By: Alex Tilton

Image Source: Wikipedia.org

Having been burned plenty of times by movies that turned out to be crap, I can be very hesitant to try out a new one. Even good reviews are still subjective opinions and you can wind up committing two hours (or three for ‘The Batman’) of your precious free time to something that sucks. So I tend to hesitate.

All I knew about Poor Things was the basic premise. It’s essentially Frankenstein as an R rated sex comedy. This sounded like a very bold experiment indeed, and in spite of the glowing reviews I was worried. Pointlessly, as it turns out.

Poor Things is one of the best comedies I’ve ever seen. It knows when and how to throw a punch, when to hold back, when to be serious and when to let the audience do its own thinking. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a movie declare open war on shame-based culture, but it is the funniest. And that’s difficult to do. Nothing is less funny than ‘trying to be funny’, and many adult comedies do this. 

By contrast, Poor Things just follows its own premise to its natural conclusion. What would someone do if they were intelligent, curious, honest and had no concept of shame? Would they be free of the shackles that confine everyone else to a drab, miserable existence? Or does that shame serve some useful purpose other than propping up existing power structures? 

Poor Things is pretty clear on its message. There’s power in breaking free of shame, if you understand how shame functions. Our main character, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) has a lot of fun at first because of her lack of shame. But she doesn’t gain full control of her situation until she understands what shame is and why other people feel it. This takes a while, because her first exposure to real human suffering doesn’t happen until halfway through the movie. Once she grasps this reality, she finally begins to grow beyond simply indulging herself whenever she wants. And this brings us to one of my very few complaints about this movie. Some spoilers ahead.

The scene where Bella becomes aware of human suffering works well, but it’s also very blunt. While traveling with a scoundrel of an attorney on a luxury cruise ship she makes a friend, who eventually becomes angry at her carefree naivete. So he decides to destroy it by showing her the horrific living conditions of the peasant laborers and their children in the city of Alexandria. I had spent most of the movie until that point alternatively laughing, and waiting for this scene to happen. Without it, or something like it, the movie would’ve had no real substance. But I think better storytelling would’ve been if Bella slowly started noticing the working class people slaving away at their jobs while she enjoyed herself, until eventually she couldn’t stand it anymore. The scene still works because Bella finally feels legitimate, convincing, massive shame at the horrifying disparity between herself and the poor of Alexandria. I just think a learning process woven into the story would’ve worked better.

In an attempt to assuage her guilt, Bella gives away all of her and her companion’s money, leaving them broke on the streets of Paris. Bella turns to prostitution for income because, as far as she can tell, there’s just no reason not to. With any other character this wouldn’t have worked, but Bella is a human science experiment with no social hangups. It worked great. The movie then spends some more time with Bella in Paris as she learns about other people’s lives and, finally, gets a real sense of how the world works. Finally she’s called home to attend the deathbed of the scientist who brought her to life, and she learns the truth about how he created her. I won’t spoil this because the specifics aren’t that important, the secret exists as a plot device to manufacture tension and hurt feelings between Bella and her creator which they have to overcome. So they go through this process of reconciliation, and it works very well. The story reaches a satisfying conclusion…or it should have. Instead it decides to tack on an exploration of who Bella was before the scientist got to her. 

The problem here is that the movie had a very complete feeling at this point. I didn’t want it to go on longer, because it felt done. I was happy. I was ready to move on. The last story arc isn’t bad as such, it just didn’t need to be there. It introduces a villain who was never in the movie before, and feels out of place. There is some decent setup for this, but the man himself is an entirely new character introduced in the final act and I didn’t like it. 

But overall the movie was excellent. It’s rated R for a good reason so proceed accordingly. I strongly recommend it. It’s weird and wonderful and a breath of fresh air.