Back in 2013, I briefly reconsidered re-naming my blog What Movie Did THEY See? It was my reaction to finding myself diametrically opposed to most other film bloggers on the merits of so many films. (For example, I was - and remain - baffled by the generally very favorable response to Josh Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing. Most loved it, I hated it. Anyone re-watched that lately? Anybody own it on DVD? I thought not. Thank you, I feel vindicated.)
A decade later, I'm having the same sense of WTF? with regard to one critical darling that I didn't care for. I'm equally baffled by the outpouring of gratuitous nastiness being slung at another film that I very much liked.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite) never does things by halves. If there's grossness, provocation or discomfort to be had in a situation, he'll lay it on thick. Poor Things is no exception to that rule. Visually stunning, but relentlessly shocking, it'll either delight you or wear you out. Myself, I fall definitively into the category of the worn out.
Lanthimos' favorite actress, Emma Stone, plays Bella, the Frankenstein-like experiment of one Dr. Godwin Baxter (William Dafoe, made up to looks as if pieces of his face had been torn off and then sewn back in place - rather grotesque and never explained). Bella, while pregnant, killed herself by jumping into the Thames River. Baxter implants her unborn child's still-functioning brain into Bella's cranium and brings her back to life. We then get to watch Stone play a grown woman with the mind of an infant, and initially she has great fun with the role - unsteadily staggering around like a toddler, speaking unintelligibly, throwing food, and so forth. Then she starts to learn things - including, to her endless delight, how to masturbate - and it's no holds barred from that point on. Bella swiftly progresses from self-pleasuring to coupling with men to working in a brothel while sorting out what pleases her and what doesn't. She also travels, reads Emerson and gives money to the poor. But mostly she has a lot of sex.
It wasn't prudishness so much as weariness and sensory overload that had me squirming in my seat and even zoning out entirely from time to time. The spectacular scenic design and fine performances aside... how much boinking does a person have to see to get the point? Every time Stone took her pants off, all I could think of was the plaudits and award nominations she'd be showered with for her 'brave' performance. It's right up there with Barry Keoghan's performance in Saltburn in terms of brazen envelope-pushing. Between that film and this one, I've now reached my 'outrageousness' quota for the year.
All through Poor Things, I kept wondering what it was like for Stone on the set, shooting these scenes day in and day out. Was she game for all this or did she have any doubts, any moments when she thought, "I CAN'T do this scene."? Was she ever coerced into doing a scene she wasn't comfortable with? What's bugging me is that, even though it's Stone giving that unabashedly raunchy performance, there's a male director pulling the strings. They've worked together before; maybe he's doing things to help Stone feel safe and protected on set. Maybe not.
And this is where I start thinking about Jane Fonda.
Fonda went on record recently about a French director she'd auditioned for in the '60s (but didn't name in the interview). She was horrified when he told her he'd need to hear what she sounded like when she climaxed in order to consider for the role. Fonda was clearly traumatized by this experience. She's also spoken, regretfully, about the fact that she had to get drunk in order to shoot the "stripping naked at zero gravity" scene that opens Barbarella, directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim. That's how terrified she was.
Barbarella, like Bella Baxter on some level, was a sexual adventurer, but also a lewd punchline in her day. Stone's Bella, by contrast, is being celebrated for her lack of shame about her body and her determination to experience pleasure on her own terms. In theory, that's a step forward for women, but the graphic depiction of it here feels more like a step backward to me. For better or worse, I am a product of my own generation (a late-wave Baby Boomer who turns 64 this month), and I can't quite make this leap. Stone's portrayal of Bella, under the direction of the ever-provocative Lanthimos, still feels a bit exploitative to me.
I'd be curious to hear what Stone says about her Poor Things experience when she gets into her 80s. I won't be alive then to hear what she says, but I'd still be curious.
With Maestro, the whole problem is the title. When you make a film about Leonard Bernstein and call it Maestro, audiences expect a full-bodied biopic highlighting Bernstein's musical accomplishments. But a better title might have been Lenny and Felicia: Portrait of a Marriage.
Because that's what Maestro really is - an artsy, impressionistic look at a difficult marriage between the bisexual Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre (impeccably portrayed by Carey Mulligan , who I dearly hope will win the Oscar). And by 'impressionistic," I mean it's a collage of pointed glimpses at the couple's life throughout various stages in their marriage. Admittedly, it omits or shortchanges some of Bernstein's male lovers and several of his best known musical works. West Side Story, for example, is mentioned twice in passing. Many of his compositions are there, but often unidentified and used as underscoring in scenes with dialogue. While it doesn't delve into the specifics of Bernstein's musical career too deeply, it does conjures up a heady vibe of the energy and passion that drove him. If you take the film on its own terms, and don't demand that it be something else, it's actually a very accomplished piece of filmmaking.
Of course, some cannot accept Maestro in its actual form. While it has a respectable 78% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, many prominent critics fall into the "Rotten" column. And those that do are shockingly dismissive of the film's writer/director/star Bradley Cooper. Even the enthusiastic endorsements Cooper has received from Bernstein's son and daughters don't appear to be helping.
Richard Brody, the New Yorker's pompous gasbag of a film critic, is not alone in deeming Cooper's recreation of Bernstein directing a Mahler symphony at Ely Cathedral "a brazen, Oscar-striving money shot." Cooper, who has a well-documented lifelong passion for orchestral conducting, spent SIX YEARS honing his conducting skills for that scene, which is at least 100,000 times what Brody spent honing his snarky little swipe at Cooper's ambition. If Daniel Day-Lewis had spent six years learning to conduct Mahler for a film role, he'd have been elevated to sainthood. Just sayin'.
It's fair to say that Maestro misses a few opportunities. It would have been fun, for example, to see the infamous fund-raising soiree that he and Felicia hosted for the Black Panthers - the one so caustically described in Tom Wolfe's equally infamous essay Those Radical Chic Evenings. But I firmly maintain that, if you're looking for an exhaustive, definitive portrait of Leonard Bernstein, you need a mini-series for that. A two-hour movie can't come anywhere near getting that job done. Cooper chose a narrower focus, and within the boundaries he set for himself, he did a more than admirable job.
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