Review: Poor Things (2023)

Did we need another version of Pygmalion?

Poor Things (2023)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in “Poor Things”

In this dark comedy, a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe), having discovered the body of a pregnant woman who has just killed herself, replaces the brain of the just-dead woman with that of her fetus. Then he reanimates the body, with the result that a fully-grown, beautiful woman has the brain of an infant.

This alone might tip off viewers that men wrote the screenplay — and the book on which it is based — since a more or less brainless woman is most men’s durable fantasy. While many reviewers and copy writers mention “Frankenstein” as an inspiration for “Poor Things” because of the surgery and reanimation of a corpse, a more apt comparison is “Pygmalion” — the Greek myth of a sculptor who decides to reject women because he hears that temple prostitution is the rule on Cyprus, so he creates a sculpture that is somehow brought to life, and proceeds to fall in love with her.

The education of this blank slate of a human being is the subject of the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play of the same name, and of the 1938 film made of it, and of the Broadway musical “My Fair Lady” (1956) and a 1964 movie, directed by George Cukor, of that — and also the subject of “Poor Things.” The protagonist, here called Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), expresses more independence than earlier Eliza Doolittles. After gaining most of her wits, she decides to flee the comforts of the only house and people she’s ever known. These are the mad scientist who created her — a surgeon who teaches medical students, Godwin Baxter, called God for short — and one of his students, whom he hires to follow Bella around and tutor her. Somehow inevitably, the name of the latter character, whose strictly functional existence is to ask Godwin backstory-revealing questions at the right time and to fall in love with Bella since the mad scientist is elderly, is Max. He’s played by Ramy Youssef, a television comedian who rises to the occasion of his first major role, his previous film appearances being characters like “Drinker” or “Coder in Kitchen.”

Also key to the plot is the fact that Bella is not only physically and psychologically unharmed from the ordeal of brain replacement and the fact that she is, in essence, both her own mother and her own daughter at once. In fact, her bottomless desire to learn, and her swift development from mental infant to, let’s say teenager, motivates her to agree when an oily Victorian lawyer, Wedderburn, promises her an adventure. And sex, because she has recently discovered it and in the Victorian society of which they are a part, she can only access it through marriage or by absconding with a cad.

The Victorian-era setting provides not only ground for jokes and socially awkward situations, which typify all of the Eliza Doolittle versions of this story, but also serves to inspire the film’s visually rich steampunk esthetic which, thanks to the willingness of the producers to be excessive, justify elaborately ruffled costumes and fantastical scenery featuring bulky floating airships or a weirdly designed ocean liner. The visual pleasures thus provided are one of the most enjoyable elements of the movie.

But the best thing is really Mark Ruffalo’s performance as Wedderburn. When he’s seducing Bella into accompanying him on a Mediterranean cruise, he’s the perfect mix of schemer, outrageous bender of social mores, and rapacious egotist. His vocal register is just right. Later, when against his own nature he falls in love with Bella and can’t abandon her as he probably meant to all along, Ruffalo’s performance becomes shrill and hysterical, but that’s more the script than anything else.

The writers got lazy, depending upon Bella’s character to lend the production its necessary air of unpredictability while riding a script that rhythmically hits its marks. I don’t know whether to blame the screenwriter, Tony MacNamara, or the elderly Scottish novelist Alisdair Gray, because I haven’t read the book. But again: men. Though the story is about a woman increasing her agency and gaining her independence, the Pygmalion tale is essentially a story told by a man. It’s just the outrageousness of Bella’s character, and Emma Stone’s fine inhabitation of it, that might fool some into thinking it’s somehow feminist. Stone’s performance is truly impressive in a very physically demanding role (among other aspects of the role, those costumes must have weighed a ton), and it’s not fair to her to praise her this low in a review, but here we are.

The only thing left to discuss is the movie’s last act, in which Bella, having returned to Godwin and Max, is separated from them once again. Describing this twist would spoil too much of the plot. I’ll just say that it changes the eventual outcome of the story not at all; the main characters end exactly where they would have been had this episode not happened at all. It is, like a lot of the surrounding details of the movie, entirely extra.