Angelus News | January 26, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 2

Bella is cared for by Godwin’s kindly
assistant Max (Ramy Youssef), who
with Godwin’s permission, bordering
on insistence, proposes marriage. But
even childlike Bella recognizes it is
“God’s” attempt to keep her at home
away from a wider world which he
fears and she longs for.
(While allowing for curiosity, I think
the film overestimates a child’s mind
for new experience. Children are
natural reactionaries; ask them to
sample new food other than chicken
fingers and they’ll respond with all the
liberality of a Russian czar.)
With his permission she instead
runs off with Duncan Wedderburn
(Mark Ruffalo). A caddish lawyer (at
the risk of sounding redundant) he
takes advantage of Bella’s naiveté and
whisks her off on a lover’s holiday.
Bella’s accelerated mental progression
now finds her in the thick of adolescence,
so if Duncan uses her, she is
an enthusiastic accomplice.
But we are back again to the great
divide of provocation and interest. In
the longest stretch of the film we are
shown in great detail the particulars
of Bella’s sexual awakening, sequences
that most readers of this magazine
would find lewd and indecent.
But throughout all this extracurricular
activity my eyes averted from the
screen not from prudishness but boredom.
Sexuality is indeed part of growing
up, but it isn’t the skeleton key of
adulthood. Lanthimos takes Bella into
the wider world, but his focus on this
one aspect of her person shrinks it.
She wants to see the pyramids, but she
must settle for the ceiling.
It even puts him at odds with his own
thesis. Bella is an Edenic creature, her
innocence putting her at odds with
a fallen society. It would certainly
explain her comfort with nudity. She
eats sloppily, dances merrily, and lacks
the patience for innuendo in polite
conversation. Most importantly, she
doesn’t fathom the absurd strictures
her society places on women, and
like most children ignores what she
doesn’t understand.
But Lanthimos groups her freewheeling
sexual liberation in with
her burgeoning feminism, a pairing
that fell out of fashion somewhere
between Rocky II and Rocky IV. It’s
a retrograde feminism, not respecting
women in all their baffling facets but
to the extent to which they please the
drooling patriarchy.
In fairness, the film recognizes the
abuses. For all his talk of spurning
convention, Duncan grows more
possessive the wider Bella’s perspective
expands. He says he wants to show
her the world, but we realize along
with her that a narcissist thinks the
world ends at his sightline. He tricks
her onto a cruise ship where she can’t
leave him, but that is only prolonging
the inevitable. Rid of his dead weight,
she later takes up a brief residency
in a brothel, a rose-colored vignette
on sex work where her sex positivity
goes over like gangbusters. After her
adventures she finally returns and is
reconciled to her fiancé and “God,”
her wild oats sufficiently sown.
Perhaps as a Catholic I should
endorse such a tidy resolution, but
I have never found myself more
offended at a film coming full circle.
It meant all its provocations were for
nothing, even its postures of defiance
ultimately subjugated to conventional
mores. What we watched for the last
two hours was not a young woman
bucking the absurdities of our society,
but a sorority girl on a gap year
abroad.
In other words, “Poor Things” is
about controlled rebellion, the cinematic
equivalent of Woodstock hippies
who went on to work for weapon
manufacturers. I have more genuine
respect for sticking to a principle, even
in violation of my own, than dabbling
in revolution only to embrace the cog.
God can forgive any sins, but I can’t
forgive you for wasting my time.
Editor’s note: “Poor Things” is rated R
for strong and pervasive sexual content,
graphic nudity, disturbing material,
gore, and language.
Joseph Joyce is a screenwriter and freelance
critic based in Sherman Oaks.
Willem Dafoe in “Poor Things.” | IMDB