The Brilliance of Adaptation

Good morning Consumers, This is Please Consume, The newsletter that loves movies as much as David Cross hated being in Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.

Poor Things (2023)

Written by Tyler Clark

We always like to toggle between newer releases and older releases, so to start the week off we thought we’d start with about as contemporary of a film as one can get. It’s so current that it’s up for eleven Oscars! Now let’s talk about the film that may just win Emma Stone her second Academy Award.

The Brilliance of Adaptation

Poor Things, both the film and the 1992 novel it’s based on, are heavily inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Its big take though is to gender swap the monster. Something that is often under discussed in Shelley’s Frankenstein is that the monster is actually a tall striking man with luxurious hair who only really looks disgusting in motion, this is why Del Toro has cast Jacob Elordi to play The Monster in his upcoming adaptation. The heartbreak of the character is internal; the fact that he is beautiful from afar but disgusting up close. 

Similarly the character of Bella Baxter, PoorThings’ version of The Monster, is a gorgeous young woman whose disgusting ways come not from her looks but seemingly uncouth nature and society's taboos around her sexual liberation. Mary Shelley’s Monster was a kind soul who wanted to learn the ways of the world through gentleness but society lambasted him for the way he looked, meanwhile Bella is heralded for looks but demonized for learning the ways of the world in what they see as the worst way a woman can act in the late 1800s: through assertiveness and experimentation.

Stretch it Out

One of the things I feel is under-discussed in regards to the film's award attention is that what makes this film so wonderful is how many of the people involved are stretching themselves artistically and going in directions they’ve never gone before. Starting with the film’s director Yorgos Lanthimos, who has done period drama before with The Favorite, but has never done hard sci-fi before. The film is dripping with abstract imagery and fantastical visuals of flying cars and laboratories of god forsaken creatures. Then you have the film's stars, Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo who take their personas and stretch and pervert them to such transcendent places. 

Ruffalo is an excellent cad, whether it’s as a drunk record exec in Begin Again or as the hot loser sperm donor in The Kids Are Alright. Ruffalo knows how to play the likable dickweed, but in this film he takes that energy and heightens it to a level of Tommy Wiseau B-movie masterpiece. He feels so phony in his performance because of his understanding of the phony nature of his character while still maintaining perfect comic timing. 

Then there’s Stone: she is the ultimate “It” girl. She started as the “perfect girl” in Easy A and has continued on that route through Crazy Stupid Love and even won an Oscar playing that role in LaLaLand, but Yorgos knows how to employ it better than anybody. First in The Favorite as the girl that is too good to be true, because she is. Then in this, in which he weaponizes her screwball energy to play into the childish nature of such a character then adds in the fact that she has that natural moviestar energy that is so palpable even the characters in the film recognize it. It’s just perfectly employed and distorted for maximum poignancy when discussing mens’ idolization of women. 

And a special shout out to cinematographer Robbie Ryan who has a real knack for environmental cinematography, he captures real spaces and refines them beautifully with natural light and open spaces. Quite the opposite of the actual feel of the movie, a movie that you could describe as “artificial” in all the best ways, the film is all sound stages and enclosed spaces, but looks incredible. It makes me really excited to see what Ryan has up his sleeve next.

Today’s Clip