Poor Things is a celebration of sexual adventurousness, empathy for the poor, traveling the world, higher education, and belief in the scientific method—in other words, of being a Democrat. I’m one myself, so I don’t mind the pat on the back. But after two-and-a half-hours, one’s back gets a little worn out.
A comedy that flatters isn’t likely to be very original in concept, and indeed, although director Yorgos Lanthimos’ audiovisual effort at quirkiness is formidable, the substance of Poor Things is of a conventional mold. Emma Stone manifests various shades of a cliched character: the clueless outsider wreaking havoc on social norms. Tarzan. Borat. Big. Coneheads. You’ve seen them; you know what kind of jokes this movie has in store. Fifteen years after Borat, Stone deadpans: “Shall we touch each other’s genital pieces?” Twenty-five years after “Spongebob Squarepants,” Mark Ruffalo hams it up as a chauvinist Squidward.
The movie’s premise, too, for all its sci-fi gloss, is decades too late to be interesting. In 1989, a naïve mermaid wondered at a kitchen fork and dreamt of exploring the world. Poor Things, released thirty-five years later, uses the same concept (employing, even, quasi-animated backgrounds), modified only by the fact that—of no little emphasis throughout—Bella Baxter has a vagina. This will strike you as an innovation only if you’ve managed to miss, for example, every HBO show ever made.
British humor. It seemingly always comes back to sex, to the uproarious lifting of naughty taboos. But who, nowadays, is imposing these taboos? Poor Things, like Lanthimos’ previous feature, The Favourite, takes place in older times, the better to supply a parade of stunned prudes to gape at women talking about their clitorises. That Lanthimos must reach backward to enable these situations says something about how stale they are. Today, even the leader of the Republican Party discusses pussies in casual conversation. So, again, who among us are these frowning, stuffy villains?
Or are we all heroes? If we are, then my feature-length pat on the back, in addition to being tiresome, has no meaning. Because, to quote Syndrome: when everyone’s super, no one will be.
-Jim Andersen