Emma’s beguilingly bonkers monster must win the Oscar
Poor Things (18, 141 mins) Verdict: Rollicking, rolling Stone ★★★★★
The Boys In The Boat (PG, 123 mins) Verdict: Sinks like a stone ★★☆☆☆
EMMA STONE won a Golden Globe last Sunday for her performance in Poor Things, and if she doesn’t follow it with an Academy Award then I’ll eat Mark Ruffalo’s hat. Which, as the film is set in Victorian times, would be a mouthful.
It’s a wildly imaginative, irrepressibly mischievous, exhilarating roller-coaster of a movie, in which Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe excel in supporting roles.
They too were nominated for Globes, as were director Yorgos Lanthimos, screenwriter Tony McNamara and composer Jerskin Fendrix, whose suspiciously anagram-like name is somewhat unsurprisingly a pseudonym.
He’s actually Joscelin Dent-Pooley, from Shropshire, and this potty film score — its oboes, bagpipes and accordions in perfect tune with the outlandish narrative but not necessarily with each other — is his first. Dent-Pooley is not yet 30. Think of a footballer making a debut in the Champions League final, then scoring from the halfway line with an overhead kick. It’s that crazy.
STONE plays Bella, an adult but simple-minded woman living in the care of a distinguished Scottish surgeon, Godwin Baxter (Dafoe), whose facial disfigurements evoke Dr Frankenstein’s monster. In this tale, however, best if not very succinctly described as a feminist voyage of discovery in the form of a Gothic horror-comedy, he is Dr Frankenstein and the lovely but apparently addled Bella is his monster.
If you’re familiar with the film’s inspiration, the 1992 novel of the same name by the late Alasdair Grey, then you’ll know the truth of the matter. If not, you should read on with circumspection.
I first saw Poor Things at last year’s Venice Film Festival (where it won the main prize, the Golden Lion) with no idea what to expect, except, on the evidence of Lanthimos’s 2018 hit The Favourite (in which Stone also shone), a big dollop of weirdness.
But part of the reason I loved it so much was the sheer surprise of it. Which, for you, might be undermined by the rest of this review. You have been warned.
I should add that, rather like The Favourite (which I also loved), it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.
Bella calls Godwin Baxter by a short-form of his name: ‘God.’ That, it turns out, is significantly ambiguous. He found Bella when she was clinically dead, after leaping into the Thames while pregnant, and reanimated her by replacing her brain with that of her unborn baby, which was still alive. ‘Her mental age and her body are not quite synchronised,’ he explains, but in due course they will be, as her mind and intellect mature.
That sets out the film’s beguilingly bonkers trajectory. Baxter’s assistant Max (Ramy Youssef) falls hopelessly in love with Bella, who makes exciting discoveries about her own body in some of the film’s more, let’s say arresting scenes.
Stone plays all this in the only way possible for an actress of her talent: with absolute abandon. It’s an extraordinarily committed performance. Then Ruffalo enters the picture, hamming gloriously as a solicitor called Duncan Wedderburn, a bounder and cad all but swirling a black cloak, like a caricature of a Victorian villain.
He too takes a fancy to Bella but unlike Max, his intentions are purely dishonourable.
He whisks her off on a Continental odyssey, telling her that ‘no other man would bring you to the raptures I have’. Certainly, Bella finds she enjoys sex, enormously, but realises she doesn’t need Duncan as sole provider.
She asserts herself more and more, spending time as a prostitute in Paris to fund her social conscience. Feminists might object to the amount of female nudity on
show, scarcely matched by the chaps, but it’s nevertheless a story about a woman cauterising the controlling behaviour of men.
REALLY, it’s a universal tale that could be placed in any age, but the Victorian setting allows Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan to let rip with the zaniness even more than they did on The Favourite.
At times it gets downright surreal, like a Magritte painting in 3D, all of which might make Poor Things sound challenging, insufferable even, but from where I was sitting it’s a proper tour de force, already certain to be the most singular film of the year. And it’s produced by Ireland’s Element Pictures too. O GEORGE CLOONEY’S film The Boys In The Boat is singular only in the sense that it takes a unique vision to turn an inspirational story about rowing into a load of old rowlocks. Clooney isn’t a bad director but he made a hash of another true story, The Monuments Men (2014), and now he’s done the same with this adaptation of a 2013 book about the University of Washington junior rowing eight who in 1936 won gold at the Berlin Olympics in front of, at least as the film tells it, a gurning Adolf Hitler.
The racing scenes are very nicely done but, apart from the boats coursing swiftly through the water, and compared with Chariots Of Fire (1981) which it none too subtly tries to echo, the film is dramatically inert.
Callum Turner plays heroic rower Joe Rantz, with Joel Edgerton as taciturn coach Al Ulbrickson. Both are engaging actors but, confronted with Mark L. Smith’s anodyne screenplay and Clooney’s lumpen direction, they flounder.