This movie was the last of the ones we saw on vacation. To be honest, the thing I liked most about the movie was the spontaneous Frozen Coke that Wife got to go with our hotdogs and popcorn. I haven’t had a Frozen Coke since I was about eighteen and it’s just as good as it ever was. In fact, if this review were a review of the Frozen Coke, I would give it five stars at no Babadooks. Because this review is a review of the movie Poor Things, I’m supposed to tell you a few things about my expectations going in and my impressions coming out.
So, Poor Things’s trailer has been knocking around for a few months now, filling me with increasing excitement and joy. I had read that this was part of Emma Stone’s ongoing resolution to make you cringe this year, coming out hot on the heels of her collab with Nathan Fielder in The Curse. The trailer felt witty and sexy (and I know this is supposed to be the year of awkward sex in films or something).
Wife kept saying, it’s going to be like the Lobster and let you down, which is a low blow, because several years ago, before I had even started writing this blog, actually, I had gone into The Lobster declaring that it was going to be the best film of the year, and I came out of the Lobster, confused, upset, and very flaccid. It wasn’t until a few days before I saw Poor Things that I finally tracked why Wife kept bringing up The Lobster this The Lobster that and it’s because the director of The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos, is one and the same with Poor Things! More than that, and neither of us tracked this until the end credits, but the writer behind this script is none other than Tony McNamara, of The Great fame, The Favourite, and Rage in Placid Lake, all of which are close to my heart because of Wife and Bestie recommendations.
Early reviews of Poor Things described it as a surrealist/feminist spin on the Frankenstein story, which I feel pretty comfortable with as someone who’d devoured Jeanette Winterson’s Frankisstein a few years earlier when someone left me for too long unattended at a mall in Toronto while holiday shopping.
(I don’t have more to say about that book except that “Longlisted” seems like more of a backhanded compliment more than anything else.)
Anyway, all signs point to something cool so far. A press tour that promises some awkward cringe sex, a much beloved writer, and an imaginative director. When we walked out of the theater at the end, Wife turned to me and said, “That was almost as good as The Lighthouse. I’d have to check the run time to see which one I liked more,” which I think was her way of saying she didn’t like it very much. She cannot get in the mood for the Born Sexy Yesterday trope that Pop Culture Detectives did such a great job with:
More than that, though, I think she was bothered by some of the decisions that Mark Ruffalo’s crybaby makes when he goes through his transformation on the cruise ship. So many of the things he does and says once he becomes infatuated with her seem so counter to the internal logic of that character, so by the time (spoiler) you’re sitting there in the third act and he’s committed himself to an asylum because of how strongly he feels towards her, we’re sort of left wondering where the fragility came from.
Wife doesn’t deny that there aren’t funny parts. Just to mention our first nonconsensually-so-funny-you-belly-laugh moment: mine is the postcard with the image of someone fellating a train in the first act, and Wife’s was a question about whether or not Bella Baxter ought to be shot in the front or back of the head in the final act.
Wife liked the sets and the cartoonish backgrounds in each scene, which I found enervating. She hated the tall collars and frilly shoulder pads, which I liked. We were both let down and mystified by the hype around the dance sequence, which was not nearly as enjoyable as Jenna Ortega’s performance in Wednesday last year. The supporting cast is as if someone wanted to play two degrees of separation in terms everyone’s work from previous years, including Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott (whose twist in the third act is such a suspenseful thing of genius) from Sanctuary, and Christopher Abbott and Jerrod Carmichael from On the Count of Three.
I can’t say that I have a lot of strong feelings about this film. I’m not nearly in the place that Wife ended as we got in the car, “It’s not that I think it was bad so much as I don’t think it should’ve existed at all.” She insists that the satire is neither topical, nor smart in its observations about living life as a modern woman, and that its candy-like exterior makes it appear highbrow while actually being fairly vacuous. And I guess I can see where she’s coming from when she says that Poor Things doesn’t have much to say, not even very much new to say. I’m not particularly fond of fictional romps into a single character’s life, whether it’s the Invisible Life of Addie LaRue or some passion project by Guillermo del Toro about freak shows, but I had the patience for this. Once. Only once. I’m skeptical of awarding this some distinction like the best popular film of the year, just because it’s weird and not actually Bottoms or Polite Society, but at the same time, I’ll take what I can get to make sure Killers or Oppenheimer don’t win on a technicality.
