The new film Cruella (in theaters and on Disney+, May 28) is going okay until the fashion show. Young Cruella de Vil (Emma Stone) is trying to get revenge against a cruel couture designer, the Baroness (Emma Thompson), by staging a guerrilla runway show to upstage the Baroness’s own. It’s 1970s London, and Cruella and some other models take to the makeshift catwalk in shocking new glam-punk garb while a band thrashes away at a song.
It’s at this point that one realizes that the film, directed by I, Tonya’s Craig Gillespie, really is trying to be cool. And not just cool; it’s crediting a Disney character (inspired by a Dodie Smith character) with the invention of punk. Cruella is yet another act of co-opting by the biggest entertainment company in the world, an attempt to graft a cheap rebel spirit onto a naked exercise in I.P. synergy.
Cruella is an origin story that, much in the way of Maleficent or Wicked, seeks to humanize a once perfectly captivating villain. Disney was not content to leave its iconic dog-snatching character as she was known in 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians—then a wicked former schoolmate of the human heroine’s, voiced with rasp and crackle by Betty Lou Gerson—or from 1996’s 101 Dalmatians, in which she’s pitched as a mean fashionista played by a go-for-broke Glenn Close.
Cruella’s brand was, it seems, too valuable to be let to lie dormant. But, a movie about an outright villain probably wouldn’t do these days. Thus this wheezy attempt to give us the other side of the story, reducing the character to a tragic history bought wholesale from the content factory. Cruella is defanged retroactively before she’s really had a chance to do anything interesting. By the end of the film, it’s impossible to track, or imagine, how this Cruella becomes the future Cruella.
Perhaps we are meant to extract psychological insights from the mean Dalmatians that stalk young Cruella’s life, as she goes from ostracized girl at school, to sudden orphan, to expert London pickpocket with dreams of designing chic clothing for rich people. (How punk!) In the movie’s crass arithmetic, the animals are meant to be shrewd table-setting, explaining her bloodlust for the breed’s pelts later on in life. But those sorry, snarling dogs—intended as both clever wink and actual pathology—are as perfunctory as the rest of the film’s origin-story stuff.
Cruella is more interested in being an edgy heist movie-meets-Devil Wears Prada riff, as Cruella (also called Estella) finds herself under the tutelage of the Baroness and gradually susses out a dark connection that binds them. (Aline Brosh McKenna, who wrote Prada, gets a story credit on Cruella.) The film is obsessed with its stylish trappings, preening around and only occasionally remembering to tell a story. The costuming, by Jenny Beavan, is indeed exquisite; her ornate designs deserve a smarter, sharper showcase than Gillespie affords them. Cruella is otherwise a thin Tim Burton knockoff, elaborately constructed but from lesser material, fraying all over.
Swanning and skulking in those fabulous costumes, Stone and Thompson cut fine figures. Thompson, lucky devil, is not saddled with any task so lame and fruitless as humanizing her villain. She gets to be all imperious nastiness all the time, which the actor seems to enjoy, face tilted and frowning as she regards her prey with chilly nonchalance.
It’s not really Stone’s fault that Cruella is such a confusing character. The script, by Dana Fox and The Favourite Oscar nominee Tony McNamara (with McKenna, Kelly Marcel, and Steve Zissis receiving story credit) suggests that she may be mentally ill, but there’s little outward indicator of that in the movie’s portraiture. She’s mostly out for very justifiable revenge, and is sad about a loss that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a Disney movie. Cruella seems aware of herself and quite in control; if there is an actual mental health crisis happening, the movie does nothing to show it. Stone tries hard to reconstruct and flesh out an icon, and does manage isolated moments when her Cruella looms as large as she’s supposed to. Most of her work is in vain, though.
Who could really parse anything clear or distinctive out of the din of Gillespie’s creation? Just as he did with I, Tonya, Gillespie turns Cruella into a relentless parade of needle drops: The Rolling Stones (“She’s Like a Rainbow”) gives way to the Zombies (“Time of the Season”) gives way to Nina Simone (“Feeling Good”) and so on. These big music cues rattle with insecurity, a desperation to conjure up a mood—a place and time, an attitude, a cultural savvy—that isn’t there in the work itself. Cruella is a tiring, deeply uncool assault, reaching its nadir with that hammy fashion show, in which punk is born and then immediately smothered in its crib.
Perhaps the biggest question of Cruella is not how she got the way she got, but who this movie is for. It’s probably too violent for little kids, too kiddie for older ones, and little more than a loud chore for parents. Marketing materials have suggested that we embrace the film’s transgressive spirit—there’s a small, mostly sidelined character who is coded as queer or non-binary or something; Disney doesn’t care to provide more detail—but Cruella’s ersatz punk is as safe as can be.
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