Yorgos Lanthimos (2023)
This is Yorgos Lanthimos’s eighth feature but his first to be adapted from another source: Poor Things is based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name. The film takes place chiefly in the capacious house of Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), an eccentric and notorious scientist-surgeon-inventor in late Victorian Britain. His carriage is horse power of a singular kind – an equine head attached to a steam engine. The Baxter ménage/menagerie includes a housekeeper, Mrs Prim (Vicky Pepperdine); assorted cadavers and mutant animals (like a duck with a French bulldog’s head); and Bella (Emma Stone), Godwin’s ward and his scientific pride and joy. As he explains to Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), an admiring medical student who becomes his assistant and joins the household, Godwin constructed Bella from the corpse of a pregnant woman who had drowned herself, replacing her brain with that of her still-living foetus. Bella has pale skin, long black hair, the mind and social skills of a toddler. Her language is primitive; if she doesn’t like the taste of her food, she spits it out. Max falls in love with her nevertheless; Bella’s vocabulary improves enough for her to consent to be his wife; Godwin engages a lawyer to draw up a marriage contract. The lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), is a randy rotter with designs on Bella, whose own sensual appetite advances at least as quickly as her intelligence. On her insistence and with Godwin’s reluctant agreement, she embarks with Duncan on travels that take them on a (late-in-the-day) Grand Tour and, for Bella, a voyage of hedonistic discovery.
There’s never a visually dull moment in Poor Things – part of what makes it such an ordeal: 142 minutes of unrelenting bravado are a long time. Lanthimos’s signature is on the film from the very start. He ensures that the opening titles are nearly impossible to read (and, for that matter, the closing credits). He’s eager to show off extraordinary set designs (Shona Heath, James Price) and costumes (Holly Waddington), often through the distorting perspective of a fish-eye lens. In those respects, and in others, Poor Things picks up where Lanthimos’s previous picture, The Favourite (2018), left off. Robbie Ryan is back as cinematographer. Tony McNamara, who co-wrote The Favourite with Deborah Davis, has sole screenplay credit this time; the script again shows a penchant for smart-aleck anachronism and four-letter words. The sustained explicit carnality of Poor Things – in particular, Bella’s sexual treatment by men – should make this new film more challenging to audiences than The Favourite but that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least for plenty of the critics in the audience. As The Favourite was ‘gloriously nasty’ and ‘wonderfully filthy’, so Poor Things is ‘bonkers’: take your pick with the adverb – ‘beguilingly’, ‘deliriously’ and ‘utterly’ are quite popular. All you need do is embrace the bonkersness. Then you can ignore what might be thought objectionable features of the film – breezy misanthropy, repellent physical detail (it’s big on blood and guts, as well as facial and bodily deformity and ugliness) – and perhaps share in its self-satisfaction.
Once Bella and Duncan go abroad, the cinematography switches from black-and-white to colour. (An odd coincidence that three of 2023’s high-profile pictures, vastly different as they are, alternate in this way – Oppenheimer and Maestro, as well as Poor Things.) The switch reflects the opening up of Bella’s world – geographically, socially, erotically. The broadening of those latter horizons, in a Lisbon hotel and later on board a cruise ship, is problematic. Bella is up for whatever Duncan wants sexually. Because she enjoys it and he’s portrayed as an increasingly ridiculous rake, it seems meant not to matter that Duncan is exploiting a woman with a fully developed body but, for the time being at least, the understanding of a child. In conversations with others, Bella embarrasses Duncan not only with her unconventional table manners but also by blithely reporting what he’s like in bed and wanting to know about the sexual habits of fellow ship passengers, an elderly mittel-European dowager (Hanna Schygulla) and her much younger male escort (Jerrold Carmichael). The heroine rattles on like a lewd version of Eliza Dolittle when Henry Higgins first unleashes her in public; but those on the receiving end of Bella are remarkably incurious about her, despite her outlandish appearance and manner of speech. You don’t get the sense that this is because they’re too polite to ask or that Lanthimos and Tony McNamara are making a point about contemporary attitudes towards women – rather, that such questions would be inconvenient to the film-makers. (Hanna Schygulla’s too good an actress not to react at all but the dowager is no more than quizzically charmed by Bella’s candour.) The only unsettling remark aimed at Bella comes from a woman in a Lisbon restaurant who claims to recognise her as ‘Victoria Blessington’. Bella doesn’t know what the woman’s talking about but we can guess.
By the time the ship stops at Alexandria, Bella’s intellectual powers and moral compass have advanced apace (although she never becomes physically self-conscious: I didn’t get that). Duncan, no longer able to control her, spends much of his time drinking and gambling, and wins a packet at the roulette table. Distressed by the abject poverty she sees in Alexandria, Bella passes his winnings to two crew members for them to hand on to the local poor. (The men pocket the money themselves, of course.) No longer able to pay their way, Duncan and Bella are ejected from the ship at Marseille and make their way to Paris. There, Bella decides to earn money by working in a brothel – the last straw for Duncan, who has some kind of breakdown. Lanthimos’s approach to the material throughout is epitomised by how he handles Bella’s experiences in Egypt vs Paris. When she contemplates the sick and starving of Alexandria, they’re glimpsed in a long shot, not distinguishable as individuals. When she turns prostitute, there are repeated in-your-face sessions between her and clients. At one point, Bella, lined up with her colleagues for selection by a male customer of hideous aspect, asks the brothel-keeper Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) if it wouldn’t make more sense for the female sex workers to make their choice of man. Lanthimos uses this single line of uncompromising feminist logic as a sop to justify all the voyeuristic boudoir longueurs. Kathryn Hunter’s disturbing eccentricity prevents the brothel scenes from being a complete write-off but there’s only one sexual encounter with any real wit. A French father (a cameo from Damien Bonnard) is accompanied on his visit to Bella by his two pre-adolescent sons – he wants to show them the ropes. There’s a comical contrast between the father’s pompous self-assurance on arrival and his difficulties once he’s in bed with Bella. His rather bemused sons dutifully observe and take notes.
The brothel episode doesn’t feature in Alasdair Gray’s source novel. Since I’ve not read this, it would be unfair to use it as a stick to beat the film with but one difference (according to the Wikipedia synopsis of the book) seems crucial and deserves attention. Gray’s story is obviously Frankenstein-inspired: Bella is the female ‘Monster’; she addresses her Promethean creator (whose forename is the same as Mary Shelley’s maiden name) as ‘God’. While translating these elements into screen drama is straightforward enough, Gray’s complex narrative structure is another matter. Most of the narration is by Bella’s husband, Archibald McCandless [sic], and contained in his autobiography ‘Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer’. (The novel’s setting is Gray’s native heath of Glasgow; the British parts of the film are apparently taking place in England though not in a specific city.) However, McCandless’s account is followed by one from his wife in which she suggests ‘that her “poor fool” of a husband has concocted a life for her from the prevailing gothic and romantic motifs of the period …’ These ‘fictitious historical documents are prefaced with an introduction by one Alasdair Gray, who presents himself as the editor of the following text …’
Lanthimos and McNamara can’t be expected to replicate all this in the screenplay but they do need to give Bella not only (like Mrs McCandless) an educated voice but also, in deference to 2020s zeitgeist, a happy – that is, a self-realising and self-assertive – ending. In the course of her travels, Bella gets to be very well read – in philosophy, literature and politics. After learning from Max McCandles that Godwin is terminally ill, she returns home, makes peace with ‘God’ and goes through with her earlier plan to wed Max. The marriage ceremony is interrupted by Duncan and a man who announces himself as Bella’s husband – or, at least, as the widower of Bella’s previous incarnation, Victoria Blessington. Anxious to know more about her life as Victoria, Bella leaves Max at the altar and returns home with Alfred Blessington (Christopher Abbott), a soldier of empire who wastes no time in revealing the sadistic nature that caused his wife, pregnant with his child, to end her life. After threatening his manservant at gunpoint, Blessington does the same to Bella, demanding that she undergo genital mutilation and drink a chloroform-laced cocktail to knock her out for the procedure. She throws the cocktail in his face; he literally shoots himself in the foot.
Playing Bella Baxter demands considerable technical skill and nerve on the part of the actress concerned: Bella’s journey to irrepressible ‘freedom’ requires physical fearlessness and versatility, as well as progressive vocal transformation. Emma Stone (who also produced the film, with Lanthimos and others) is especially impressive in the early scenes with her staccato, guttural outbursts and toddling gait – a wild-child Morticia Addams. Although her sex scenes are inevitably causing more comment than anything else, Stone is very good in demonstrating other facets of Bella’s appetite – stuffing her face with pastéis de nata, manically jerking about when she takes to a dance floor. The performance never ceases to be a feat but I struggled to take pleasure in watching it. There’s a moment in Lisbon when she hears a fado being hauntingly sung (by Carminho, a well known Portuguese fado) and a suggestion of sadness crosses Bella’s face. It’s one of Emma Stone’s few gently expressive moments; for the most part, it’s just as well that Bella is only approximately human. One of the few interesting things about Poor Things was seeing it, by coincidence, just three days after I’d renewed the acquaintance, forty-odd years on, of Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977). The two films share a sexually adventurous female protagonist, though Brooks disapproves of Theresa Dunn’s behaviour while Lanthimos ‘celebrates’ Bella Baxter’s. Also as in Looking for Mr Goodbar, the performances of the main men in Poor Things aren’t up to much.
Given how often British actors are cast as Americans, it may be churlish to complain about the reverse in action but it hasn’t done Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo or Christopher Abbott any favours here. Ruffalo has shown himself a fine naturalistic actor playing American working men of his own (or nearly his own) generation in films such as Zodiac (2007), The Kids Are All Right (2010), Margaret (2011), Foxcatcher (2014) and Spotlight (2015). What he does in Poor Things is liable to be overpraised simply because he’s miscast and such evident effort goes into his exaggerated posh English accent and matching mannerisms, which are painful to hear and see. Even allowing that Max is innocuous, Ramy Youssef brings little colour to the role. Abbott is very weak as Bella/Victoria’s toxic first husband and Jerrold Carmichael wooden as Hanna Schygulla’s shipboard companion. Willem Dafoe does better, despite giving his scientist character an accent that’s an evolving experiment in itself. Is it meant to be Scottish (and so just about the film’s only nod to its Caledonian origins)? The accent is roughly consistent with Godwin’s stitched-together face (the handiwork of his own father, also a surgeon) but the pieces of that fit together more neatly than their vocal counterparts. Even if the dodgy accent is intentional, it belongs in a comedy sketch rather than a film of nearly two and a half hours. Still, Dafoe does leaven the scientist-playing-God with a compassion for Bella that, in the heartless context of Poor Things, is distinctive and almost mysterious.
Godwin dies peacefully. Bella decides to carry on his scientific and surgical work with Max at her side. The closing scene is a group portrait in the garden of Godwin’s house, now (presumably) Bella’s. She smilingly presides over a gathering that includes, as well as Max and Mrs Prim, two other young women – Felicity (Margaret Qualley) and Toinette (Suzy Bemba). Felicity was Godwin’s next experiment after Bella; regretting what he saw as the latter’s precocious independence, he was more comfortable with Felicity’s slow rate of development but she’s starting to blossom now. Toinette befriended Bella when they were both sex workers in Paris and introduced her to lesbianism and socialism. (The extent to which Bella is persisting with either isn’t very clear.) Alfred Blessington is on all fours, eating grass from the lawn. His brain has been swapped with that of a goat. For viewers who like Poor Things but need a shot of political correctness to complement their immersion in its OMG phantasmagoria, the girl-power finale is probably just the job. This viewer found it perfunctory and shallow; since I’d been furiously bored for more than two hours, though, I’m not complaining that Yorgos Lanthimos rushes to wrap up his interminable tale.
16 January 2024
