Cruella (2021)
Directed by Craig Gillespie; co-written by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara; starring Emma Stone, Emma Thompson and Joel Fry.
3.5/5
When you’re watching a film and it really appears as though everyone involved had a blast making it, what you’re watching always takes on a brilliant kind of infectious charm. It’s almost a universal law at this point and transcends genre and intended audience. I mean, oftentimes, even the films I really don’t like can sometimes become somewhat enjoyable if everyone seems like they just had a good time.
For me, that’s what makes Cruella a surprisingly fun prequel and helps it to stand independently from the other films it’s tied to. It’s filled with the glitz and glamour you were probably expecting and really doesn’t disappoint when it comes to its stunning costumes and sets, refusing to reduce them to set-dressing and bringing them forward as integral parts of the narrative (a particularly stunning yet fearsome battle-dress piece comes to mind here.)
It certainly isn’t without its bum notes, particularly in the latter end, and still suffers from the more monolithic issues that loom over most of the modern stock of Disney productions, but I think most people will find something within Cruella to really love.
From the moment she was born, an older Cruella (initially played by Tipper Seifert-Cleveland, then later by Emma Stone) reflects, the soon-to-be famed Disney villain was marked out as different for, if nothing else, her by-now iconic black and white hair.
Surprisingly, Estella’s (Cruella’s birth name) youth was one filled with the warm love of her mother (Emily Beecham) and, less surprisingly, rebellion – the “I am woman, hear me roar” kind – mainly against the authorities that were within the halls of her prestigious school.
When her mother is killed, suddenly and for reasons the young Cruella believes to be her fault, everything changes, though. Cruella finds herself racked with guilt and thrust into a world unfit for an orphaned child. Alone, she retreats to London, but is quickly picked up by or, more accurately, picks up the two petty thieves that would soon become her friends, and later henchmen, Jasper (Ziggy Gardner, then Joel Fry) and Horace (Joseph MacDonald, then Paul Walter Hauser) Badun.
Cruella soon takes to hiding her naturally eccentric hair under a heap of red dye and after Jasper manages to wrangle her a gruellingly low-level job at the prestigious Liberty fashion store, she soon stumbles into the path of the veteran designer and career psychopath Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson). What follows is a student-mentor dynamic that quickly turns into a bitter rivalry and, eventually, something much more sinister indeed.
As a comedic crime caper it’s compulsively watchable and I have to disagree with the line of thought that Stone’s portrayal of Cruella’s Jekyllian side, Estella, is dull. The student of fashion by day, anarchistic scene disrupter by night is a thrilling narrative because the two are inextricably tied. Throughout, you’ll find yourself waiting for that friendly persona to split open and Cruella to emerge, and despite her accent being a little cartoonish next to actual Brits of the film (or maybe because of it), Stone’s performance is charismatic to a magnetic extent. Considering she had the monumental task of filling the one and only Glenn Close’s shoes, I’d say she’s done incredibly well here.
It’s also surprisingly nuanced on the issues it decides to concern itself with (it really only pays lip service to some of the perhaps less internationally profitable issues that crop up.) Co-writers Dana Fox and Tony McNamara and director Craig Gillespie (whose most recent work I, Tonya you’ll probably remember fondly) appear to be trying to tackle that modern notion of the “girl-boss” – the sort of late-stage capitalist caricature of the empowered woman who simply takes over from the hyper-powerful male CEO, instead of attempting to dismantle the systems that are oppressing most everyone else – and a tale about two borderline psychotic fashion moguls battling it out for the position at the top turns out to be particularly fertile ground.
This is until that final act, however, where although the film remains entertaining, the themes set up sort take completely the wrong turn, the nature versus nurture argument starting to develop fizzles out, and the pre-existing worries you had regarding this character being the same one who goes on to attempt to skin some particularly cute dalmatians come crashing back in like a particularly confused pigeon via the window.
The film does engage in a sort of revisionism regarding this point later on in the film, with Cruella implying that similarly to her role here, Roger Radcliffe is himself an unreliable narrator, biased against her in his retelling of what occurs later, but that just doesn’t feel as though it suffices as an answer. On its own, this point doesn’t really matter all that much, but combined with the dodgy execution of the film’s headier themes, it all culminates in the sense that Gillespie was hoping the film might live purely on face value.
And to be fair to Gillespie, it kind of does. My one suggestion would be that if you can disregard the film’s pop-cultural ties, then you should probably go ahead and do that.
What you’re signing up for here is less Joker-Esque downwardly-spiralling cynicism applied to an old Disney villain (who would seriously want that?) and more Maleficent meets Oceans 8.
Watched on 28th May 2021