Review: 'Poor Things' is an absurd masterpiece of a growing mind, centered by a stunning performance by Emma Stone
It’s no small thing to call “Poor Things” the most audacious movie the the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has made in the English language — not when that includes such swing-for-the-fences titles as “The Favourite,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “The Lobster.”
But “Poor Things,” a science-fiction movie in the “Frankenstein” vein that’s also a bawdy sex farce and a satirical journey of feminine self-discovery, tops all of Lanthimos’ past Hollywood work for its audacity and wit. It’s also a movie that boasts a new level of acting from Emma Stone — someone we loved already, and are thrilled to find has found new mountains to conquer.
When we meet Stone’s Bella, she has the mind of a child. Quite literally. She’s the ward of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a scientist with radical notions (for this unspecified but vaguely Victorian era) about how to maintain and prolong life, as evidenced by the odd hybrid animals walking around his London courtyard.
As Dr. Baxter tells his student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), Bella was found floating in the Thames, a would-be suicide. She was dead, but the nearly born fetus inside her was alive. So Dr. Baxter transferred the baby’s brain into Bella’s skull, and has been raising her in the Baxter house. Max, who is soon hired as an assistant, chronicles how Bella goes from baby talk to primitive English in short order.
Bella learns so quickly that she soon wants more than what Dr. Baxter and Max can teach her cooped up in the house. Bella wants to see the world, so she runs off with Dr. Baxter’s lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Duncan takes Bella to Lisbon to experience the pleasures of good food and sexual intercourse — she calls it “furious jumping” — both of which Bella discovers she likes to do frequently.
Eventually, though, Bella develops even deeper levels of thinking — through which she discovers such things as poor people, money and morality. She also realizes that Duncan is a rake and a cad, and doesn’t like that she continues to improve her mind through books. When they are dumped off a cruise ship because Duncan has run out of funds, Bella seeks her own adventure in Paris.
Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara (who co-wrote “The Favourite”), adapting the novel by Alasdair Gray, create a fully realized and quite magical world, which opens in wonder in direct proportion to Bella’s ability to take it all in. It’s a clever trick Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (another alum of “The Favourite”) pull, using black and white, a boxy screen ratio and constricting fish-eye lens when Bella has a baby’s brain, then expanding the vista and the palette as her mind grows. The production design shows equal leaps in creativity, from the wrought-iron machinery of Dr. Baxter’s lab to the luxury of Lisbon.
Lanthimos also surrounds Stone with a colorful supporting cast. Dafoe and Ruffalo are both superb as the extreme personalities in Bella’s life, and Youssef’s calm as the wide-eyed Max balances them well. Other fascinating faces — in roles I won’t divulge here, so you can learn their surprises in turn — belong to Kathryn Hunter (from Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth”), the comedian Jerrod Carmichael, Margaret Qualley, Christopher Abbott and the German legend Hanna Schygulla.
It’s Stone’s performance, though, that brings the wonder of “Poor Things” into focus. She channels all the steps of Bella’s mental progression — from babbling babyhood to sublime intelligence — with precision and wit, but also with warmth and tenderness. Stone finds both the humor and the heartache of Bella’s unique perspective on the world and its people, and creates a performance that is in the stratosphere of acting. It’s a master class in the middle of a masterpiece.
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‘Poor Things’
★★★★
Opens Friday, December 22, in theaters. Rated R for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore, and language. Running time: 141 minutes.