Stone ravishes in Lanthimos’ dark, comedic masterpiece
In the middle of “Poor Things,” the new film from Oscar-nominated oddball auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, our heroine, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), toddles off on a solo adventure for the first time. Wandering the streets of a pastel storybook Lisbon, Bella heads for a pastry stand, where she crams as many custard tarts as she can into her mouth. Later, she vomits on a balcony overlooking the city. Cause, meet effect. Bella observes this data and reports it back to her scientist father figure, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), in a crudely scrawled postcard home.
This kind of self-experimentation is the backbone of “Poor Things,” Lanthimos’ strange masterpiece about a young woman who receives one of life’s rare gifts: a chance to start over, from scratch. What will Bella do with her new lease on life?
The adaptation of the 1992 novel by the late Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (the script is by “The Favourite” scribe Tony McNamara) has long been a pet project of Lanthimos’, and it fits with themes he has explored in his other films, specifically “Dogtooth,” wherein adult innocents seek to escape cloistered confines. But Bella might be his most daring, shockingly self-possessed creation yet.
She is the creation of Godwin, a disfigured surgeon who was the subject of his own father’s medical meddling, who lives and researches in Victorian London. Godwin is a loving figure, a Dr. Frankenstein whose ethereal waif of a monster is like a daughter to him. While her brain catches up
to her body, she waddles around his house, stifflegged and petulant, bite and word cataloged by a young medical student, Max (Ramy Youssef ).
Despite his desire to keep the conditions of his experiment pure,
Bella is a being of free will, and Godwin is just one of many guides in her evolution. He instills in her a love of science, but soon her burgeoning sexual appetite leads her astray, and Bella becomes taken with the dastardly cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who whisks her away to Lisbon. Thus begins the adventure that makes Bella who she is, learning the highs and lows of life with the help of various people who demonstrate what it means to be human: the corporeal pleasures, intellectual quandaries, emotional lows and political questions — and that people can be “cruel beasts,” too.
She gains pragmatic knowledge aboard an ocean liner from Martha (Hanna Schygulla) and Harry (Jerrod Carmichael), and learns more about herself though sex work and socialism in Paris. The final stop on her
journey is back home to London, where she has to face herself, or the self that others expect her to be. Will she accept or reject it?
There’s an obvious comparison to be made here to “Barbie,” another film about a beautiful naïf discovering the sharp corners of the world.
But where Barbie cracks under her existential crisis, Bella only grows stronger, absorbing power as she explores. Stone delivers an astonishing performance, and is perhaps the only actor who could convincingly convey such simultaneous expressions of sincerity, absurdity, intelligence and humor.
This film may be fantastical, outré, at times bizarre and sexually frank. But ultimately, “Poor Things” is a traditional heroine’s journey forging its own path. That Bella achieves a fully embodied sense of personal liberation makes it a truly feminist fairy tale.
MPA rating: R (for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore and language)
Running time: 2:21
How to watch: In theaters Dec. 8