{"id":3642,"date":"2024-01-08T17:24:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-08T17:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3642"},"modified":"2024-01-10T23:07:24","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T23:07:24","slug":"poor-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2024\/01\/08\/poor-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Poor Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yorgos Lanthimos follows up his smash hit The Favourite<\/em> with this bizarro riff on Frankenstein<\/em>, from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. We\u2019re introduced to childlike Bella Baxter through the eyes of earnest young medical student Max McCandless, but before he accepts her ersatz-father\u2019s offer to marry Bella, she\u2019s spirited away by rakish Duncan Wedderburn. As usual, Lanthimos adheres to the motto \u201ctoo weird is never weird enough\u201d, so Willem Dafoe is caked in geometrically-crenelated latex as the hideously benevolent \u201cGod\u201d, Kathryn Hunter makes a memorable cameo festooned with tattoos, Bella\u2019s home is surrounded by a bizarre menagerie of cut-and-shut barnyard animals, and various seemingly random shots are given an extreme fish-eye lens treatment.<\/p>\n

This is also one of those movies where everyone\u2019s doing a voice. American Ramy Yussef manages to let his stiff English accent imbue the character with a na\u00efve earnestness which works well. Dafoe\u2019s Scottish accent seems to ebb-and-flow, but he\u2019s such a bonkers creation that this is a minor concern. The biggest issue by far is with Mark Ruffalo, who probably would have seemed miscast if he had been allowed to use his own accent, but he\u2019s so far away from the caddish Wedderburn to begin with that the strangulated and inconsistent dialect only compounds the problem. Presumably Jason Isaacs was too busy pretending to be Cary Grant?<\/p>\n

But the movie belongs to Emma Stone, who not only fully integrates a flawless cut-glass accent into her performance, but flings herself into the infantile aspects of the role, and precisely tracks Bella\u2019s evolution from feral force of nature, to wilful sex maniac, to bleeding heart handwringing liberal, to effortlessly compassionate master of her own destiny. It\u2019s a stunningly ego-less performance, and Stone\u2019s bad luck that she\u2019s likely up against Lily Gladstone at this year\u2019s Oscars.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s it all about though? Well, somewhere under the wacky camera angles, ripe performances, storybook production design and discordant score, there\u2019s a parable about childhood, feminism, socialism and the nature of romantic love. But if this a feminist empowerment film (written by a dude, directed by a dude, based on a novel by a dude), it\u2019s one of those feminist empowerment films in which empowerment is achieved largely by the shedding of clothing. If you\u2019ve ever had cause to wonder what Emma Stone\u2019s nipples look like \u2013 wonder no longer. And yet, for all the odd choices, eccentric casting and dodgy accents, there are images and ideas and sequences here which will stay with me. I preferred this to The Lobster<\/em>, which for all its bracingly flat oddness ran out of ideas in the last third, but it\u2019s not as viscerally engaging as The Favourite<\/em>, which also has the very fact that it\u2019s about royalty and ruling to give it a bit more thematic ballast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yorgos Lanthimos follows up his smash hit The Favourite with this bizarro riff on Frankenstein, from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. We\u2019re introduced to childlike Bella Baxter through the eyes of earnest young medical student Max McCandless, but before he accepts her ersatz-father\u2019s offer to marry Bella, she\u2019s spirited away by rakish Duncan Wedderburn. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[12,19],"class_list":["post-3642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-movies","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-WK","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3642"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3644,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3642\/revisions\/3644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}