Emma Stone gave Poor Things an unexpected happy ending

It's been a year of film protagonist arrests, perhaps none more so than Emma Stone's in Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor things. The movie is one lot: a surreal, beautifully designed, provocative fantasy set in an alternate Victorian Europe. It features a mad scientist who blows up dark bubbles and sticks hybrid animals together, and it tackles themes of sexual liberation, socialism, gender constructs and free will. The enormous, practical sets are packed with detail, captured through blurry fish-eye lens cinematography.

And yet Stone, playing the reanimated corpse Bella Baxter, dominates all this noise with ease. She's perhaps the most original and charismatic lead character in any 2023 film: a young woman who starts out under the care of mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) and with the apparent mental age of a toddler. She develops quickly over the course of the film, fueled by an insatiable thirst for experience. And by the end of the film, she possesses a fierce, principled intelligence.

Putting together her performance was a technical challenge for Stone, Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara, the smart, acerbic Australian writer of Hulu's series. The bigwho previously worked with Stone Cruellaand both Stone and Lanthimos The favorite.

“Usually you have a movie and the character talks the same way the whole movie,” McNamara said during a video call with Lanthimos and Polygon. He talks about Bella's disarming turns of phrase, like calling sex “furious jumping,” and a man she's had enough of (the scheming Duncan Wedderburn, a hilarious Mark Ruffalo) as a “swearing, weepy person.” “It's not often that you get the opportunity to create a language that evolves from scene to scene and from sequence to sequence. It just seemed like a fun opportunity to have a character who (…) didn't know the words for things.'

The role demands a lot from Stone: comedic timing, intense physicality, fearless sexuality, strange language rhythms and consistency in effectively portraying a character's journey from childhood to adulthood. As such, Bella presents a golden opportunity to Stone, who is quickly gaining a reputation for courage for her roles in projects like The curse And Maniac, wasn't going to miss it. She rises to the challenge with her usual charm and energy, and a bit of righteous showboating.

But Bella's brain is still somewhat out of sync with her body and with the world around her. Her movements retain a marionette-like jerkiness, her language has a loose, naive poetry and her behavior is impulsive and unfiltered. Annoyed by a baby's cries in a restaurant one evening, she matter-of-factly announces to her table companions, “I'm going to have to hit that baby.”

Lanthimos says he sat down with Stone and divided the script into stages of Bella's development, each of which had defined physicality and language skills. “Sometimes we thought: Oh, maybe she actually speaks a little too eloquently in phase three, maybe we should pull that back. Or, I remember if she starts using synonyms when she learns all these words, we would come up with more. They made some adjustments on the spot, but to keep the film coherent and the character development on track, the script had to be “very precise and specific,” he says.

Image: Searchlight photos

Bella doesn't take control of it Poor things just by the power of Stone's performance. It is the character's attitude that wins over the audience: her sense of adventure, her morality, her lack of shame or prejudice that comes with social conditioning.

McNamara thinks this is because Bella enjoys a level of personal freedom that will be the envy of anyone who watches the film. “She is what none of us will be,” he says. “We carry shame and society shapes us, and here is someone who doesn't have even those two things. (…) And I think part of you says this: I wish we were! I wish we could go through life and explore it on our own terms, and shape life the way we want to, and be a little more impervious to outside forces like they are.”

That is especially clear in Poor thingsapproach to sex. One of the film's most challenging aspects comes when the still childish Bella discovers the sexuality of her adult body, which she embraces with a voracious appetite that initially delights but ultimately exhausts and enrages the exploitative Duncan.

Stone and Lanthimos artfully defuse this potential bombshell with humor, candor and, most importantly, by giving Bella complete control over her sex life. “What we wanted to do is deal with it the same way (we) deal with everything else, the same way that the character Bella has no shame or prejudice about anything. The same goes for her when it comes to sex,” Lanthimos explains. “So she didn't have to feel ashamed, but just explore it and experience it in the same way she experiences food, or whatever. And some of it is pleasant, and some of it makes her want to spit it out.

Photo: Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight Pictures

Poor things It is sometimes an overwhelming film, but always entertaining. And while the robust humor and baroque imagery are consistent with Lanthimos and McNamara's previous work, at its core there is a sweetness and optimism that may surprise some viewers. It is almost unrecognizable as the work of the director of the severe, creepy parable Killing a sacred deer or the dreamy melancholy of The lobster. It's closer to, but still very different from, the worldly, kinky intrigues of Lanthimos' The favorite And The big.

Without avoiding difficult topics, Poor things is ultimately a warm-blooded, generous and uncynical film. The book has this in common with the 1992 source novel by eccentric Scottish author Alasdair Gray, although the book is offset by a touch of bleak political realism that Lanthimos left out of his more fantastical film.

When I told Lanthimos and McNamara that, I was surprised Poor things' lack of cynicism compared to their previous work I get a strange reaction; they laugh awkwardly and exchange surprised looks. But they ultimately agree on the source of the film's hope. “I think it came from Bella,” says McNamara. “I think it came from that character. As Yorgos says, being true to that character means ultimately staying true to an idea of ​​this kind of optimism about life's adventure. There is a kind of uncynical approach to experiences and what they bring you and (how it) shapes you. And I think maybe that's why it unintentionally became a happy ending.”

Poor things is in theaters now.