Review of Poor Things

Did you watch Poor Things?

I saw the snippets online and on TV, and the scenes looked sumptuous.

Emma Stone is one of my favorite actors.

I watched Poor Things last night on HULU streaming. The first few minutes into it, I was glad my husband was outside; he would not have liked it at all.

The movie is set in the Victorian age, and Stone plays Bella Baxter. She is innocent and awkward in talk and movement, but why?

Here it comes, folks. She has the brain of a child. Dr. Baxter does medical experiments; sometimes Bella can do what she wishes on corpses too in his experimental lab.

Stone acts the heck out of her part. Her posture, walking, facial expressions, and speaking are spectacular when you realize she is Dr. Godwin Baxter’s experiment. He replaced her deceased brain with that of a fetus (and it is her unborn fetus he used!).

Stone's performance as Bella shows a woman trying to learn in a body that is disconnected from the brain. She has temper tantrums, is rude, spits out food, and hits people.

Baxter hires Max McCandless to document Bella’s progress. He sits and watches her all day and notes everything she does. He falls in love with her, and she agrees to marry him.

A shyster, Mr. Duncan Wedderburn, played expertly by Mark Ruffalo, convinces Bella to go away with him. She wants to experience the world before she settles down with her fiancé, who agrees to her trip.

Now, with the REAL adventures begin.

There are rough sex scenes, many of them. Crude talk comes out of Bella’s mouth, some describing sexual acts that she wants done or has experienced and wants more of. We see her transform into a woman with a mind and a strong will, much different from the tantrum child.

Wedderburn has trouble with Bella, so he purchases tickets on a steamship. Bella is trapped on this huge ship with him, giving him more power over her. Bella finds friendship in an older woman and the younger companion traveling with the woman. Wedderburn claims he loves Bella and wants to marry her, but she tells him she is engaged, which enrages him.

Bella is uninhibited in her quest for sex, allowing the director to showcase so many parts of Emma Stone, more than we see of her sexual partners (of course). If you ever wanted to see Emma Stone naked, this movie is your chance.

Emma is shown children in desolation and treated cruelly and decides to give Wedderburn’s gambling winnings to them (she is tricked by sailors who steal the money). Wedderburn is infuriated; the ship discovers he has no money to pay his debts, and they are thrown from the ship, destitute, at the next port.

Emma finds that she can make money as a prostitute and works for a madam of the town’s whore house. She surprises Wedderburn with money Dr. Baxter sewed into her dress and says she will buy him a ticket home. He takes all of the money and runs.

Emma continues as a sex worker but decides a better way is to be interested in the clients. She plays question games with them first and, if they have a bad odor, douses them with fragrance oils.

After her stint doing this, she goes home to her fiancé and the weird scientist Dr. Baxter. On his estate, strange creatures that are the result of his experiments on animals run around (visibly disturbing).

A man shows up.

Reader, can you guess who this is?

It is her husband from her previous life, and to make matters worse, Bella agrees to go with him.

She finds out quickly why she hated him before, causing her to commit suicide with a child almost ready to be born.

She overhears his conversation with a doctor about circumcising Bella. His desire is to take all of her sexual pleasure parts, so that she will be more amenable to being a good housewife and bearing his children.

The man is sorely mistaken - Bella is not his wife now and is not amenable to bearing children. She uses his drugs and his weapon on him and escapes home to Dr. Baxter and McCandless.

Dr. Baxter dies. It seems that now Bella is fully cognizant of who she is and is a mature and happy woman. We see her drinking on the patio with a friend from the whore house.

We hear goats bleating. Then we see her ex-husband crawling on the ground, bleating like a goat, eating the greenery. Justice! She knew enough surgery to change his brain.

It seems the plot is a way to take a dead woman, put a baby’s brain into her, and raise her so that she belongs to you and will do as you please. Experiment on a person in a woman’s body, with a child’s emotions, slowly maturing and then remove her from her family's safety (Dr. Baxter) and her fiancé McCandless. Wedderman wanted to show her off as a beautiful creature (who embarrassed him constantly), and did all he could to control her, and own her.

Many times, in the sex scenes or the surgery scenes of experimentation, I had to run the film ahead.

Also, HULU kept jamming up with the damned spinning circle constantly in the last thirty minutes of the film.

I just wanted to get to the end of this horrid movie!! Wasted my time except for the beautifully created scenery. It also creeped me out and not in a good way.

Just take out the actors, the abominable creatures, and the spoken words, and show us the visuals, the steamship, the buildings, the costumes. That would make a great movie, not this gumbo of an Australian screenwriter’s adaptation of a dirty book by a dead Scottish man, centered on a man’s attempt to control a woman who – gasp – actually enjoys sex for the pleasure of it.

I watched the Oscars and the camera panned to Annette Benning, who lost to Emma. She had a sort-of glare on her face. Now I understand it - not because Emma beat her. I think it was because of the shitstorm in this movie of over the top sexual encounters, nudity and nonsense. Older Annette knew the Oscar idiots would vote for that and not her acting in a story based on true events. They would want the weird and over the top.