Magical Realism for Children

Poor Things, like its star, is ravishing, but incomplete

[Oscar nominations aren’t announced until January 23, but if the prognosticators are right I’ve gotten a good head start on them with my essays on Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, and May December. I figure I can get moving on some the other sure-things I’ve seen.]  

You can class writers any number of ways. Raymond Chandler, for example, famously separated those who write stories from those who write writing.  Among the kind of writers who deal in characters, I’d say there are those who love their characters and those who love what they represent.

The instinct of most people with a humanities education will be to prefer the former to the latter. Every writing authority suggests empathy as a tool of character creation, at least in part because it’s assumed if you love your characters, even the nasty ones, they will be well-rounded and truer to life than the automatons tinkered from Meaning by the second camp and (more importantly in the current environment) easier for audiences to, as they say, relate to.

But characters like Woyzek, Marchbanks, Alex DeLarge, and Mother Courage appear to be from the second camp. You can almost see their authors, wearing chroma-key body-suits, guiding them along. Still these characters are superb because, visibly manipulated and made mouthpieces though they may be, they also show us something about the human condition.

There’s a lot to like in Poor Things, but whether you go for it really relies on how you feel about second-camp characters who are as obviously stitched together as the face of Willem Dafoe’s Dr. Godwin Baxter. The film takes place in a fantasy steampunk fin du siècle précédent (steam-powered carriages, skies full of dirigibles etc.) and Baxter is the sort of Man of Science you would expect to find in such a setting, always churning out fantastical and sometimes gruesome inventions.

Baxter is himself the gruesome invention of his own father, who disfigured and tortured him to better understand the natural universe and human mind and body; Godwin doesn’t bear him any grudge for this, much to the bafflement of the gormless young medical student he hires, Max McCandles (played as a baffled naïf by Ramy Youssef, who gets several laughs out the line “What?”), because Baxter shares his father’s penchant for deferring the personal to the clinical; he compulsively notates everything, either in ledgers or out loud. This leads to many funny lines, as when he rises from his sickbed after taking morphine which, he notes, kills his pain; amphetamines, which give him energy; and cocaine, because, Baxter explains, “I am partial to cocaine.”

This scientism also leads Baxter to fish a fresh female suicide victim out of the Thames, cut the still-living baby out of the corpse’s womb, transplant its brain into the skull of the dead woman, and electrically reanimate her. The new baby-brained humanoid, called Bella, waddles among Baxter’s menagerie of animal hybrids, and is taught rudiments like a child.

It sounds sinister, but Baxter’s madness is not like that of Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls; though he may not perceive the wrongs done to him by his father, he has somehow developed a nurturing, even good-fatherly attitude toward Bella. In fact, after he assigns McCandles the job of chronicling her behaviors (which include punching and throwing things at McCandles), he eventually suggests McCandles marry her and give her the kind of love he cannot (including sex, as Baxter’s father neutered him long ago).

(I will intrude on the plot description here to note that this is the sort of thing I call Magical Realism for Children, which is basically children’s literature with adult situations, in which the simplistic good guy/bad guy dichotomy is excused, or obscured, by a fantasy setting.)

McCandles is game for the union (Bella is played by the ravishing Emma Stone, so why wouldn’t he be), but by the time this comes up Bella has advanced sufficiently to have a sense of her own needs — including, she discovers when playing at table with a cucumber, the need for orgasms. As it happens she is simultaneously discovered by Baxter’s solicitor, Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo in an outlandishly louche manner and drawl that announces “roué” in florid script. He gives Bella many orgasms, which she likes very much, and she embarks with him on a long pleasure tour of Europe in defiance of her fiancé McCandles but with the acquiescence of Baxter, who understands Bella’s desire to prove out rather than simply accept what’s best for her.

Bella by this point has an adult vocabulary — though one filled with expressions she has cobbled herself, like “furious jumping” for the process by which Wedderburn gives her orgasms —but retains a childlike desire to consume all experience like the sweets she crams into her mouth with no consideration for appearance, as well as a disinclination to dissemble.

Bella is certainly an idea-driven character, and the director, Yorgos Lanthimos, clearly has fun with the idea of a combination Candide and Frankenstein, albeit a female one who is not so much disillusioned by experience (except where it comes to Wedderburn, who, reduced to a mewling, jealous baby by her intractability, comes to bore her) as alert and often unusually agreeable to everything that happens to her — including recourse, when indigent, to prostitution in Paris, at a brothel portrayed as a sort of situational finishing school run by a philosophical madame named Swiney. Bella does not perceive her work there as exploitative, though her socialist lover on the whorehouse staff has explained the means of production to her; it’s just another kind of experience.

The variety of sexual scenarios Bella is run through in the brothel are entertaining, but this is also where I began to feel Poor Things’ conceit fall apart. For one thing, Swiney’s philosophical yak is thin and ridiculous — Faginesque self-justification without Dickensian genius. And Bella’s education, in and out of the brothel, is all about what is pleasing to her and what isn’t, and not anything else. She reads some philosophy, but mainly plays word games with it; she is briefly exposed to Man’s Inhumanity to Man, which causes her great pain, but she quickly rejects it, not because of any insight, but simply because the pain is an encumbrance to her.

Her freshness and resilience are at first exhilarating, but eventually we come to feel that, for all her cleverness, she’s just not paying attention — which is not something you’d say about either Candide or Frankenstein. She’s supposed to be an idiot savant, but if she is, she’s a cynical idea of one.

When Bella finally returns to Baxter and McCandles, it’s formally closure, but still feels unfinished — which is why, I suspect, a final section has been added which appears to explain the mystery of proto-Bella’s suicide with a villainous ex-husband but mainly serves as a cheap feminist boo-yah — so far out of key with the rest of the story that I wondered whether the filmmakers hadn’t also noticed the conceit falling apart, and stuck this ending on to gratify audiences that wouldn’t be content with the typical ambiguous Lanthimos ending.

I understand also why Lanthimos brought forward the fisheye tricks and doppler music cues from The Favourite — branding is very important in modern mass-market artistry, and he may feel he needs audiences to learn to look for the Lanthimos label.

The visuals are arresting and carry the viewer along; I especially appreciated Shona Heath’s and James Price’s production design for making the fantasy settings look like places that might have actually existed, and Holly Waddington’s costumes, which gently (or less gently in the case of Bella’s amusingly overblown early get-ups) goose the steampunk affect. All the acting is great and helps keep the idea-driven characters entertaining. Emma Stone’s kudos are especially well-earned; her child-Bella is humorously obstreperous and self-centered, and the way the later adventurer-Bella navigates the world flows naturally from it.