Emma Stone leads us into Fisheye Frustration
I’d like to begin by pointing out that I liked Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite. It’s story of two cousins vying for the attention and affections of Queen Anne had a darkly comic tone and richly compelling characters. I didn’t *love* The Favourite though, as Lanthimos had an annoying tendancy to get in the way of his own movie. Excessive (and unmotivated) use of a fish-eye lens, overly-stylized dance sequences, and hallucinogenic visuals were all employed throughout. And each and every time, their use drop-kicked me right out of the story Lanthimos was trying to tell. It was showy and distracting.
Poor Things is as if Lanthimos extracted all of those bits from The Favourite and stitched them together to make a whole movie out of those parts.
Poor Things is the story of a mysterious young woman named Bella Baxter (gamely played by Emma Stone). Bella seemingly has the mind of a toddler, and we learn in short order why. Her guardian, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), fished the body of a suicide out of the river. When it turned out that the young woman was pregnant, he implanted the baby’s brain into the body of the woman and revivified her. Why? It was something to do, I suppose.
Anyway, a young student named Max (Ramy Youssef) falls under Godwin’s tutelage and becomes smitten with Bella. But before Max can wed her, she is swept away by a sleazy lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) who doesn’t even begin to suspect Bella’s true origin. The two travel across Europe, where Bella confronts and challenges society’s strictures, particularly those against women and women’s sexuality.
Earlier this year, I watched a movie about a beautiful, yet naive woman who travels to an unknown land and is suddenly faced with some ugly truths about life. She has to come too terms with the facts that the world is not what it is supposed to be and either accept that or fight to make things better. This is, of course, Barbie, and I liked that version of this story so much better than Poor Things.
It’s not that I think this isn’t a story worth telling. I just think it shouldn’t be told in a manner that resembles a poor imitation of David Lynch by way of Terry Gilliam. Lanthimos has a fantastic cast at his disposal. And they’re all doing great work. Why, oh why, does he insist on taking our attention away from them?
Poor Things is the most frustrating movie I’m likely to see this year. As the movie went on, I could feel my anger towards it rising with each passing fish-eye shot. Can someone take that lens away from Yorgos, please? It’d be doing us, and him, a huge favor.