Poor Things (2023) Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
I admit that, for much of Emma Stone’s career, I underestimated her skill. I believe I first saw her in Superbad, all the way back in 2007, in which a very drunk Jonah Hill tumbles forward and breaks her nose. Great movie! Holds up! Stone gets hilariously angry! I, and perhaps the culture at large, slotted her into the role of Funny Actress in Mainstream Comedies, as evidenced by Easy A and The House Bunny, charming romps as well. It can be tricky for actresses to transition out of this lane into more serious roles. Amanda Seyfried has managed that move perhaps more deftly than any other actress in her generation, catalyzing it with a role in Twin Peaks: The Return as Becky, Shelly’s wayward daughter.
In 2023, Emma Stone made a similar move, and she did it extremely well. Her performances in Poor Things and The Curse demonstrate that she has the range and, especially, the fearlessness to be considered among the best actresses working. The Curse is incredible, and I’ll write more about it later. Poor Things is good. Good, not great. But Stone’s performance is phenomenal.
Stone plays, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, a sexy baby. Literally: in a steampunk fantasy version of the late Victorian era, Stone’s body is discovered by Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist. Stone is dead; she is also pregnant. Dafoe performs an operation that places the in utero baby’s brain in the mother’s body. Because, obviously! Science! Gawky in her adult body, Stone struggles to understand the world, eventually traveling across Europe, where she learns about sex, suffering, and socialism.
The story, as befits a modern-day retelling of various 19th-century tropes, can feel diagrammatic. Sensuality—check! Social conscience—check! Off to the next lesson! Yet throughout, Stone plays it all with a strange mix of the deadpan, of wide-eyed naivete, and lack of self-awareness. And damn if she doesn’t pull it off. Perhaps actresses who get their start in the comedic realm are best positioned to portray the full range of human emotion.
Iron Council by China Mieville (2004)
From one steampunk phantasmagoria to another: Iron Council is the concluding volume of Mieville’s Bas-Lag trilogy, sprawling fantasy novels that take place in a world where scarab-headed beings called khepri built statues with their saliva and prisoners called ‘remade’ have their bodies altered in unspeakable ways as punishment. Weird shit, basically. I love them.
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