Poor Things - A Review

Poor things is now available for streaming on Hulu, and as such, I finally got around to seeing it this past week. It's a rollicking rewrite of the Frankenstein mythos, set in a steampunk, alternate late-1800's Britain. It stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Mark Ruffalo, thus giving it two local acting heroes, as Dafoe, an Appleton native, played in Milwaukee's avant garde theater districts before moving to New York, and Ruffalo originally hails from Kenosha, WI. The film is based on a novel of the same name, originally written by Alasdair Grey.

The story begins with a suicide. A pregnant woman whose name we don't know (at least, not at first), throws herself from a bridge into icy, cold water. Her body washes up on an embankment, remarkably well preserved. It is chanced upon by an eccentric scientist named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Dafoe), who loves nothing more than dissecting cadavers, and is looking forward to testing a new re-animation technique. He realizes that the mother's brain is too far gone, but surmises that the fetus, which is still alive, would provide an ideal brain. So he transplants the fetal brain into the body of the mother, reanimates the dead-tissue Frankenstein-style, and observes the results.

What he observes is literally a child in a woman's body. She has no self-restraint, no impulse control, and limited speech, at least at first. Baxter names her Bella (who, by now, you must realize is Emma Stone). She, in turn, calls him "God." (Which sounds presumptuous, even after the viewer realizes that it's short for "Godwin.") To assist him in recording all her behavior, Baxter enlists the aide of one of his lesser students, Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef). He is immediately taken with her, saying unguardedly, "What a pretty retard!" Bella, when she is introduced to him, slaps him across the face. Not because she is upset at overhearing his comment (which she does not yet understand at this time), but because she finds it funny.

 As someone with a woman's fully grown body, Bella has difficulty learning motor control, and it is some years before she masters it. Her long, dark hair grows much faster than that of a normal woman. She also discovers masturbation far too early, and goes absolutely hog-wild over it - something which Max finds equally horrifying and enticing. Against his better judgment, to say nothing of his meek disposition, he develops feelings for her. Godwin Baxter, upon observing this, surmises that having him be wed to Bella might be a good idea.

Enter Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo), a silver-tongued lawyer, and an unscrupulous letch. He is hired to examine the legalities of the marriage contract Baxter draws up for Max and Bella. But upon reading it, he becomes fascinated with Bella and purposes to meet her. Feigning a weak bladder, he excuses himself to use the restroom, but sneaks off to find Bella instead. When he does, he is immediately taken with her - a pure sexual hedonist encountering another sexual hedonist with even less restraint than himself. He sneaks back to Godwin's residence afterward, climbs up to the balcony near Bella's room, and meets with her secretly on the roof. They conspire to run away together.

When Bella announces to Godwin that she's leaving, Max is horrified, but Godwin is stoic. He decides to let Bella have a free hand to explore both herself and the world. He even gives her some money, secretly sewn into her coat pocket.

Up to this point, the film has been entirely in black and white, save for the suicide scene at the beginning. But when Bella leaves with Duncan, the film turns to vivid color, as the world opens up before Bella. She first visits Paris. She sees the good, the bad, and the ugly, and can't get enough of it. She discovers alcohol and, naturally, overdoes it. She encounters a bickering couple and is shocked when the woman yells at her in French, something to the tune of, "What do you think you're gawking at?!" And, naturally, she goes all-in on having sex with Duncan, as furiously and frequently as possible. It's at this stage that the film seems positively pornographic. Duncan even suggests that they get married.

Yet Duncan is repeatedly frustrated with Bella's impulsiveness and tendency to disappear on him for hours at a time. To remedy this he baits her with a surprise, having her get inside a large trunk. When he finally lets her out, they're on a ship bound for a port in the Mediterranean. Bella does not appreciate being confined. Yet she finds in some of the ship's other passengers intriguing, as they are sophisticated philosophical types who introduce Bella to books written by great thinkers. She takes to these books with almost as much gusto as she took to masturbation.

It's at this point that she and Duncan begin to have a falling out. He tries being violent with her new friends, but is restrained by the ship's crew. He is also frustrated at continually losing at gambling. But then his fortunes turn around, and he wins a huge gambling pot - enough to make him flush with cash. Unfortunately, while the ship is in port, Bella sees diseased children, dead and being buried in a mass grave. The sight horrifies her so much that she takes Duncan's money and gives it all away to the poor. Or, so she thinks. She charges two of the ship's crewmembers with distributing the money for her, and it's a good bet they simply abscond with the money. (The movie doesn't show this, but it's strongly implied.) When Duncan awakens to find himself utterly destitute, he is furious.

They return to Paris, where Bella puts her sexual extravagance to good use by becoming a prostitute, quickly becoming a customer favorite. She is amused at the ineptitude of her lovers at first, and comes to appreciate what she had with Duncan. But she also knows she can't go back to him. When Duncan learns that Bella has turned to whoring, he is more furious than ever. What's more, when he sees that Bella had been hiding the cash Godwin had sewn inside her coat for quite some time, he simply takes her money and leaves.

Bella, defeated and eventually having grown jaded at a prostitute's life, finally returns to Godwin. There, she decides to go ahead with her marriage to Max. But then a strange new twist gets added to the story, and I won't go into that for fear of spoiling a very intriguing surprise.

Poor things is one part science fiction, two parts pornography, and three parts bildungsroman. Through Bella, we see everything through the perspective of an overgrown child, and when she grows quickly into a sophisticated intellectual, we can't help but admire her.

Highly recommended. But brace yourself.

Eric

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