Movie Review : Poor Things (2023)
I’m a big fan of Greek film director Yorgos Lanthimos. His apocalyptic love movie for losers The Lobster and his surreal contemporary tragedy The Killing of a Sacred Deer were among the meanest and most original films I’ve seen in recent years (and I like mean), so I was very excited to learn he had a new movie out starring Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo, two actors I also love. But let’s be real here: Poor Things is kinda bad.
It’s not terrible by any means, it’s just bad and not nearly as clever and subversive as we collectively convinced ourselves it is.
Poor Things is adapted from a Scottish novel written by a weirdo named Alasdair Gray and tells the story of Bella Baxter (Stone), a woman saved from death by a Frankenstein-like scientist named Godwin Baxter (the also excellent Willem Dafoe) who put the brain of her unborn child inside her head. Which means she’s basically a newer person and has to relearn everything. Because she’s beautiful, it makes things pretty queasy for men around her.
Is this supposed to be a feminist movie?
The calling card of Poor Things is that it’s a coming-of-age. The emancipation of a woman who was created and exploited by men. If this sounds good on paper, let me remind you that it is essentially the vision of three men, Alasdair Gray, Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara. So, it’s technically a feminist movie, but it’s a feminism seen through the lens of the male gaze. Because we can’t, for the love of everything that’s beautiful, let go of trying to dictate every narrative there is. We have to “know how this should work”.
The thesis of this movie is how women look and fuck enables their ability to control men and ultimately rule the world. It claims: women, you should be hot and fuck all the time. Because keeping us longing is your gateway to power. Are women allowed to want something else out of life? Shouldn’t they be allowed to gain social and political power in another way than by making men horny and getting fucked? Should they want things at all except making men lusty? Poor Things is eerily quiet on that front.
I’m not the biggest gender studies guy, but this movie is so fucking smug and self-satisfied with its own boring and reactionary take, it becomes an elephant in the room. Also, isn’t it a boring, already held belief that women can control men with sex? I wholeheartedly agree with the idea, but isn’t in a little full of shit surface feminism to claim: we’d love you to rule the world at the condition that you let us fuck you or let us think we have a chance of fucking you. It’s kind of messed up if you ask me.
But the Lanthimos of it?
I don’t know. It’s there, but it gets half-swallowed by the heaviness of the fairy tale setting. You can’t really be brutal when everything is shiny and bright colored. It’s not a setting that suits his skill set at all. There are some fun details like Godwin Baxter being called God all the time by Bella. It’s clever, but equally as on-the-nose as anything in Poor Things. A man has a right to explore genres and tone, but you gotta provide a little of what people love about you.
Emma Stone’s performance is the most Lanthimos aspect of Poor Things. She is wonderfully weird and boundless like a child in a woman’s body should be. There’s one scene at the beginning where she pees herself while staring at Baxter and his hapless assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) with a straight face that I loved. She’s at home in a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, playing a weird and off-putting character.
I just wish she was starring in a better one.
*
No, Poor Things isn’t a good movie. It looks good and does the steampunk thing correctly enough, but it can only get you so far in such a long and winding movie that has a last half hour that could’ve easily been cut. I believe a lot of the accolades it got leaned heavily on Yorgos Lanthimos’ reputation and Emma Stone’s performance, but nothing else about this pseudo-feminist movie is clever or interesting. Huge disappointment for me.
