AnneCarlini.com Home
 
  Giveaways!
  Insider Gossip
  Monthly Hot Picks
  Book Reviews
  CD Reviews
  Concert Reviews
  DVD Reviews
  Game Reviews
  Movie Reviews
  Check Out The NEW Anne Carlini Productions!
  [NEW!] Sasha Lane & Brandon Perea [‘Twisters’]
  [NEW!] Sir Ian McKellen [‘The Critic’]
  Josh Lovelace (NEEDTOBREATHE)
  Michael Des Barres [2024]
  Belouis Some (2024)
  Jay Aston’s Gene Loves Jezebel (2024)
  Fabienne Shine (Shakin’ Street)
  Crystal Gayle
  Ellen Foley
  Mark Ruffalo (‘Poor Things’)
  Paul Giamatti (‘The Holdovers’)
  The Home of WAXEN WARES Candles!
  Michigan Siding Company for ALL Your Outdoor Needs
  MTU Hypnosis for ALL your Day-To-Day Needs!
  COMMENTS FROM EXCLUSIVE MAGAZINE READERS!


©2024 annecarlini.com
Ghost Canyon

Movie Reviews
Poor Things
(Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, et al. | R | 2 hr 21 min | Searchlight Pictures)

Overview: From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe).

Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents.

Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.

Verdict: Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Poor Things is essentially a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, wherein the resurrected corpse is that of a woman (Stone) who died by suicide, her body a perfect vessel for the curiosity of mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe).

Much to his surprise, this beguiling girl he dubs Bella Baxter becomes more than an experiment to him; she becomes a daughter of sorts. Theirs is a bond forged by science but blossoming in sincere mutual adoration. However, Bella is growing up fast. Though she has the body of an adult, her mind begins as that of a child. As such, she is full of extraordinary potential and hungry for both knowledge and experience.

More swiftly than her father would like, she begins to yearn for what lies beyond the humdrum confines of the Baxter home, which is literally shot in black and white. When a lusty rogue (Mark Ruffalo, absolutely sublime in his sleaziness) offers to show her the wider world, she jumps at the chance — and all the curious opportunities that follow.

As Bella sets forth, her world bursts into color. On their voyages, she finds cities of aqua and gold, with pink skies and lush greenery. Bella herself is oft bedecked in sickly pale blues and vivid but slightly nauseating yellows. And that’s a virtue, not a glitch.

Through this lens, Poor Things becomes a coming-of-age story that radiantly reflects a young woman growing to understand herself as a creature of intelligence, sexual desire, and autonomy. While the origin of the film is the birth of horror itself, Lanthimos’s Poor Things has a lovely aesthetic that pulls its pastels from surprisingly grim sources.

At the film’s press screening at the New York Film Festival, production designers Shona Heath and James Price and costume designer Holly Waddington revealed that their color choices were plucked from anatomy books, reflecting the hues of veins, blood, and bile. This might sound repulsive on the page, but in execution it is glorious — while still feeling a wee bit gross.

When the Poor Things designers explained their inspiration, a puzzle piece of the film clicked into place for me. Life and death are intricately intertwined in the film, just as the repulsive colors of the body’s innards are to Bella’s widening world. Coolly, Lanthimos leaps from Bella’s galavanting back to lonely Godwin’s dissection exhibitions. Both are experimenting — one in life lessons, the other on corpses.

With this perturbing palette, Lanthimos and his team remind us that no matter how far she travels from home, Bella is tied to Godwin (or God, as she calls him) and destined to return. Beyond the literal, this also speaks to death itself: her origin and her eventual end. And yet Poor Things will not get caught up in the gloom of its own meditation on mortality, for this is a happy tale. [K.P.]





...Archives