‘Poor Things' is a Creative Rebirth For Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos
Yorgos Lanthimos
If Barbie had a shadow self, she would be Bella Baxter, the off-kilter protagonist of Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film Poor Things. Adapted from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, the Greek filmmaker’s beautiful dark twisted fantasy happens to follow the same basic premise as Greta Gerwig's fluorescent-pink one: a scientifically-engineered woman (with a two-syllable name that starts with “B”) ventures outside of the sequestered domain she knows, embarking on an existential odyssey that opens her eyes to what it means to be a woman in the real world. Where Gerwig's plasticine fable was fated to be smooth and sexless by virtue of its corporate packaging, Poor Things is a debaucherous coming-of-age story replete with sex, gore, and profanity – but for all its bacchanalia and bodily fluids, Lanthimos’ latest reveals a strikingly humanist worldview and engages with sexual politics, pleasure, and power in a way that makes Barbie look all the more like child’s play.
When we meet Bella, played by a raven-haired Emma Stone, she has been reanimated from the dead by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) with no memory and no social or cultural imprinting—physically a grown woman, but developmentally an infant. She learns about the world as a child does, through sensory experience, as well as through her relationships with the various male archetypes (i.e. Kens) that populate her world, including her father figure Baxter, bookish fiancé Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), and libidinous cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), whom she leaves Max to abscond with on a sexual safari. Bella barrels across Europe and through Freud’s stages of psychosexual development, discovering the ecstasy of orgasms and oysters, as well as a passion for life itself, empathy for the disenfranchised, and her own autonomy—even and especially when her indomitability incenses the men who aim to control her.
Like many of Lanthimos’ films, Poor Things is about power, rules, and restriction. From the remote family compound in Dogtooth, to the dystopian hotel in The Lobster, to Queen Anne’s palace in The Favourite, Lanthimos architects rigorous, punitive mazes in which his characters become ascetic mice, and employs a cool, clinical distance as he examines how people seek meaning through controlling themselves and each other—often to cruel and violent ends. Poor Things begins in a similar way, with Bella cloistered in the gothic Baxter estate like a hybrid of Frankenstein’s monster and Rapunzel—“She’s an experiment, and I must control the conditions or the results will not be pure,” Dr. Baxter tells Max—but eventually, she experiences the liberation that Lanthimos’ characters have always been denied. Unafraid, unashamed, and unsanctionable in her quest for agency, Bella is the first Lanthimos character that can be considered a hero. She’s as if someone took all the bottled-up desire of Lanthimos’ previous protagonists, shook it up, and popped the cork. When she first leaves the Baxter home, the film shifts from black-and-white to vivid color—like Dorothy entering Oz—and a new world is unveiled.
From its sumptuous, sci-fi aesthetics alone, Poor Things is an audacious creative leap for Lanthimos; its whimsical, baroque flair recalls the worlds of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, featuring Kubrickian interiors, steampunk costuming, and syrupy color palettes. His stylistic signatures are abundant—deadpan humor, static sex scenes, squirmy body horror—but in comparison to the sterile modernity of The Killing of a Sacred Deer or the claustrophobic decadence of The Favourite, Poor Things’ lush, erogenous maximalism is a headrush. (For Bella, too: while admiring a garish neon sunset in Lisbon, she suddenly pukes.)
As Bella emotionally and intellectually complexifies with each new experience, Lanthimos also exhibits a more dynamic range of feeling and ability in his filmmaking. The beguiling score by first-time film composer Jerskin Fendrix moves from sparse, warped tones that lilt inquisitively as Bella hobbles around like an overgrown toddler, into robust, symphonic swells that crescendo when she has a soul-awakening experience, such as sex with a loving partner or witnessing children suffering. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan, whose austere compositions helped create wonderful tension in The Favourite, creates soft, sensual images attuned to the gestural and tactile in Poor Things. More than in any of his previous films, Lanthimos invites room for his characters to feel pleasure, connection, and growth.
The cast of Poor Things also reaches novel heights. Ruffalo, who is often cast as a straight man, renders Wedderburn so flamboyantly, farcically stupid one feels robbed having not seen him in more comedic roles. For viewers unacquainted with his standup comedy or his eponymous Hulu series Ramy, Youssef makes a formidable impression in his first film role, holding his own alongside multiple Oscar-pedigreed costars. Even seasoned veteran Dafoe, one of the most prolific and versatile actors alive, manages to unearth something completely new in Dr. Baxter.
Then there’s Stone, who turns in her career-best performance as Bella—comfortably clearing the bar set in La La Land, for which she took home the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2017. She began shooting The Favourite less than a month after her Oscar win, beginning a fruitful collaborative partnership with Lanthimos. In addition to Poor Things, on which Stone also played a producerial role, their projects together also include the silent short film Bleat, shot in early 2020 in Greece, and the forthcoming feature Kind of Kindness, which was shot in New Orleans last fall. The beginning of Stone’s creative relationship with Lanthimos feels at least as pivotal as any award, as far as representing the turning point that has led to this current moment of artistic abundance in her career; in recent years she has selected increasingly adventurous projects, offbeat characters, and highly idiosyncratic creators like Yorgos, and like Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, creators/co-stars with Stone on The Curse. She refers to her connection with Lanthimos as “one of the greatest gifts of my life,” and has expressed a desire to continue working together. “I have more admiration than I can even put into words for him.” (It is enticing to imagine them collaborating long into the future, like Scorsese and De Niro for post-millennial cinephiles.)
Stone isn’t the only one for whom working with Lanthimos has shifted a paradigm; Barry Keoghan’s role in The Killing of a Sacred Deer introduced him to American viewers and anointed him the new prince of weirdos, while Olivia Colman’s performance in The Favourite earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress, an upset win over Glenn Close and Lady Gaga. Under Lanthimos’ direction, actors reveal abilities unseen or unexpected; something about entering his cinematic universe seems to be synonymous with liberation.
Expanding the scope of things artistically also seems to include making space for a softer, optimistic outlook from Lanthimos that contrasts the stark fatalism of his earlier films. That temperament is personified here by Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael), a cynical man Bella meets on an ocean liner who believes mankind is hardwired for cruelty. “We are a fucked species,” he cautions her. “Know it.” Bella feels dampened, but not despondent: “I need to offer something to the world,” she resolves.
Where Lanthimos’ previous films effectively punish characters for daring to seek beyond their circumstances, Poor Things rewards Bella’s childlike curiosity and affirms her desires—for pleasure, for knowledge, for interdependence. The story is as much a fairy tale about a woman who takes ownership of her life as it is an allegorical self-portrait of the filmmaker doing the same with his art: Lanthimos is both the mad scientist who modulates reality and dissects human nature, and simultaneously, the product of his own experimentation, breaking away from convention through creative rebirth and renegotiating his relationship to humanity.
Originally Appeared on GQ
