His chivalrous offer is quickly trumped, however, by a wolfish, deep-pocketed lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who has zero compunction in lusting after somebody with the mental capabilities of a child and who serves as Poor Things’ foppish, mustache-twirling foil-a predator with enough money to double as a sugar daddy. Godwin and becoming part of a sweetly dysfunctional family. The first is a sweet medical student, Max (Ramy Youssef), who takes pains to stifle his desires even as he’s obviously falling in love: A decent chap, he’s willing to wait until Bella grows into her body, proffering his services as a live-in assistant to Dr. But instead of delving into truly murky waters of paternalism or pedophilia, Poor Things angles itself more triumphally as a story of sexual awakening, with Bella as a naive libertine rubbing her pleasure in the prudish faces of her countrymen.ĭespite Godwin’s best efforts, suitors begin to arrive at his door. Lanky and loose-limbed, with a knack for lapsing into volcanic tantrums at the slightest provocation, she starts out as a sort of toddler, which is how Godwin-whose surname sets a baseline for the kind of metaphorical subtlety we’re dealing with here-likes her: temperamental, but also deferential and dependent. The result of this dubiously ethical gambit is a hybrid creation whose body is fully developed and whose mind is maturing at an exponential rate-though not enough to keep Bella ahead of her own steep biological curve. The Best Movies of 2023 Cage on Cage Dangerous Insecurity: ‘May December’ and the Rotting Core of True Crime Some years ago, Godwin discovered Bella’s lifeless, pregnant body floating in the Thames, delivered her unborn child, and, in a stroke of Frankensteinian inspiration, implanted the infant’s brain in her skull, effectively swapping one life and consciousness for the other. Pay it forward, as the saying goes, and while Bella is not visibly marked (save for a scar at the base of her neck), she’s also a guinea pig of sorts, albeit one whose origin story is rooted in nobler intentions. The latter is a grotesquely disfigured shut-in whose facial scars testify to his past as a subject in a series of sadistic scientific experiments administered by his father. The narrative is one of metamorphosis, centered on the highly malleable Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), introduced as the adopted-daughter-slash-patient of the mysterious Dr. ![]() Poor Things finds the director working with promising material: Tony McNamara’s screenplay is based on a 1992 novel by the Scottish fantasy writer Alasdair Gray, whose work has often been compared to Franz Kafka’s. Having broken through on the strength of his sadism, he’s now trying to interlace alienation with ingratiation, to the point that his talent-which is real-all but cancels itself out. The difference may be that where von Trier is a true misanthrope whose films end up acclaimed in spite of themselves, Lanthimos seems increasingly to desire awards and adulation, with Poor Things representing a new high (or low) for this tendency. One possible model for Lanthimos’s career is the Danish master Lars von Trier, whose work is directly evoked in Poor Things via the tableau-like transitions between chapters-nods to the visual language of Breaking the Waves and Melancholia. But as he’s drifted further into the rarefied air occupied by well-funded international auteurs, his bleakness has become precious and bespoke-and, perhaps most important, marketable. Even when he started working with movie stars for the absurdist rom-com The Lobster, he retained a certain snarling ferocity. Back in the days of Dogtooth, Lanthimos was a vital, vicious newcomer, placing the isolationist politics of his homeland, Greece, under a microscope. On those terms, the film is both a success and a failure-a notably ambitious, memorably stylized compendium of self-consciously outrageous images and one-liners that ultimately flatters its audience’s prejudices when it should be testing them. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.Ī razor’s-edge conceptualist whose films typically involve sadomasochistic power games, Lanthimos likes to warp reality around his characters, and one way to look at the strange, ornate Poor Things-which recently won the Golden Lion at Venice en route to a pole position in this year’s Oscar race-is as an edgy yet politically correct fable of a Sleeping Beauty who gets woke.
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