Frankenstein meets Forest Gump meets Flowers for Algernon meets The Island of Doctor Moreau meets Wes Anderson meets 50 Shades of Gray
Genre: Drama/Fantastical
Premise: A crazy old doctor performs an unthinkable experiment on a young woman and charts her progress as she opens up to a new world of sexuality that she embraces with aplomb.
About: To tackle playing different mental ages throughout the movie, Emma Stone came up with five “templates” for how she would act at the ages required for each stage of the film. This allowed her to know which ‘version’ of Emma to perform in a production that was shot out of order. The screenplay was written over four and a half years time.
Writer: Tony McNamara and Alasdair Gray
Details: 2 hours and 20 minutes
Some of you were probably hoping I would review the new Netflix flick, “Leave the World Behind,” so I’ll leave a mini-review in the comments. You can also check out my review of the book here.
Okay, onto my big weekend movie…
You guys know me well enough to know I’m not the biggest indie movie fan. I think a lot of indie movies are smoke and mirrors. They’re weak scripts bolstered by artistic direction from talented directors. But when you undress them, the stories are a hodgepodge of half-realized ideas drowning in melodrama, philosophy, quirkiness, or some unappealing combination of the three.
With that said, I understand that a film is not just a screenplay. The acting, the cinematography, the sound, the music, the set design, the locations, the direction — all of these things can make you feel something separate from the writing. So, every once in a while, when I watch an indie film, it works. Which is exactly what happened with Poor Things.
It helps that this is unlike any movie I’ve ever seen before. Let me give you an idea of how weird this movie is: I almost walked out in the first ten minutes. The cinematography, music, and acting were so jarring that I felt like I was going to vomit. I’m not kidding. I got super queasy.
I’m glad I gutted it out, though.
Our story is set in an indeterminant time – my guess is somewhere in the 1800s – and follows a mad genius named Godwin who finds the body of a rich pregnant woman who killed herself by diving off a bridge into the river. This, Godwin decides, is “Bella.”
For reasons only Godwin understands, he takes the brain out of the still living fetus and inserts it into Bella’s skull. So Bella is now her child. And you thought the ending of Chinatown was a trip!
Godwin hires a young assistant named Max to chart Bella’s every move. Because Bella is beautiful, Max falls in love with her, and Godwin tells Max they should marry, which both Max and Bella are thrilled about.
But then Bella discovers self-pleasure which completely changes her view of reality. A lawyer and cad, named Duncan, who comes in to notarize the marriage, finds himself drawn to Bella and asks her to come away with him on an adventure where they will have copious amounts of sex. That’s all Bella needs to hear. She’s in.
Off they go to Lisbon where Duncan fulfills his promise. But then one afternoon, when Duncan is asleep, a restless Bella heads out into the city where she engages in some sexual exercises with random men. Being a child, she sees nothing wrong with this and excitedly shares her experiences with Duncan, who is beyond mortified.
After a series of fights, the two end up in Paris without any money and, without consulting Duncan, Bella rectifies the situation by heading to a local brothel and offering her services. She loves the experience so much that she decides to become a full-time prostitute. Eventually, she learns that Godwin is dying and heads home, where Max is thrilled to see her again. Once there, she is confronted by her former husband (before she killed herself). Bella will have to make a choice of whether to stay with Max or return to her original husband.
Man, where do you start with this film?
There’s so much going on!
I guess let’s talk about the most relevant element for screenwriters, which is that if you want to nab a great actor, write a movie with a kid in an adult body. It’s the clearest path to an Oscar. We saw it with Sam Rockwell playing a 14 year old in Three Billboards. We saw it with Olivia Colman playing a child in The Favourite. And now Emma Stone is going to win the Oscar for playing a 5 year old.
Cause she will win the Oscar for this. The race is over. Not only is she playing this very unique part but the things that Emma Stone does in this performance are borderline unsettling. I don’t like to use the word “brave” in acting because, well, “playing pretend” doesn’t have that high of a ceiling. But it’s appropriate. She is brave for the insane things that she does.
And then there’s the icky part of this movie. I’m just going to say it. Bella is a 3 year old prostitute. It’s insane when you really think about what’s going on and how someone got this idea and everyone signed up for it. The more you think about it, the more icky it gets.
But let’s look beyond that. In a movie like this that has such a unique character, it is almost impossible for any other actor in the movie to stand out. But Mark Ruffalo somehow manages to. Probably because he plays something he’s never played before: a sexual deviant a-hole. And he does so hilariously.
The real power in his performance is his unraveling. He starts off as this super-confident charming ladies’ man who’s bedded hundreds of women. But through each excursion with Bella, he loses more and more of that confidence because she drives him crazy. She’ll go out for a croissant and come back having slept with a stranger, lol. Duncan cannot handle it. He freaks out, throwing a number of temper-tantrums, each of which is worthy of its own Oscar.
Then you have the sets. I’ve never seen sets like this. There’s a fairy-tale aspect to them and, yet, they somehow feel real. The Lisbon set, in particular, where they were up on this cliff in this little town. It was romantic and beautiful – kind of like how a famous city might look in a dream. Yorgos captured that. The boat set was a favorite as well.
The big thing I worry about with these movies is that they’re more concerned with being weird than good. That’s definitely how things played out early. But by the midpoint, it became quite an emotional film that was trying to say something about growing up and lost innocence and embracing who you are. And there were some heavy emotional moments late between Bella and Godwin, her quasi-father who did the unthinkable to her. It wasn’t just dumb shock value.
Will I recommend this to friends? Not unless you’ve spent at least one day of your life watching a Jean-Luc Goddard marathon. You need some cinephile street cred to be able to make it through this movie, I feel confident in saying. Its strangeness is more overwhelming than any casual moviegoer will be able to handle.
But, at the end of the day, the movie DOES work. And it’s worth seeing just for Emma Stone’s performance. I promise you, you’ll leave saying to yourself, “Wow,” after you watch what she does.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Poor Things, as wacky a movie as it is, uses one of the oldest screenplay templates in the business: The Hero’s Journey. Go ahead and watch this movie next to Star Wars. You’ll see that it follows an extremely similar narrative. It goes to show that The Hero’s Journey can be used for the highest-grossing films in the business as well as the artsiest of artsy fare.
