthiness of her clients. Lanthimos dwells with unrelenting prurience on the seamiest and often ugliest denizens of Paris, from a man who humps Bella’s leg to a man who copulates with her while his two young (too young) son look on as he “educates” them about the act of sex. It’s all very ironic, of course, but it’s also deeply unpleasant.
The ugliness of excess is also there in many of the performances, but Mark Ruffalo’s is particularly egregious. Look, I like Ruffalo as much as the next person, but to me many of his performances seem a little try-hardy, and Duncan Wedderburn is no exception. His accent is deliberately execrable, impossible to place yet equally impossible to ignore. Some elements of it work–his relentless efforts to control and corral Bella end up making him ridiculous, which is as it should be–but just as many do not, and I found myself eagerly waiting for the moment when he’d finally shuffle out of the frame for good.
I’d like to say that all of this raucous sexuality and absurdity and relentless vulgarity added up to something profound, some powerful take on the repressive and destructive nature of the patriarchy. However, at the end of the day I actually found myself simply…bored by it all, if I’m being completely honest. Around the halfway mark I began to wonder just how much more I was going to have to endure. Perhaps some of this repugnance stems from my own prissiness, but I do genuinely think that the film gets in its own way in its constant emphasis on just how undisciplined and ugly the body and its various functions can be.
All of this isn’t to say that the film doesn’t have things that I enjoyed. Emma Stone deserves all of the credit she’d been given–including an Oscar nomination–for the work that she delivers as Bella. It’s an embodied and deeply affecting performance, and it’s quite a marvel to watch her move from barely-controlled marionette to stately (and ruthless) lady. Poor Things is also an exquisitely crafted film, and there were moments when I found myself swept away by its steampunk aesthetic, which is both quite beautiful and yet haunting (the scenes in Alexandria are particularly evocative).
Yet even at the formal level it’s also cloyingly self-indulgent, with Lanthimos’ well-known penchant for fish-eye lenses in abundant display. Let me tell you that a little bit of this goes a very long way. While I understand its function–it’s supposed to help us understand Bella’s efforts to break out of the various constraints placed on her by the patriarchal culture in which she lives–it’s one of those cases where I couldn't help but feel that less is more. When almost every other scene is shot in this way, it becomes an affectation rather than a sophisticated piece of filmmaking.
A friend of mine remarked that he thought that Poor Things offered up a more insightful and effective critique of patriarchy than Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and while I can see why he would make such a claim, I ultimately don’t agree with him. For all that this film pays close attention to Bella’s voyage of sexual self-discovery–I lost count of the number of close-ups we got of Emma Stone’s O-face–it still feels to me that the entire film is shot by and for the male gaze. I lost count of the number of times that we as viewers were treated to the spectacle of Bella’s naked body, and I likewise lost count of how many times we saw her reach orgasm. Not to sound like a broken record, but this is another of those cases where less is more, and what could have been a film revolutionary in its depiction of female pleasure instead just becomes another piece of prurient fetishism.
If there is one glimmer of hope, it’s that the film ends with Bella finally in charge of her own destiny: her “God” is now dead (get it?), and she’s even mastered the art of surgery and managed to vanquish her former husband (who comes in at the last minute to try to reclaim her). The last shot we get is of her reading, settled in her little enclave. It’s a quasi-feminist bit of closure, I suppose, but the film’s unremitting excesses ultimately undermine its supposed feminism. At the end of the day, the patriarchy wins, just like always.