I was not planning on seeing this. I had not even seen a trailer so I had no idea of what this movie was going to be.
It is a rare and beautiful thing to be this ignorant going into a movie.
This movie is fun.
Based on a novel by Alasdair Gray, this movie is like if the Bride of Frankenstein did not die and got to experience the world.
A child in a woman’s body, Bella spends the movie learning about her body.
And through that, she learns the ways in which the world wants to control it.
She learns about sex, exploitation and commerce, and without the filters and constraints imposed on women of the time, she is able to expose the hypocrisy of Victorian society.
When Mark Ruffalo shows up, the movie is elevated to another level.
Before his appearance, there is an archness to the whole affair - the casting of performers like Willem Dafoe (with faux Scots burr) also points toward the artifice of this world.
Ruffalo is so innately down-to-earth that he perversely provides a grounding for the film as Stone/Bella outgrows him.
The dynamic between the debonair ladykiller and Stone’s innocent is hilarious, particularly when she starts to puncture his veneer.
Stone is fantastic as the central character.
She does not lean into mannerisms or tics, instead she presents Bella as slowly growing in speech and control of her movements.
As the movie heads into its home stretch, she evokes the characters’ growing melancholy, without losing her flinty sense of forward momentum. Even with all she has been through Stone’s Bella maintains her belief in progress and growth.
I have only seen a couple of Yorgos Lathimos’s prior movies, and I was not really taken with them.
After Poor Things, I am keen to catch up on those I have missed.
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