Borgos Yawnsthemost—I couldn’t stop saying it. Misremembering Will Menaker’s review of Poor Things, the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos, was all I could think about for the second half of the movie. Lanthimos has been with us Americans, and us Baltimoreans at The Charles since Dogtooth came in 2010. Over a decade later, that movie defines Lanthimos for a lot of people, in both directions, but even more must be familiar with his mid-2010s run: The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Favourite. That last one won Olivia Colman an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and it was the success of The Favourite in 2018 that allowed Lanthimos the opportunity to adapt Alisdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, a project he’d been developing since 2009.
Poor Things is then, presumably, Lanthimos’ dream movie: the one you get to make if you or anyone involved in your film wins an Oscar—or if your movie makes over $100 million. Despite the fact that he’d been working on it for close to a decade when his last film came out, Lanthimos has been out of the picture for five years. Something else I kept thinking about while watching Poor Things at The Charles on Saturday night with my friend Katherine, and not a whole lot of other people, in theater 1: how crowded it was five years ago for a matinee of The Favourite. For anyone surprised or grateful that a movie as strange and relatively challenging as Poor Things is playing so widely, remember that The Favourite wasn’t that far off, and every older person who went to the movies as a matter of course pre-pandemic saw it, along with Green Book and Paris Can Wait.
It wasn’t crowded at all on Saturday night of opening weekend of the new film by an established international auteur starring three major American movie stars—are “the movies” really back? Katherine doesn’t think anyone under 70 is willing to risk spending money on a trip to the movies for something they haven’t seen, hence the increasing popularity of revival screenings. Should it be surprising that Elf played at The Senator this month alongside Labyrinth and It’s a Wonderful Life? Not at all, even if you, as I, remember seeing Elf in initial release 20 years ago. Remember, time waits for no one—only a matter of time before Dogtooth shows up in The Charles revival calendar.
Much ado about Borgos, not much about Poor Things? This movie was a victim of its trailer, a good one, but one that played often and before pretty much everything I saw in the last two months. It reveals too much of what makes the movie appealing; I hesitate to call it a highlight reel, but the movie itself rarely funnier or more beautiful than its trailer. Everything cool about the trailer—Emma Stone’s daffy Bella Baxter, Willem Dafoe’s deformed mad scientist, Mark Ruffalo’s intemperate suitor, all dressed and set in something like the Belle Epoque of Dungeons & Dragons and Final Fantasy IX—is inert in the actual movie.
Katherine said that, on the surface, Poor Things and The Sweet East have the same story: a beguiling young woman goes on a journey across part of the world and bewitches a handful of lecherous men, only to come home stronger and wiser. (Katherine’s distinction: “Talia Ryder was pretending to be retarded, Emma Stone is retarded.”) Because what happened is Dafoe found Stone’s body immediately after she jumped to her death; without any major damage and some electrical activity left, he kept the woman’s body alive, removed her brain, and took the brain of her unborn child and put it in her head. Stone’s Bella Baxter is a baby in a grown woman’s body, and while this reveal elicited gasps in the audience on Saturday, it was the last time this movie approached anything like surprise or novelty.
Because unlike The Sweet East, Lanthimos is locked down and turgid, walking his characters much like an RPG, refusing any intent with the camera and relying instead on the sherbet colored skies and some older tricks: fish eye lenses and violent fucking. By the time Stone’s character reaches Jerrod Carmichael and Hanna Schygulla (!!!), she’s learning about the indigent people who, unbeknownst to her, live outside of the glorious kingdom she enjoys; soon, she’ll work in a brothel and be told that she’s “making her own way in the world.” All of this, like the film’s skinny hand-drawn font, are a decade out of date, a very belated pop culture note that would’ve been superfluous in Lanthimos’ last film. Unlike The Favourite, whose ambiguous ending genuinely did satisfy people while remaining ambiguous, Poor Things is bloated, overlong, and stuck in the mud, a traditional story for a director that should be much more interesting and dynamic. Here, he’s relying on old tricks, and after half a decade away, it’s just not enough.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith