Movie Review – Poor Things
I haven’t done a movie review in a while. SPOILER ALERT. I give away so many things, so if you haven’t seen the film and you wish to, maybe wait to read this until you have.
I recently went to see Poor Things starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, and Willem Defoe. It was directed by Yorgos Lathimos, the same director of the film The Favorite. I enjoyed The Favorite a lot when I watched it, and the trailers for Poor Things looked so interesting, so I decided to go to see the film. I went into it knowing that it would be strange and probably very weird. But I was intrigued by the storyline and the characters and, being a huge fan of Emma Stone’s work and wanting to support a film with Mark Ruffalo since he has been outspoken in supporting Palestine for years, I was excited to see it.
The movie was extremely weird, but not in a bad way. It was refreshing to see something that was not only a new and original idea and not just a reboot or a sequel or a Disney or Marvel film (no hate to those who love those movies but I am positively exhausted by them), but also it was refreshing to see a film take risks in its artistic expression. Lathimos doesn’t hold back. He takes the film to the very edge of weird and then barely pushed it over. And while some of the choices didn’t land very well for me, I still appreciate that Lathimos wasn’t scared to do something so different than what’s currently selling at the box office.
The things I loved:
This movie is stunning. The use of color is tremendously effective. The costume design is unique and makes the viewer feel as though they, too, like Bella, are thrust into a world that is both familiar and strange simultaneously. We know we’ve been here before, and yet we feel disjointed and caught off guard. And while something like this would normally make me feel too jumbled to really invest in the story, the sensation actually works to heighten the urgency of every scene and every conversation.
The acting is positively superb. Stone and Ruffalo have some outstanding chemistry on screen that is unmatched for me in recent films. So much of what these characters do and say is so very strange and odd and uncomfortable, and yet Stone and Ruffalo lean into them, commit themselves entirely to their respective roles, and deliver performances that are definitely worthy of Oscar nominations. Especially Ruffalo, who I have never seen in a film like this. And yet he fits in just as well as Stone.
The dialogue in this movie is strong. It’s funny, it’s clever, it’s stylish, it’s harsh, it’s raw, and it completes the aesthetic of the film which, in my opinion, is hard to accomplish successfully, but this film does it. There is so much philosophy written into these conversations that don’t come across as philosophical right away. It kind of builds a tension between what is and is not spoken, and it allows the viewer to place their own significance on what’s said and what’s not.
The things I struggled with:
The story is about a young woman called Bella Baxter who, after an event, loses her memory and her ability to function as an adult. Willem Defoe’s character, a man called Godwin, is her rehabilitation physician helping her learn to walk, talk, eat, and exist as an adult woman in a pseudo-Victorian England. Because Bella has no recollections of her life before the event, she longs to see the world, to learn, and to create experiences. She meets a lawyer called Duncan, Ruffalo’s character, and he takes her to see the world. His interest in her is entirely sexual, and as she has the mentality of a teenager by the time they leave London, pretty much all she wants to do is have sex, too.
There is, therefore, a tremendous amount of sex and nudity in this film. And while I appreciate the film’s acknowledgement that women are also sexual creatures capable of enjoying carnal pleasures, I was somewhat miffed by the film’s focus on her sexual exploits over every other interest she has. Sure, at times she’s seen reading and later in the film she’s learned to speak French and so we know that she has invested time in these other interests, but sex is the focus. No part of Bella’s character development exists outside of sex and sensuality. Not on screen, anyway. And that is something I take issue with.
There is another aspect of this film that was both intriguing and upsetting, and that was the ways in which men are portrayed. Almost every single man she encounters wants to possess her in some way. Godwin, Defoe’s character, is the doctor responsible for her rehabilitation and, out of a desire to keep her safe, he is extremely controlling and limiting with what she is allowed to do and where she is allowed to go. To the point that he actually manufactures a betrothal between Bella and one of his students, a young man named Max, whom Godwin knows is in love with Bella and is, therefore, easy to manipulate. Bella is not consulted about this. She is not given a choice.
This is Godwin’s attempt to keep tabs on Bella. He has his own medical research that he has to keep up on, meaning he can’t be with Bella all the time. Max can. Max is easy to manipulate. It is, essentially, a prison that is being offered to her and she begins to feel trapped. So much so that when she meets Duncan, Ruffalo’s character, she sees in him an opportunity to flee her captivity and see the world. And that is exactly what she does.
Duncan is the person with whom she first experiences actual intercourse. She has masturbated before and enjoys that, but she has not had intercourse with another person until Duncan. If I remember correctly, she calls it “angry jumping,” or something like that. And Duncan tells her once they’ve gone to Lisbon that she’s “not allowed to fall in love with him,” and indeed, it is unclear if Bella even knows what being in love is. And it’s irrelevant in any case because she is not the one in danger of catching feelings. It is, in fact, Duncan who falls in love with her and asks her to marry him.
She tells him that she doesn’t know how to answer his proposal considering that she is already betrothed to Max. This pisses Duncan off. It’s unclear if it’s the rejection of his proposal that enrages him, or if it’s the fact that her hand is spoken for by another man, but either way, he spends the rest of their time together sulking and pitying himself. This is yet another example of men attempting to take advantage of Bella’s naivete, her ignorance of the world and of what marriage means as an institution.
They end up in Paris where Duncan abandons her after stealing all of her money. She has no other recourse, and so she takes a job a sex worker in a Parisian pleasure house. Here she learns that not all men want their partners to enjoy sexual acts. And while this does nothing to temper her own sexual desires, it does show her how cruel and selfish people can be. These are men who, for however short or long, seek to possess her for their own gains, and she is genuinely not given a choice in who she beds, or who watches her while she beds them. There is one particular scene that is especially disturbing where a father brings his two sons and has them watch has he has sex with Bella. This is, he says, to teach them the ways of sexual love. The eldest boy cannot be any older than fourteen.
Bella receives word that Godwin is ill and dying, and so she returns to London to be with him in his last days. She decides that she has had enough adventures and wants to make a new life for herself. She wants to be a doctor and Godwin, thrilled, leavers her his surgery. She also is reintroduced to Max, the young man who is still in love with her, and they have an honest conversation about her life as a sex worker. She asks him if he can “forgive her whoring,” or if he, like Duncan, will be jealous and angry. Max tells her that her body is her own to do with as she likes and that he doesn’t feel jealous, but rather envies any man who gets to spend such intimate time with her. It is a sweet scene that results in Bella asking Max to marry her.
The day of the wedding arrives and before the ceremony can be completed, a new character is introduced. He is called the General and he is the man Bella was married to before the event that caused her to lose her memory. She does not remember anything about him at all, but it’s clear he will not let her go. She chooses to go with him back to his home (a choice that feels extremely against her character; we, the audience, are supposed to see this as her curiosity winning out; she has had a past life that she doesn’t remember and she wants to see what it is, but even that just doesn’t feel like a strong enough explanation for why she chooses to go with him) and quickly finds that he is a cruel, heartless sadist. He, believing her “sexual hysteria” to be a danger to their marriage, decides to hire a surgeon to remove her clitoris and the glands. She ends up telling him she won’t have the surgery and after a struggle, she overpowers him and gains her freedom.
The movie ends with Bella married to Max and living in Godwin’s house. And while this seems at first to be a satisfactory conclusion to this story, it smacks in the face of everything else in the film that is feminist and anti-misogyny. She wants to be a doctor and Max is helping her accomplish this, but at no point in the film does Bella express any desire to be married. She does not express any love for Max. She is never shown having sex with Max. And moreover, throughout the film all of her choices are rooted in her refusal to conform to convention and traditionalism. So to have the movie end with her in a traditional, conventional marriage is utterly disappointing.
And I am not saying that putting her in a marriage with Max is, in and of itself, misogynistic, but it does reek of this idea that, even the most independent of women, even those that never once express a desire for marriage or any kind of romantic relationship, can’t be really happy or fulfilled unless they have a husband at the end. And what the fuck kind of nonsense is that? And yes, I recognize the movie takes place in a kind of pseudo-Victorian period, but it is also very clearly not a historically accurate representation of that period, either. So using what would have been expected at that time as a justification for this creative choice is, in my opinion, an absolute cop-out.
Is it really so bad to portray an independent woman who genuinely has no desire for marriage or motherhood? Is it really the worst thing to show her happy on her own? For fuck’s sake, it is 2023. Almost 2024. No, there is nothing wrong with a woman wanting a more traditional life. The whole point of intersectional feminism is to acknowledge that women are complicated and multifaceted and they are capable of desire a myriad of things. And sure, one could argue that the fact she’s studying to be a doctor at the end of the film is a sign of women being shown to want a career and domesticity. And if Bella had, at any point in the film, expressed even the smallest interest in being a wife, I’d have no issue.
But she doesn’t. Ever. At all. The whole premise of the film is explicitly based on her fleeing this forced betrothal. So to have her go from making her life into exactly what she wants it to be without reference to anyone else to being a wife, even one pursuing a career in medicine, is aggravating. Because it still emphasizes the point that a woman cannot be happy unless she has a man. And what a load of absolute bullshit that is. Studies have shown that the women who are the happiest and have the longest life expectancy are those who are not married and do not have children.
And while I do love how the movie portrays different types of men (Godwin is the overprotective father figure who, however well meaning, perpetuates misogyny by trying to control his daughter; Max is the well meaning but misguided “nice guy” who, in a moment of selfishness, perpetuates misogyny by choosing a course that is best for him but not necessary best for her; Duncan is the typical “bad boy” who thinks he’s all that and then ends up falling in love with the naive young woman and then perpetuates misogyny in his jealousy and controlling behaviors, and the General is the typical abusive shitface who hates women but wants an heir and so needs a wife to make that happen), I also absolutely hate hate hate how, at no point, does Bella recognize that each and every one of these men has or is using her for their own gains.
This movie could have done so many fantastic things. But it falls so very, very short because, of course, it’s a woman’s story being told by men. Men can, and do, effectively write stories with women in them, and they even write effective stories with women leads. But telling a woman’s story — putting themselves in a woman’s shoes and writing about what it’s like to be a woman in the world — those stories men cannot tell. Bella is a compelling character and her journey is an incredible one. But when it comes down to it, she is constantly put in positions of servitude to the men around her. And even in the end, her choices are wrapped up in what the men in her life want. It is so stereotypical. Even the fucking Barbie movie, which is peak white woman feminism if I ever saw it, got this more right. Barbie doesn’t “end up” with a man, any man. Her self-actualization requires her to be her own person without input from any outside source, let alone a masculine one. Bella’s self-actualization is, for so much of the movie, her path to tread. She doesn’t go where she doesn’t wish to. She doesn’t do what she does not wish to.
So of course, it has to end with her married to a man.
I would give this movie two and a half stars. In quality, it deserves four, but the ending truly does ruin the rest of what is an otherwise stunning spectacle.
