Click here to listen to the flashback interview with Emma Stone for THE HELP.
POOR THINGS is a glorious gothic fantasy of the grotesque and the macabre rendered with high art and low comedy. Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has found his muse in Emma Stone, who give a performance that blends careful construction with wild abandon. The result is a work of genius that questions everything with the innocence of an infant, and damns hypocrisy with the force of the Old Testament deity.
This re-imagining of the Frankenstein story finds God aka Mr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) playing god with a recent suicide. The result is a blank slate of an alluring creature that he names Bella (Emma Stone), for whom the norms of society seem discordant with a being of free will. With the mind of an infant, and the body of a woman, she is a conundrum that proves to be a delight to the scientist in God, and to be irresistible to God’s assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who falls for Bella even as she discovers the sensual delights of her body in unselfconscious ways, and starts to yearn for life beyond the safely enriched environment of God’s palatial townhouse.
Into this Garden of Eden comes Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), the lawyer brought in to draw up the papers binding Bella to God and Max forever. Enchanted by Bella’s forthright sexuality, he finds no difficulty in persuading her to join in on adventure that will bring surprising outcomes for them both as Bella becomes a person of substance, and more refined motor skills, and Duncan discovers the unexpected consequences of that which most attracted him to Bella.
We should just give the Oscar® to Emma Stone right now. Hers is a performance of breathtaking boldness that follows the logic of her character to its logical, sometimes uncomfortable, conclusion. Fearless is too trite a word for it, and also hopelessly inadequate. She is a marvel of wonder and curiosity as that ci-mentioned blank slate, reacting with a fierce native intelligence that predicts the great intellect lurking within the limited vocabulary and awkward body at the start of the film. It is a performance that grows into that intellect as Bella turns the tables on her smug seducer, and startles those around her with her unassailable logic that flies in the face of society’s constructs of civility. The film grows, too. As Bella’s adventures take her to new locations, and new ways of thinking about her place in the world. Emerson and Socialism, cynicism and hedonism vie with each other as they propel her, and us, to a fully formed human being unfettered by the expectations of others.
Lanthimos frames it all with the trappings of Grand Guignol and Gaudi, with a dash of German Expressionism. Colors that are as heightened as Bella’s new senses perceive them, and as off-kilter. Fish-eye lenses, deliberate artificiality allow us to see the world through the eyes of our heroine in all its absurdity as she bustles through it with an eager appetite and fanciful wardrobe that comments on her Pilgrim’s Progress. When she explains her conclusions with the dead-certainty of someone for whom the world is logical, but people are not, her reasoning is unassailable, her impulses pure, and we are seduced.
POOR THINGS is a profound comedy of sex and politics. Particularly with Ruffalo as the befuddled Lothario, gasping like a beached halibut at the results his tutelage in what Bella has termed “furious jumping”. It is as unfiltered as its heroine, and as inspiring. Never has a philosophical treatise been more entertaining, nor sensual. It accomplishes what the best art should, challenging our paradigms and delighting us as it does so.
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