It is an act of vandalism that Poor Things, the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray’s astonishing 1992 novel, even shares a title with Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s atrocious reimagining of a book he didn’t understand. Gray decorated his works with Blakean visionary illustrations, and his 1980s masterpiece Lanark is as close to life-changing as novels get.
Alas, he made the hideous mistake of dying in 2019 at the age of 85, leaving himself at the mercy of the barbarians who survived him. Poor Things, the film, contains a chilling, if unintentional, message for the creative giants of this or any other time, and for everyone else, too: Whatever you do, never, ever die.
In Poor Things — the real one, Gray’s novel — Godwin Baxter, an eccentric loner and scientific genius of 1880s Glasgow, brings a drowned 25-year-old pregnant woman back to life, implanting the brain of the unborn child in the mother’s skull. The saga is recorded in the rediscovered memoir of Archie McCandless, a low-born fellow doctor who befriends Baxter and eventually marries the woman, whom Baxter has named Bella.
Gray informs us in an introduction that he is merely the editor of this text, which he says a historian friend of his recently found in a box of discarded old documents. Unlike the volume’s skeptical discoverer, Gray believes McCandless’s book, much of which consists of competing firsthand accounts of a globe-trotting love affair between Bella and a playboy lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn, is a factual record of the life and achievements of Baxter, one of Scotland’s great forgotten heroes. However, for fairness’s sake, our “editor” includes a rebuttal letter from the real-life Bella that he found enclosed within the original book.
McCandless’s wife, who says her name is Victoria, becomes a doctor, suffragette, and socialist — for her, the book is the delusional and inexplicable fantasy of a useless and daydreaming husband. She didn’t rise from death itself but from the British lower classes, just like Archie.
Or so she claims. Part of the fun of reading Poor Things is the hunt for a single stable truth within this nesting structure of opposed narratives, which riff on a dozen different literary forms. The exposition of the novel’s big mysteries — about whether Baxter is noble or evil or simply lonely, about who Bella is and what she really represents for the novel’s male characters — brings the wondrous reminder that reality is no more cooperative than the book in our hands. Poor Things is about the tragically unbridgeable gulf between men and women and parents and children, the mixed blessings of science and progress, and the unsettled meaning of the good for the individual, for entire nations, and for humanity in general.
The lesser Poor Things, the film, is a floridly pointless female revenge fantasy. There are no competing versions of anything in it. The book has some horrible men, but none is uncomplicated or even portrayed as villainous. Gray, a believer in Scottish independence, could give an imperialist English general and would-be kidnapper the full dimensions of a believable person. In the movie, even Baxter (played here by an autopiloted Willem Dafoe) is a scar-faced monster who imprisons Bella in his townhouse and harrumphs about the primacy of science and the purity of his experiments. He is an unknown figure to Gray’s readers, who understand Bella (or, more accurately, Archie’s allegorical fantasy Bella) as the outcome of both scientific curiosity and Baxter’s sad yearning for familial love.
Lanthimos is also unfair to Bella herself, whom Emma Stone plays as a sex-obsessed airhead. She steals money, which she then gives away in an especially naive and braindead fashion, and transplants one awful man’s brain into a goat. Out of either laziness or disrespect for his audience, Lanthimos makes Bella far more foolish and cruel than her literary inspiration, most of all by excising the Victoria alter ego.
Actually, every character in this movie is more terrible than Gray makes them out to be, including even the very minor ones. In the novel, Baxter’s housekeeper is a kindhearted old woman who turns out to be half of one of the book’s only functional parent-child relationships. In the movie, she’s a stone-faced scold and a willing henchwoman in unethical science experiments. Lanthimos, missing every point possible, even gets the setting wrong, moving the primary action from Gray’s beloved Glasgow to London, the imperial capital.
Perhaps worst of all, Poor Things, the movie, is an aesthetic assault. Gray could write in iambic pentameter and parody Frankenstein, Candide, and Dostoevsky in gorgeous, addictive prose. Fassbinder’s human diorama-type artificiality is just one of the more obvious influences on Lanthimos, who thinks he’s combining the obsessiveness of Kubrick with the whimsy of Fellini and the enlightened gross-out factor of Cronenberg. Lanthimos only exposes his limits: The sets and costumes are headache-inducing down to their color palette, his Paris seems lifted from a Star Wars prequel, and Mark Ruffalo’s accent is a bad parody of Jeremy Irons’s voice-work in The Lion King.
Lanthimos’s Poor Things is a work of alienation from the human race. After a career spent casting an unsparing eye on his characters’ motives and emotions, he has finally reached misanthropy. The cultural atmosphere was working against him here — Gray’s novel is a subtle and searching treatment of the past 300 years of gender politics, while Lanthimos can only parrot the acceptable outlook of his own time. Nearly every male character is a predator, which is not the case in the book or real life.
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Fans of Lanthimos will come away wanting to make excuses for him or to imagine someone had his name attached to this through fraud. The film’s closing idea that whoring is a bright portal to socialism and that their pairing represents the epitome of female liberation is too stupid for the Lanthimos of The Killing of a Sacred Deer or The Favorite to have come up with himself. He certainly couldn’t have gotten it from Gray, a socialist who believed in the rigorous interrogation of his own ideas. Lanthimos’s film is crowd-pleasing agitprop for audiences that he fears will leave the theater unsatisfied if there’s no active endorsement of sex-positivity or a certain notion of social justice.
In exposing his limits, Lanthimos has traced the present-day crisis of his art form. Movies are wonderful, and sometimes dangerous, because they’re the ideal popular medium for the clear expression of stories and ideas, or at least they used to be before the internet, the pandemic, and some deep collective failing nearly killed off mass-market theaters. Books can be world-changing, on both an individual and planetary scale, because of the intimacy of the reading experience. But the written world is also indispensable because it allows for complexity and self-argument like no other form. Of course, the best movies have booklike ambiguity, while the best books achieve cinematic vividness. Yet the worst movies, like the worst books, are also perfectly clear about what they’re after.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.