Brain surgery and world travel, 3.5 readers. That’s the stuff this Oscar contender is made of.
Your old pal BQB here, dodging dog ducks and goat chickens with a review.
I rarely say this about a movie, but if this one doesn’t win the Best Picture Oscar, then all 3.5 of you should write a sternly worded complaint letter to the Academy. It’s that good and if it doesn’t sweep all categories, especially of the acting variety, I’ll eat my hat.
Why? Because it’s that different. It’s that strange. It’s that unique. In a world of prequels, sequels and reboots, director Yorgos Lanithmos has brought us something that we’ve never seen before. He has a history of making strange, bizarre dark comedies such as “The Favourite,” another past Oscar contender starring Emma Stone in which two lesbians fight for a 1700s Queen of England’s affections and all the power that comes with it.
Here, Yorgos and Stone renew their creative partnership to bring you a feminist Frankenstein that is bold, message laden, yet not too preachy and laugh out loud funny, yet morbid, sick and twisted. Every actor involved – Stone, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo appear as you’ve never seen them before, frankly as no one as seen anyone before and while Stone’s and Ruffalo’s noms are deserved, I feel like Dafoe was quite cheated as he was passed over as a potential gold statute winner this year and wrongfully so.
The plot? Mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is horribly deformed, his mangled face and body the result of years of bizarre experiments performed by his own mad scientist father. He explains his various deformities in terms of his father’s mad science findings i.e. “when he removed that he discovered we need that” and so on.
Dr. Baxter discovers the body of a woman who has just committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. When he finds the body washed up on shore, he discovers the very much dead woman is carrying a living child in her womb so naturally he, ok this is where you would think he would write off the deceased mother and save the live baby but no, he cracks open the dead mother’s skull and swaps out the live baby’s brain for the dead mother’s brain, bringing mother back to life with a baby brain and essentially making her her own daughter and mother.
To Godwin, this makes perfect sense. To everyone else he tells this story to, they think he is quite mad indeed. Such is the life of a mad scientist.
Godwin names his new creation Bella (Emma Stone) and though she has an adult’s body, she has the mind of a baby. Throughout the movie, we see Bella, despite her adult form, progress in mental state from infancy to toddler-hood, to childhood, rebellious teenager and finally, full blown adult hood, all in a relatively short time span, and Stone’s ability to pull off these various stages make her very deserving of the Best Actress Oscar. Extra credit for having to run around with those caterpillar eyebrows and crazy, frilly, big shouldered, Victorian outfits.
Of course, a baby’s brain in an adult body yields all sorts of hijinx. For the first part of the film, Bella walks and talks like a toddler and throws temper tantrums like one when she doesn’t get her way. Perhaps we’ve all dealt with a precocious tyke who screams and throw things when they are upset but when a 30 something old woman acts like this, definitely hide the sharp objects.
Dr. Baxter takes on a teaching assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youseff) who is given the task of observing Bella and taking notes vis a vis her mental growth. Her exploits as she learns basic things and discusses them matter of factly are quite humorous indeed. Bella and Max fall for one another and are engaged to be wed. Dr. Baxter calls in nefarious cad/lawyer Duncan Wedderburn to draw up a marriage contract only for the perverse Wedderburn to take advantage of Bella’s naivete and lead her astray.
Off they go on a worldwide adventure, and as Bella’s mind expands she becomes increasingly more difficult for Wedderburn to control (comically so), the underlying message being the smarter a woman is the less likely she’ll be controlled by men but this is done with a lot of laughs rather than rammed down your throat.
Perverts who have the hots for Stone will be glad to know she’s naked and having hardcore sex for literally half the movie. Bella refers to this as “furious jumping” and enjoys the fun of it, doing it indiscriminately with anyone interested and unaware of all the potential negative ramifications, thus taken advantage of quite a bit.
Ruffalo, who usually plays a typical straight man, is fun as the lecherous rake who seduces Bella into a life of debauchery, only to go mad when Bella becomes an expert hedonist and engages in transgressions that send Wedderburn into a frenzy.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. It would surprise me if this doesn’t win several Oscars including Best Picture. It is rare for a comedy to win Best Picture, but its that good. Visually, it’s at times pleasing and shocking, like a trainwreck you don’t want to look away from what with all of Dr. Baxter’s twisted experiments brought to life on screen. Superb acting from all involved. Original in a time that lacks originality.
Bookshelf Battle 