In ‘Poor Things,’ Emma Stone Acts Like an Actual Child and It’s Amazing
A few thoughts on Yorgos Lanthimos’s bizarre new film.
Poor Things is a really strange film with a whole lot of layers. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos with a screenplay by Tony McNamara, the film is a fever dream of a coming-of-age story seen though fisheye lenses, peppered with references to women trapped by men in classical Hollywood films (I saw quotations of A Streetcar Named Desire and Citizen Kane and am sure there are a ton of others that I missed).
I also found it really strange (though I probably shouldn’t be surprised) that it tackles the oppressive forces of poverty and misogyny head-on but seems to pretend that racism does not exist, or at least that it cannot be named directly in the way that other social inequities can in the slightly fantastical world of this film. The film’s black characters seemed pretty tropey to me, as they primarily serve as guides to the white female character as she grapples with the absurdities of “polite” society. I might be missing something here, but it felt like a weirdly flat aspect of an otherwise fascinatingly textured film.
But, to my main takeaway: Emma Stone’s performance in the first half hour or so of this movie is a revelation. All of the performances are excellent throughout the film…
