Poor Things

It won’t do to take Poor Things literally. This, after all, is a movie in which a pregnant woman jumps off a bridge and is brought back to life, with the brain of her still-living child implanted in her own skull. The result is Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), who seems built to violate the Victorian mores of her society. We witness Bella, with her infant brain in a full-grown woman’s body, evolve from an innocent who spits out hated food and speaks in broken syntax to a wiser woman who reads up on socialism but still refers to the sex act as “furious jumping.” 

The movie, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) and based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is partly a riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and partly a charcuterie board full of bits from other works of dark science fantasy, with frequent visits from weird cinema down through the ages. I loved it, though possibly would have loved less of it; at two hours and twenty-one minutes, Poor Things starts to circle and belabor its point. Some won’t mind; others won’t get past the first half hour. Not a horror movie itself, it’s best appreciated by horror fans with long memories and patience. Its visual imagination is richly capacious, it has an uncompromising vibe of pure cinema, and when you see it a second time — and you may want to — you’ll at least know at which points to hit the bathroom.

Stone gives a hungry, open-souled performance illustrated by I lost count of how many sex scenes; she will be and has been praised for her bravery in the second aspect, but the meat of her work resides in the first, as Bella’s brain grows and her responses to stimuli and to life — at some points in her journey, there’s little difference — gain more subtlety and less babyish affect. Stone helps put across the story as a fable about growth in a barren garden of a society. We’re not meant, from our privileged perch as 21st-century people, to take Bella’s arc as a Victorian woman as commentary on feminism or anything else. Victorian London is just the most diabolically fun setting for this tale and its central figure, a prickly and proudly ungovernable agent of chaos.

A lot of the film, with its mad-lab gore and copious sex and nudity (if this got through with an R rating, what gets an NC-17 these days?), is like a Hammer horror from the ‘60s seen through a fever-dream lens (literally a fisheye lens at times, as well as a bokeh blurring effect). Cinematographer Robbie Ryan and production designers Shona Heath and James Price can take deep bows. And Lanthimos doesn’t forget about the supporting cast, including a waffle-scarred Willem Dafoe as Bella’s creator (who burps bubbles when eating) and a whiny Mark Ruffalo as one of the (male) fools who try to trap Bella’s spirit. Poor Things has a paltry-for-the-2020s $35 million budget but manages to look like a big Hollywood saga, only seen through a funhouse mirror.

Poor Things is essentially a comedy. We never fear for Bella even when things look bleak and Jerskin Fendrix’s ominous score becomes, according to the editorializing subtitles, “perplexing.” With its concerns with dark scientific inquiry and female consciousness coming into its own, it’s the true Barbenheimer this year. It arrives just in time to give me happy optimism about the future of cinema as a delivery system for idiosyncratic visions. It may not make studio accountants giddy, and might even be too stubbornly strange for the Academy, but it’ll take its place among the iconic works in dark-fantasy history. But this sort of unstable experiment comes with a mild warning: I loved it, but some of it I didn’t like. If that makes sense.

The Year in Review

In 2023 at the movies, perhaps moreso than in many other years, William Goldman’s axiom held true and firm: “Nobody knows anything.” In 2023, the phenomenon of Barbenheimer got more butts in seats than anyone would have thought; Barbie finished at #1 for the year (a slot I don’t anticipate any other 2023 movie taking at this point), while Oppenheimer, a three-hour, R-rated biopic of a nuclear physicist, will likely cross the line at #5. Would either of them have done as well without the other? Nobody knows. Goldman’s Law, of course, means that nobody knows what will work and what will crash and burn (prediction: any pair of dissimilar movies that try to duplicate Barbenheimer will go down in flames). 

Much trickier is that some movies would seem to have all the right moves on paper. Then they come out to crickets and yawns. I expected Mission Impossible 7, Tom Cruise’s follow-up big sequel after Top Gun 2, to pack ‘em in. Instead it ended up at #13, after Indiana Jones 5, which like MI7 tanked badly domestically in relation to cost. (Both productions were troubled by COVID delays, and Indy 5 had years of expensive development before Harrison Ford even stepped onto a set.) Meanwhile, Sound of Freedom got largely astroturfed (tickets bought in bulk to be gifted to folks who may never have bothered to go see the film) to the number 10 spot. Regardless, it and Oppenheimer satisfy two criteria I always look for in these year-end assessments: Neither was made for kids, nor were they sequels or based on existing popular media. (Oppenheimer was based on a book, but it’s not like that book was Harry Potter or something. Nobody, I promise you, said “Ooh, let’s go see that movie based on American Prometheus!”)

Fast X sputtered and stalled out domestically, having to make most of its bingo money overseas. Essentially China, with its 1.4 billion paying customers every studio chases, is the savior of a lot of American movies that Americans seem to have gotten over. 2023 was not a stellar year for Disney in general; almost everything they tried underperformed, but other than Guardians of the Galaxy 3, the response to Disney’s Marvel shingle showed either the start of superhero fatigue or indifference to the characters and stories taking place after the departures of many OG Marvel favorites. Ant-Man 3’s underwhelming take (domestic gross: $214 million; cost: $200 million) raised eyebrows until the stockholders got a load of the reception of The Marvels, which at a cost of $275 million racked up a mouth-drying $200 million in ticket sales worldwide. Domestically, it made $84 mil — less than M3GAN, less than Equalizer 3, barely better than Meg 2.

The DC Extended Universe movies, operated by Warner, had troubles of their own. The DCEU released its final four movies in 2023, none of which made it to the top ten. The Flash, which came with its own public-relations headaches, came the closest at #23 (still a slot below the much cheaper Scream VI). DC’s other three superhero movies only did worse, if you can imagine. Shazam 2 died a lonely death, Blue Beetle fared only slightly better, and Aquaman 2 as I write this is not having the most encouraging Christmas opening weekend. Much of DC’s crisis this year has to do with this iteration of the DC movie universe coming to an end, and DCEU fans’ interest along with it, though Warner has Superman: Legacy penciled in for a July 2025 release. So, other than the third Spider-Verse film, and some movies featuring Spider-Man associates (Madame Web, Venom, Kraven), there’s Deadpool 3 and that’s it for superhero movies in 2024. (The writers’ and actors’ strikes delayed a lot of productions.)

What will studios entice us with next year? There are the sequels: Dune Part Two, Kung Fu Panda 4, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, another Godzilla/Kong movie, another Planet of the Apes, another Alien, another Lord of the Rings thing, another Twister, another Sonic the Hedgehog, another Gladiator (for real?) … and another Joker movie, which we all sorely needed, apparently. There may be some surprises: there’s Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, and Jordan Peele’s typically mystery-shrouded fourth film, and Beetlejuice 2 might be interesting against all odds, and Furiosa has my attention, and Ryan Gosling’s Kenergy might be enough to lift his version of The Fall Guy, and Mickey 17 sees Bong Joon-ho returning to science fiction, and Ethan Coen makes his solo debut with Drive-Away Dolls … But as for what’s going to occupy the Barbie spot this time next year, well, nobody knows anything, still.

Finestkind

Brian Helgeland, the writer/director of the fishing-boat thriller Finestkind, clearly knows his way around the deck. Before lighting out for Hollywood, he worked a scallop boat out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the land scenes in Finestkind are set and were (mostly) filmed. As the film’s college-age protagonist Charlie (Toby Wallace) learns the ropes, so do we. Charlie drops in on his fisherman/captain brother Tom (Ben Foster) and goes to work for him. It would have been interesting to follow these two in the real world, not in a neo-noir where people intone things like “You set us up!” and “Why the gun?” at each other.

Helgeland delivers a more or less engaging thriller anyway. But the early scenes — maybe the first hour or so — feel so lived-in and tied to experience sweet as well as harsh that it’s kind of a bummer when Finestkind pivots towards genre. I guess what I’m asking for is not so much a different movie as a different world — a world where a studio would finance a slice-of-life comedy-drama about a smart kid who roughens his hands on a fishing vessel for a while. But this is this world, and the script for Finestkind hails from a time when Helgeland was starting out and needed to show studios he could write something that would make money. This is the game most filmmakers in the studio system have to play. 

So plot threads begin to rise and envelop the characters, and some of them work better than others.  Captain Tom loses his boat, so he moves to the boat owned by his dad (Tommy Lee Jones), but then that boat gets impounded, and $100,000 is needed to get it un-impounded, and luckily Charlie has fallen in with Mabel (Jenna Ortega), who has drug connections through her mother. Soon we stop seeing details of working life and other things we haven’t seen much before in movies, and start seeing things we’ve seen all too often. 

Money is flashed. Packets of drugs are hidden (in scallop-filled freezers). Guns are brandished. One hilarious twist that perhaps only those from Massachusetts can fully appreciate: the ominous meetings of criminal business take place mostly in a well-lit donut shop. (Clayne Crawford, as the scary kingpin, is groomed like and has possibly been encouraged to sound like Casey Affleck in his great Dunkin’ Donuts bit on Saturday Night Live.) People are beaten up. As soon as we see a pregnant woman, we wait for something traumatizing to befall her. The thing is, this plot seems to want to steer towards a bleak, despairing noir ending, and Helgeland seems to like his characters too much to let that happen. Everyone mostly ends up where we’d like them to be. It’s as though the movie sweated out its fever and started sipping ginger ale and getting around again. The characters become like people again, with wants and needs beyond the thriller narrative.

So there’s a tension between the more artful, less “plotty” version of this story — the soil of which produces the flowering of mood and milieu and character we encounter in Finestkind’s first half — and the more conventional path down which the movie takes us, temporarily, until Helgeland settles the plot stuff and sets his people free to plan their lives after the movie is over. But before it gets slightly less interesting — only slightly, Helgeland is still professional enough to wring some stress out of the thriller elements — there are lovely moments, such as when Mabel shows Charlie her room and says “This is me,” or when Charlie and Tom can’t quite escape the embrace of their mom (Lolita Davidovich), or when we see a junkie who nevertheless has enough wherewithal and taste to read Elmore Leonard. Helgeland has created people who deserve better than what the studio demands he give them. 

American Fiction

Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is a bit like how Spike Lee’s Bamboozled might have turned out if Lee had eased up on the satirical buckshot a little and focused on the people involved. A television veteran here making his feature writing-directing debut, Jefferson has adapted Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, which was published back when debates over political correctness and Black urban “authenticity” ruled the culture wars. Today it’s all about “wokeness” and “virtue signaling,” and American Fiction rolls in to say … not a whole lot we didn’t know. White readers and literary tastemakers are hungry for reasons to feel guilty, and novels written in African-American Vernacular English about bleak lives full of despair are their cup of poverty-porn tea.

Fed up with writing literary books nobody reads, and contemptuous of try-hard bestsellers like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, our hero, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), sits down and taps out a reductio ad absurdum saga called My Pafology, pseudonymously credited to “Stagg R. Leigh.”(Later it gets a less subtle, unprintable title.) To Monk’s dismay, the book takes off, charming every white reader whose desk it crosses. Ironically, the book is also nominated for a Literary Award, and one of the judges — Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto — shares Monk’s low opinion of (his own) novel. 

American Fiction isn’t altogether about that, though. Jefferson spends a lot of time fleshing out Monk’s family issues, establishing why Monk can’t really afford not to benefit from the book’s runaway success. (His elderly mother Agnes, played by Leslie Uggams, has dementia and requires memory-care housing that costs a fortune.) We meet Monk’s libertine gay brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown); his tart OB-GYN sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross); housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), who’s been looking after Agnes. Monk’s time as a son, brother, and prickly boyfriend — he’s attempting something with new acquaintance Coraline (Erika Alexander) — gets more play than his identity as a writer.

Jeffrey Wright has always been a pleasure to watch and listen to, and as the grouchy Monk he gets a lot of mileage out of eyebrow reactions and facepalms. (Monk spends much of the movie slumped in disbelief over what he’s hearing.) Wright takes full advantage of a rare lead role, and Jefferson gives him plentiful dramatic meat to chew on. It’s just that if you’re expecting the movie to lampoon the current moment (characterized by some as too sensitive, too concerned with diversity), American Fiction isn’t that movie. Jefferson keeps the hubbub over the book within plausible parameters. Not really a satire itself, the film is partly about satire and how it can seem indistinguishable from the stuff it’s roasting. 

Percival Everett’s novel was more of a metafictional musing on how a writer can sell himself cheaply. The racial aspects in the movie feel similarly muted. Monk objects to his books’ being filed in the African-American Studies section of the bookstore, and I imagine Everett and Jefferson would harbor the same watchful resentment against their work’s being pigeonholed because it emerged from Black creators. “The blackest thing about this one is the ink,” says Monk of one of his books. He also says he doesn’t believe in race — right as a cab driver passes him over in favor of a white passenger. Jefferson and Wright underplay the moment nicely.

The insights and ironies in American Fiction feel matter-of-fact. Nothing is punched up very hard. It’s a relaxed portrait of a man caught between needing to be true to himself and needing to make some money. It’s comparable to Bamboozled only because in both, the Black creators indulge in stereotypes in a spirit of sardonic revolt and watch as the public embraces them sincerely. Here, Cord Jefferson doesn’t seem to feel the same fire in the belly that Spike Lee did about the subject. That’s partly a good thing — Jefferson doesn’t head down the alleys of farce that Lee did — and partly sort of bland. The pertinent fact about Jefferson’s creativity, on the evidence of this film, is not that he’s Black but that he comes from TV, and American Fiction, smoothly rendered and never daring the excesses that Lee did, is essentially television. Still, it leaves the viewer with curiosity about what Jefferson will try next, and no movie that allows Jeffrey Wright this much screen time should be ignored.

Saltburn

In some ways the anti-Holdovers, the sharp thorn of a movie Saltburn, the second film by writer-director Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), wants to show the moral vacuity of the upper class and the worse morality of those who aspire to it. On the evidence, Fennell doesn’t have much faith in humans, who she seems to think will do any swinish, hurtful thing they can get away with, and in the godless universe occupied by Fennell’s characters, they can get away with plenty. The movie is well-appointed and observantly acted, but boy is it a downer. You may need a shot of cinematic Pepto-Bismol in the form of a revisit to The Holdovers if you try to down this difficult, unappetizing dish.

Our sympathy goes early on to Oxford freshman Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), who talks vaguely of tough times at home. Oliver notices rich boy Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) and swiftly becomes enamored of him. Is it just envy of the upper-crust kid’s reality, or genuine attraction, or all of these and more? Fennell sets up a narrative in which we believe in Oliver (Keoghan, summoning some of the heartbreaking vulnerability that distinguished him in The Banshees of Inisherin, makes this easy) and keep looking for proof of malice in the wealthy family he finds himself among.

Oliver befriends Felix, who plays at being a spoiled rich kid but has moments of kindness and awareness of those “beneath his station.” Felix invites Oliver to stay the summer with him and his family at their estate, Saltburn. Oliver accepts, and rapidly gains acceptance from Felix’s mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), and father James (Richard E. Grant). A couple of wild cards are shuffled into the deck — Elspeth’s hapless rich friend Pamela (Carey Mulligan in a memorable one-scene cameo) and Felix’s cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), also staying at Saltburn. They may make things more complicated for Oliver.

After a while it becomes clear that Saltburn has more in common with The Talented Mr. Ripley than with anything else, and that it eventually falls into a subgenre of thriller alongside Teorema, Brimstone and Treacle, Visitor Q, and 2005’s The King. It’s nice — I guess? — that the rich folks shown here turn out quite differently from our expectations. And Fennell sidesteps charges of elitism by making the film’s antagonist less a class warrior than a manipulative fabulist. It turns Saltburn into something of a revenge tale, except the victims haven’t done much to deserve it except exist, which may be part of the point. It also becomes unsatisfying and incoherent, essentially painting the upper class as well-meaning sorts plagued by people looking for financial help and devious moral goblins.

Sitting here after Saltburn is over, I don’t have a clear feeling about any of the characters except Richard E. Grant’s Sir James, who seems none too bright, even childlike (he loves nothing more than a party and an excuse to wear a costume of knight’s armor to it), but basically generous until his instincts are steered wrong by duplicity. Much of the work, of course, is done by Grant, who makes a bright impression, as he always has. Emerald Fennell herself comes from money — her father is the jewelry-designer-to-the-stars Theo Fennell — and her treatment of the father here is fond and gentle. Her tender feelings radiate outward to take in the rest of the Catton family.

But then we’re thrown back with Oliver, whose behavior takes him to a place where we really can’t (don’t want to) follow. I was left wondering what the point of Saltburn was other than up-ending our biases about people along the class spectrum. I would guess that the current moment won’t find many viewers sympathetic to what Fennell seems to be trying. Unlike Promising Young Woman, it doesn’t tap into the rage of its day. It’s just purposelessly unpleasant. The rich, we’re left thinking, would be perfectly fine and happy if left alone on their estates and not bothered by people who want their money or their lives. That can’t be what Fennell meant us to take away, can it?