Poor Things

They live in different worlds, light years apart, but Margot Robbie's Barbie and Emma Stone's Bella Baxter in “Poor Things” are actually long lost sisters this movie awards season.

After “Barbie” rang out 2023 as the poster child for a very good year of girl power, I kicked off 2024 by catching up with “Poor Things” on the big screen. While both Barbie and Bella are on missions to find themselves, Bella turns out to be more provocative and stimulating to spend some quality time with. True, she's something of a nymphomaniac, but that just adds to her charm.

She's a wiggy, whimsical one-of-a-kind creation from a place between Frankenstein and Monty Python. And Yorgos Lanthimos's gorgeous, eye-popping movie around her – literally the world of a mad scientist – has leapfrogged up my awards choice list for so boldly and originally taking on my favorite movie themes of all:

You know, the meaning of life, and stuff like that.

Set in – or more like, launched from – Victorian London in the 1890s, it is a role-reversed variation on the Frankenstein theme. Bella is the reanimated creation of renowned surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter (a perfectly cast Willem Dafoe). Although it's his face that's stitched together, as opposed to her perfect beauty, the fact that she calls him “God” and he refers to her as “an experiment” pretty well sums up their relationship. At least at the beginning.

Not to give away any spoilers not revealed in the trailers, but bringing Bella to life entails her evolution from infant to woman, all in the obviously all grown-up body of Emma Stone. The role's physical requirements alone are astounding. In the early scenes just learning to walk is the challenge. Throw in a heaping helping of courage required to play Bella once she discovers sex – but Stone's all in, in every frame.

It's a bravura performance, hilarious at times, wise and profound at others. Her Golden Globe nomination is much deserved, and an Oscar nomination is a foregone conclusion. 

Wanton yet still innocent and pure, the sexual stage of her development is reminiscent of Mark Twain's observation: “Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...!” Once Bella discovers this supremest of delights, she can't understand why people just don't do it all the time.

Dr. Baxter has a young assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) who's smitten on first sight of Bella. But rakish defrocked attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) also learns of Dr. Baxter's marvelous creation and comes sniffing around.

Bella has yet to learn the meaning of evil intentions, and is happy to take the cad at his word and go traveling with him. On a sort of Victorian update of the Odyssey, she proves herself a quick study and quite resourceful in the ways of the world.

Almost from the beginning, she senses she has little use for the petty minds and puny imaginations of “polite society.” In this respect she is like the film's director Lanthimos, who, it seems, doesn't suffer fools or hypocrisy gladly. After testing limits of taste and sexual norms in “The Lobster” and “The Rivals,” he fully hits his stride with “Poor Things,” tiptoeing along a titillating tightrope between mindless lust and profound revelation.

The fact that both Dafoe and Ruffalo give what may be the best performances in their brilliant careers further attests to Lanthimos's directorial talents. By the story's climax Ruffalo draws laughter for just showing up on screen, while Dafoe goes to the other end of the spectrum, tapping into a source of real love.

The script adapted by Toby McNamara from Alasdair Gray's dark comic novel adds to the performances, and to the sense of “Poor Things” as a unique, if bizarre, work of art. The characters speak Victorian English, including sexual euphemisms, with 21^st century sensibilities, often with laugh-out-loud results. Throw in colorful Monty Pythonish flying machines, steamships and architecture, and the results feel wacky and whimsically lost in time and space.

The climactic joke in “Barbie” is that being a plastic doll means she's lacking certain parts essential to be an actual woman. In Bella Baxter's case, it's these very parts that lead to discovery …and to danger.

Emma Stone, who also produced “Poor Things,” said she wanted to play the role to explore so many dimensions of what it means to be a woman.

But on her odyssey to “see what the world is really like,” she and her co-stars paint an even grander picture of what it means to be a human, in a rollicking, challenging, illuminating and gloriously entertaining raunchy gem of a movie.