Poor Things

Part of my coverage of the 59th Chicago International Film Festival.

POOR THINGS   ***

Yorgos Lanthimos

2023

IDEA:  Reanimated by a mad scientist in Victorian England, a woman with the brain of an infant sets out into the world in search of wisdom and independence. 

BLURB:  If Greta Gerwig’s Barbie had 100% more sex, nudity, profanity, and brain transplants, it would look something like Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. As in Gerwig’s contemporaneous phenom, the film charts a naive, sheltered woman’s universe-crossing odyssey toward self-actualization and independence in an oppressively patriarchal society. Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter may not be plastic, but she’s very much the creation of someone else, a (literal) girl in a woman’s body who’s slowly discovering her autonomy. And she’s joined by a Ken of her own in the form of the vain and irascible man-child Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo with an over-the-top antic bravado to rival Ryan Gosling’s performance. There are even opulent, candy-colored sets and fake backgrounds that look like they emerged from a vat of acid on an old MGM lot. Set against the restrictive mores of the Victorian era - albeit an era transformed by Lanthimos and his production designers into a vagina-patterned, rainbow-hued steampunk phantasmagoria - the film devotes much of its time to exploiting the comedic potentials in the clash between its protagonist’s lack of inhibition and the “polite” society she blithely shows up. These scenes are often very funny, sharply acted and cut, but they’re also pretty obvious and tautological; the same can be said for Ruffalo’s caterwauling refrain upon the latest cold shoulder from his object of desire. If there’s a critical difference between Barbie and Poor Things, it has to do with the genders of their makers. Both films center on a woman’s coming-of-age, but Lanthimos’s, which is notably adapted by a man from a novel by a man, seems more interested in inventorying the toxic masculinities of its rogue’s gallery of men. There is something more than a tad prurient in its continual focus on Stone’s nude body, and in the primacy it assigns to sex as a means of personal liberation. While its gaze may prove disappointingly conventional, Poor Things swims in so much aesthetic imagination and deliciously sardonic language that it’s an experience worth indulging.