‘Poor Things’ Wins a Wealth of Oscar Nominations

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The Academy’s biggest surprise so far this year is giving 11 Oscar nominations to Poor Things. Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has been stirring attention at the industry’s margins for the past decade, receiving one Oscar nomination for The Lobster (2015) and two for The Favourite (2018). With 11 nods—including Best Picture, Director, Actress in a Leading Role (Emma Stone), Actor in a Supporting Role (Mark Ruffalo), Cinematography and Music—Poor Thingshas become a contender. 

Lanthimos can be accused of advocating weirdness for weirdness’ sake, yet even if the charge has merit, he’s outstanding for developing an idiosyncratic style in an industry where surprise has been outlawed and imagination curtailed.

With Poor Things, Lanthimos chose an interesting source, Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel by that name. A postmodern pastiche of Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins and other eminent 19th century British authors, Gray’s Poor Things is delightfully eccentric, the kind of thing Edward Gorey might have written and illustrated had he turned to writing novels. Gray’s visualizations seem to have spurred Lanthimos’ imagination as much as anything else, and the director was determined to magnify the oddness. In the novel, the daringly unconventional scientist, Godwin Baxter, is physically grotesque. Lanthimos gave the role to Willem Dafoe and turns his face into a prosthetic patchwork of stitches. A playful hint of Clive Barker?

Mysterious Woman

Baxter’s assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), is tasked to document the progress of the mysterious woman living in Baxter’s mansion, Bella (Stone). She has a child’s open staring eyes, and her body language is as uncertain and unsynchronized as her speech. “Who is you?” she asks a stranger. Baxter treats her indulgently, like a father with a handicapped child, and she’s a naughty child, breaking plates and unselfconsciously exploring her erogenous zones. She calls Baxter “God,” short for Godwin but indicative of the author’s larger concerns.

Baxter’s mansion is Bella’s Eden. He has created her, not from random parts like Dr. Frankenstein but by saving the body of a woman who jumped into a river from a high bridge and replacing the suicide’s brain with that of her almost born child. Like the God of Genesis, Baxter grants Bella free will, including the freedom to make mistakes and succumb to the temptation of the slippery solicitor, Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo). Besotted at first by his advances, she runs away with him.

Lanthimos’ strengths are visual, and Poor Things is optically stunning. All the old stratagems of cinema are employed in the opulent black and white of the film’s first half, including closing irises and fisheye and other distorting lens that nudge the story toward the edge of normal consciousness. Rooms and streets are carefully composed of oval shapes and contain many mirrors, coffined ceilings and Art Nouveau curves. Poor Things bursts into color as Wedderburn takes Bella to Continental Europe and on a sea cruise, a journey meant to fulfill his desires, but for Bella it becomes a voyage of discovery. Poor Things’ out-of-time hues are enabled by Lanthimos’ use of Ektachrome, the seldom-seen color film stock once used by National Geographic.

Gray’s novel contains many ideas, including injunctions against doctors who treat patients’ bodies as if their lives were of no account, the severe rationality of frockcoated Victorian science, the callous disregard of the poor by the rich, the snobbery of the class system. Lanthimos’ film alludes to some of these but focuses on Bella’s development and how her intellectual increase and blossoming of knowledge challenges the vainglorious Wedderburn. Poor Things can be read as a feminist challenge to male objectification, uplifted by a cast whose performances will latch on to memory.