Poor Things (2023)

Rated R and it was definitely trying to shoot for an R-rating.  I'll go as far as to say that the movie was shooting for an NC-17 rating.  It was trying to be as sexually explicit as it could possibly be.  It was wildly offensive in almost every imaginable concept.  The thing that might be more frustrating that, while a film should be clear with discussing sexuality, even to the point of showing it, Poor Things takes it to a point of absurdity.  The point is made and then that point is hammered over-and-over again.  At one point, we had a discussion, "Is this who we are?  People who watch Poor Things?"  Yeah, it was too much.

DIRECTOR:  Yorgos Lanthimos

I've seen my fair share of movies by Yorgos Lanthimos.  I mean, I get him.  I know what I'm signing up for.  I'll even go as far as to say that I don't typically hate Yorgos Lanthimos movies.  That's kind of surprising, even for me writing about this guy, that I kind of like most of his movies.  Rarely are they my favorites.  But do you know which one is my favorite?  It's the one that's on the nose: The Favourite.  Lanthimos comes from the school of thought that he wants to deal with the taboo.  He wants people to confront the uncomfortable.  But do you know what?  That message gets a little tiresome.  I don't think I've ever wanted to re-evaluate a complete canon of work on a director because of one movie before.  That all changed with my viewing of Poor Things.

Poor Things really wanted me to hate it.  It just kept hitting button after button in an attempt to get me to recoil from it.  We started it pretty late and at one point I was falling asleep.  Being a film love at 40 might be one the biggest asks in the world because, you give me too much of the same thing, I'm going to get drowsy.  We were watching Poor Things and it was just goofballery followed by goofballery.  It was discordant music coupled with a really obnoxious fish-eye lens with a bananas worlds colored by sexuality.  I mean, I like when people do things a little different.  I like when things are meant to shake things up.  But this was an attempt to alienate on a weaponized scale.  There  was so much discussion of sex and I don't think that was necessarily inappropriate.  But there was this line where, you know, we got it.  Thank you.  We get that Emma Stone was going to be sexually all over the place with this movie. At one point, I feel like sex scenes were being used to stall for a lack of progression in the narrative.  That's a real odd choice.  But again, I was falling asleep, so I stopped the movie so we could pick it up the next day.

Maybe we picked the best place to stop the movie because --for a while --the movie actually got pretty good.  We picked the movie back up when Bella found herself enraged on the boat.  She hated Duncan Wedderburn and there was something to watch.  Considering that this is a movie about a woman as tabula rasa, it took this long to get to the point where she finally started growing as a person.  I was really into it.  From a point where I wanted to like this movie, I found the growth of this character over the course of a movie fun.  I love that her language got more and more complex as she started learning about life's truths.  

But then they got to Paris.  And he went back to the same well that the first act of the film found itself.  Now, I get --and oddly even applaud --the fact that the character was definining her independence by a job that people found reprehensible.  Okay.  That's interesting.  I'm saying that you could even show that.  But the thing that got me is that we got stuck there again.  Golly, it felt almost cruel to Emma Stone to have her film so many exploitative scenes for the sake of a bit of shock value.  There's a way to show that time has passed and that she has lost and gained a little bit over the course of the time in a brothel than what we were shown.  But again, Lanthimos wants to feed off of our discomfort over the taboo.  It should be stated clearly that it's not the worst thing in the world to make the movie likable.  He's a very talented director who handles the weirder side of storytelling.  But that all kind of gets sacrificed under the greater umbrella of discomfort.

Also, I have a really important question about the world of Poor Things.  One of the central conceits of Poor Things is that Bella doesn't know how the world works.  She is colored by oddities that make people look at her as off.  It makes her character funny and sympathetic at the same time.  It's the Frankenstein's monster thing.  But here's the problem with Poor Things.  Bella is the creation of suicide.  She has the mind of an infant in an adult woman's body.  But we see Bella's previous life as Victoria where she's quite even-keeled.  Admittedly, we only see her suicide, but that looks like her problems seem quite grounded.  The bigger problem is that everyone in this movie is really off.  Everyone looks at Bella as a fish out of water because she says wildly abhorrent things. That doesn't really scan.  Bella talks about her sexual conquests at fancy dinners and people clutch their pearls.  The thing is, so does everyone else in this movie.  The older woman with whom she bonds asks about a lover's genitals at their first meeting.  She's wildly open about her sexual background and proclivities.  Why is Bella so weird in this?  Honestly, the entire world is so bizarre, match Lanthimos's tastes in the absurd.  Nothing really scans in terms of storytelling.  Instead, so much is given over the the mood of the piece, which dominates over everything else.

I know people are torn over Mark Ruffalo's portrayal of Duncan.  My wife really didn't care for him.  I thought he was the best part.  Why?  I knew exactly where he was as a character.  As silly as he was, I knew his goals and his intentions.  I laughed a lot.  It was interesting.  

To close up, we were showing the kids Barbie.  Both stories are about men using women as objects and playthings.  Over the course of the story, both women discover the value of their own nature and the good that they bring into the world.  But Barbie is far more effective of a film.  It seems silly and like Barbie would be the film that would be dismissed as fluff.  I can only hope that I can forget Poor Things given a certain amount of time.  It had so much going for it and it sacrifices all of that for the sake of being shocking.