Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Ah, dang, I was hoping for so much more.
Or maybe less, since they crammed a whole lot of unnecessary stuff in that was pointless.
The biggest thing I was waiting to see was whether or not this was going to be an attempt by Disney to try and redeem yet another villain.
And, sadly, it was.
Let me start by saying that Emma Stone does a great Cruella, though for her to come from such humble beginnings maybe underpins how out of place her Queen’s English sounds.
I really do like Stone’s Cruella laugh, it’s more subtle than was the 1990s Glenn Close version. Stone’s laugh has that true aristocratic feeling rather than the caricature of evil.
Due to Disney’s ban on smoking in their movies, Cruella has lost her iconic cigarette holder, but I think the cane works well in its place.
The character herself is a nice contemporary update, even though the film is set in the 70s.
And, needless to say, Emma Thompson is absolutely luminous, stealing every scene she’s in.
I wanted Cruella to be more Vivienne Westwood.
Punk started breaking into the mainstream in the mid-1970s, giving voice to a burgeoning revolution against the more excessive style of mainstream music of the time.
Punk bands prevalent during this era operated under a DIY mentality, often self-producing and distributing their music independently.
The Sex Pistols led the charge in the UK, while the Ramones did the same in the US.
Punk was was counter-culture, politically charged, and in your face.
It’s a key element in the style of Cruella, especially as she fights back against he upper classes through aggressively charged art.
But in the end it feels like it only serves as the backdrop of Cruella’s rise to prominence.
While the film uses the punk rock revolution visually, it fails to use it effectively for the plot.
I get that the movie tries to give her deeper motivation, but it fails because it both goes too far and not far enough.
Her henchmen are now not as blindly loyal as in previous iterations, one of them even becoming the voice of her conscience.
This establishing of found family ultimately is what makes the movie not work, as they refrain from committing to either Estella or Cruella in th eend.
I wanted Cruella to be the rebel who broke punk rock fashion into the high fashion world (a la Vivienne Westwood) and I wanted her to be the change the stuffy ’50s and ’60s, more traditional mindsets didn’t want.
I wanted that rebellion to be her motivation and her origin, that anger and frustration fuelling her spiralling into darkness, because it could have been a wonderful commentary on the designer fashion world and the filthy rich.
We’ve lost people to that depraved world before, why not Cruella?
But while Cruella does end up in the dark underbelly of the fashion industry, it isn’t really used to full effect, only hinted at.
Stronger is the commentary on consumerism and media manipulation, which kind of feels a little beside the point once you realise Cruella isn’t going to commit to being fully Cruella.
Maybe I’m just being a stuffy purist who likes her villains to not be so easily forgivable.
When Maleficent got her origin story, it made sense. She was originally excluded and snubbed more than anything else.
Ursula is more akin to the wild feminine archetype who refuses to kowtow to patriarchal standards.
And both these women represent the face of women who endure under the patriarchy, when the world is neither safe nor supportive.
Neither are looking for your understanding, only showing you that you can like or dislike how they live their lives.
Cruella is trying to redeem a woman who wants to skin dogs and make a coat out of them.
But a woman who wants to skin an animal simply because their coat is beautiful, sounds exactly like high fashion.
I get it that it’s distasteful to a modern audience, and I see why this PG-13 movie steered well clear of making that coat out of actual dogs (as did its predecessors).
However, Cruella, an evident dog lover herself, turns out to be the progenitor of the arguably inhumane population of Dalmatians (101 pups from one pair, hello?!).
And then she ends up hating them so much (if we consider this the pre-quel to existing films)? Or she gave the pups away because she wanted to breed more for a coat? I’m confused.
Confusing was also the attempted feminist redemption arc in the film.
Had they stuck to the fashions stuff, foregone the faffing between Estella and Cruella once she commits to being Cruella, I think I would have enjoyed it a great deal more.
For Cruella to eventually become what she so ardently fought against, would have made sense.
Instead, the film ends on a lukewarm note where how Cruella looks on the outside is the strongest marker of her inner duality, rather than the duality itself (consider DC’s Two-Face as a comparison, or even Harley Quinn!).
In the end, perhaps my greatest grievance with the film is that it’s a PG-13 film.
Had it been a true punk rock film with strong adult themes, I might not feel so betrayed.
But I guess this is the problem when you get excited about your childhood stories being remade; you’re not twelve anymore.
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