Poor Things: Barbie Goes Victorian

You’ve heard of Dr. Frankenstein, who created a monster out of bits and pieces of human beings. And you’ve heard of Pygmalion, the ancient Greek who sculpted a beautiful woman and then fell in love with her. (The story was modernized by George Bernard Shaw, author of a play about linguist Henry Higgins, who turns a cockney flower girl into a duchess by teaching her how to speak the King’s English. Of course, Shaw’s play became a beloved romantic musical, My Fair Lady, in which confirmed bachelor Higgins and former flower-seller Eliza Doolittle come together in the finale.)    

 I mention all of the above because a current hit film, Poor Things, combines elements of the Frankenstein monster with Pygmalion’s beloved Galatea. The pieced-together woman who develops into an unlikely love object first shows up in this film as a childlike innocent who can barely speak, and walks with an unsteady gait. The odd and fascinating details behind her creation are something you won’t hear from me. Suffice it to say that she calls her much-disfigured patron “God” (his name is Dr. Godwin Baxter), and that initially she clings to his every word. But her boundless appetite for life leads her to discover corners of the world—and her own body—she was not anticipating. So she’s off on a series of erotic adventures in the various capitals of Victorian Europe, portrayed via Yorgos Lanthimos’ highly original filmmaking as the most charming of stage sets. (Lanthimos seems to share with Wes Anderson a passion for fanciful art direction, but I’m convinced Lanthimos, who previously released The Lobster and The Favourite, has much more to say.)

 It's easy enough to call Poor Things kinky. Certainly it’s full of sexual couplings, blunt language, and body-revealing costumes (and the lack thereof). We certainly see a great deal of Emma Stone, who—in the innocent-abroad role of Bella Baxter—discovers both the joys and the humiliations of sex. It’s fun to remember that Stone, a producer as well as the star of this film, made her breakthrough in 2010’s Easy A. There she played the bravura role of  a smart, nerdy (and virginal) teen who pretends to be the local tramp as a way to navigate the rigid social scene at her high school. In Poor Things, the “tramp” label would have no meaning for Bella. Totally committed to satisfying her own wants and needs, she judges the behavior of others in terms of the level of satisfaction they bring to her. Still, she’s constantly evolving, learning that the bed-jumping that had so delighted her in the arms of the roguish Duncan Wedderburn (a slimy Mark Ruffalo) is not always the route to personal satisfaction.

 Bella’s path turns out to be full of men who want to control her. There is, first of all, her “creator,” the obsessive scientist eerily played by Willem Dafoe. There is Wedderburn, a sexual libertine who finds the tables turned when he falls for Bella. There’s another man who emerges late in the film, and seems to have the means to bend her to his will. All these can be said, by final fadeout, to be among the “poor things” to which the title refers. Men don’t fare well in this film, except perhaps for Max (Ramy Youssef), the gentle science nerd who loves Bella for herself.

  Poor Things is a triumph of cinematography, musical scoring, set design, and the melding of past and present. Bella Baxter is a heroine for today, a Barbie who has taken a different (but parallel) route to self-realization.

 

Not Caught Flat-Footed Regarding Barbie

I was the right age to play with Barbie dolls when they were first introduced to little girls. But my mother wanted no part of these “teen” fashion dolls with their garishly painted faces and highly exaggerated proportions, and I tended to agree with her. Personally, I remained content to continue building my “family” of 8-inch Madam Alexander cuties who looked more like me.

 Still, I’ve been unable to ignore all the hype surrounding the new Barbie movie. I’d hardly be interested in a flick that simply exalted the plastic pal of so many girls of my era. But I was certain that writer/director Greta Gerwig—whose off-center take on Little Women (2019) is a worthy addition to the Louisa May Alcott canon—would have something interesting to say. And, hey, I was right.

 Gerwig (and her writing-and-life partner Noah Baumbach) can’t be accused of lacking ambition. The film’s early scenes are an hilarious re-creation of Barbieland, where all the buildings are pink and all the important jobs (doctor, judge, astronaut, President) are filled by Barbie clones who are simultaneously brainy and beautiful . . . and of course very well dressed.  Ken is here too: amiable, not too bright, and generally outfitted for the beach. Before the role-reversal joke can wear out, Stereotypical Barbie (a perfectly-cast Margot Robbie) finds herself starting to feel actual human emotions, and heads to the Real World to figure out what’s going on. Her trip to Southern California  puts her in contact, for the first time, with male misogyny, while the tag-along Ken (Ryan Gosling) discovers that toxic masculinity—complete with cowboy duds and horses—might improve his lot in life. (A column by Jean Guerrero in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times focuses on the film’s quiet recognition that the rules for today’s men, as well as today’s women, might be overdue for a makeover. She urges that we all adopt “Kenpathy” for guys who would rather not be male chauvinists but know no other path.)

 There are many details in this film that are genuinely funny, like the fact that Barbie’s moment of truth comes when she discovers she can no longer habitually perch on the balls of her feet, the better to model stilettos. I also loved the presence of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), whose hacked off hair and grotesquely painted features show her to be the victim of some sadistic little human girl’s lurid imagination. The candy-colored enticements of Barbieland should win art-direction love at Oscar time. But I was also amused at the fact that Barbie’s native habitat is set against my own hometown, Santa Monica, which in the film looks equally idyllic and—Gerwig suggests— almost equally plastic. There’s a hilarious moment when narrator Helen Mirren suddenly bursts into the story to comment on a casting matter, and Robbie’s film-ending line is both provocative and smart.

 Speaking of smart, there’s the interweaving in the plot of a sympathetic human mother (America Ferrera) and daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) with strongly mixed emotions about the Barbie world. And I loved the acknowledgment of Ruth Handler, played in the film by a delightfully appealing Rhea Pearlman, as both Barbie’s original “mother” and a strong businesswoman with a billion-dollar idea. The film, in addition to all its ideas about female empowerment, is open to acknowledging the sheer goofiness of the Barbie empire, which once briefly included a pregnant friend for Barbie, as well as a little-girl doll who grows before your eyes into an adult body, and a Barbie with a television screen embedded in her posterior. Oh well, back to the drawing board.