Cruella (Dir Craig Gillespie, 2h 13m)
Well. It finally happened, my dears. One of the films I reviewed has finally driven me mad, dear reader. I now write to you from a tottering pile in the English countryside, cosplaying what the Disney board of directors thinks the 1970s British Punk scene looked like, drinking tea out of a flowerpot and hammering away at this review from an antique typewriter. Everything, of course, is either black or white, someone has written in scribbled notes on the walls, furniture, and my clothing, basic character archetypes, slogans, and the sort of pap that can be slapped on a t-shirt at the Disney Store for £24.99. Everything has a kindergarten Vivian Westwood meets Alexander McQueen edginess to it. Edginess with all the point and pierce of plastic craft scissors. Here's one of the slogans: "Uninspired". Another: "The Death of Cinema is Popularism". A third: "Disney is Single-Handedly Murdering Innovation and the Competition, and, Darling, Its Hands are Such a Fetching Red".
My, my. Such concepts. And, as for myself, I'm feeling awfully rebellious and alternative as a Radio Disney cover of Iggy and the Stooges "I Wanna Be Your Dog" blasts out. The 1970s, ladies and gentleman, has arrived at the point where it's naught but product, a style to throw on and off as the mood takes you. It's rebellion for the masses, packaged, and marketed, and stamped with an anarchy A. I recline, take a sip of tea. Giving in to popularism, to the lowest common denominator, to the great industrial machine at the heart of Western Cinema that never innovates, only replicates is a form of madness, and to this madness, dearest reader, I have finally succumbed. You should try it sometime, darlings, it's fun. As I recline on a chez lounge, pick safety pins out of my coiffiered hair, and watch as a representative of the Walt Disney Corporation pick their "First Confirmed Gay Character" out on an antique television, in what's now become an almost annual tradition of bait-meets-hook-meets-cavalcade-of-thinkpieces-meets-tired-facepalm-from-LGBTQ-community, and as my copy of "Best of the 60s and 70s" slowly rotates on the record player beside me, I think back to what made me this way.
Ah, yes, Cruella.
Cruella.
Let's go back to the 1990s. We've been here before, haven't we? This isn't our first go round, our first merry-go-round on the great remake bender. Oh no. 1996, alongside Disney topping off their first Renaissance with the still sublime The Hunchback of Notre Dame, brought us their first foray into live action adaptions. For what it's worth, 101 Dalmatians is a solidly faithful adaption of what's always been a B-Tier Disney film, the original held back by the (in hindsight astonishing) box office bomb of Sleeping Beauty forcing Disney to cut costs and corners in the animation process. The original is, thus, a charming example of the studio's sketchier early 1960s style, and the live action adaption is, at least, smart enough to cast Glenn Close in full grand-dame scenery chewing glory, and to bring the tale up to the present, if the film itself is essentially otherwise in lockstep to the original. A roundly terrible sequel followed in 2000, and that was that.
Except, of course, it wasn't.
A decade later, Tim Burton wanders into Wonderland with Johnny Depp et al in tow, finds, and promptly chugs the bottle marked "Remake Me!", a billion dollars spill out of him and Bob Iger looks at his watch and realises it's time to make an absolutely obscene amount of money in cinema's grandest "money for old rope" scheme. Cue the montage, cue up "Money, That's What I Want" by the Flying Lizards, and let's roll. Maleficient, a solid reimagining/remake of Sleeping Beauty in which we're shown a more empathetic side of Disney's greatest villains makes $760 million. Kenneth Brannagh remakes Cinderella on a comparative shoe-string, and makes over half a billion dollars. Now we're talking. Jon Favreau, already single-handedly powering the Disney machine via the Marvel Cinematic Universe, remakes Jungle Book into a solid adventure movie with impressive special effects, and tops that at $967 million.
Up steps James Bobin with a sequel for Alice, needle scratch, ignore that one. To Beauty and the Beast, the undeniable high-mark of Disney's first renaissance, and whilst the whole unnecessaryness of this entire exercise is already fully on show, it's an absolute slamdunk, as Disney walk away with $1.25 billion dollars. Next track. Ooh, ABBA with "Money". Neat. By now, Disney are on a roll, and their next two choices are a left-field curveball in the form of an adult Christopher Robin, that still pulls in nearly $200 million, and an Oscar, and an absolutely botched home run that leaves Tim Burton's Dumbo lost somewhere in its overly dark and sombre tone. Even these can't stop the remake program, and next up are two more of the Renaissance films.
Stop the reel, hold freeze on myself silloutted against CGI Simba unconvincingly showing emotion, fade that down to black, drop newspaper headlines about the Disney remakes being shameless cashcows, stamp over this with the word NOSTALGIA in nice mismatched punk-style newspaper font in fresh red. Raise eyebrow artfully. See, nostalgia sells. Correction. Nostalgia doesn't just sell, it sells at a higher profit margin than original works. For all the neckbeardish cries of ruined childhoods, and SJW pandering, nostalgia is the big trend right now, through remakes, reimagining, reduxes and the like. It's...a remarkably clever decision. You already have familiarity, so marketing can be pinpointed down into making absolutely sure that hit of childhood memories and seratonin are delivered to your brain, the merchandising can roll onward forever, and the best part? Disney's library isn't even close to empty so these can be launched out into the world practically forever, with sequels to boot.
The imaginative cost of having to create these films is essentially zero, any dated elements in it can be filleted out and progressive, pseudo-feminist concepts can be air-dropped in, and of course, a veritable cavalcade of "First Gay Disney Characters" can be lobbed in for, uh, the gays and the girls to feel like this film might be talking to them. Aladdin and The Lion King, two utterly soulless reanimations of the beloved Renaissance, one utterly buggering the plot and feel of Disney's Arabian fairytale, and the other a technologically horrifying wildlife documentary devoid of expression or animation, make $2.5 billion dollars between them. Lady and the Tramp, ironically perhaps the film that, between its so-so status among Disney's canon and its dated and offensive characterisations, is ripe for a remake, is pretty much dumped onto Disney+ because, by this point, Disney can just drop $60 million of film as a carrot on its streaming service. A sequel to Maleficent does, at least show that the taste for these remakes is lagging, barely breaking even even at $500 million.
Change visuals. Slow mournful instrumental electric guitar version of "Reflections", slow motion footage from 1998's Mulan, newsprint of reviews over the top. Red punk font: "COVID Closes Cinemas". And atop all this mechanical regurgitation sits Mulan, a fundamentally broken film that at last, seemed a burst of light. The project was over, the machine had stopped in its tracks, finally beaten by a virus, the hubris of Disney in charging $30 for a film that would be free in months, a hollow-ringing feminist narrative warped to breaking point, and an indifferent Chinese market. And that was that. Roll titles. Lights up. Beatles bow. Dear audience, that was the folly of Disney, I've been your narrator and coming soon are wonderful original Disney films written and created and told by artists rather than accountants.
Except, of course, they arent. And no, that wasn't it.
Far from it.
It's just the beginning.
And now, dear reader, if you will, a short aside on the concept of the girlboss. Ahem. It's 2014, and the blogger Sophia Amoruso, via her by-now long since remaindered memoir of turning an eBay store semi-respectable and professional into the brand Nasty Gal, unleashes, quote unquote hashtag girlboss unto the world. Far from dismanting the patriachy, why not become the patriachy, but, you know, with girls? Let alone the cast that Amoruso's company had an employee turnover to rival Mark E Smith's legendary The Fall and openly stole designs from competitors, it produces the little white lie (that quickly turned ash grey and then jet black) that working hard, and melding together one's feminine identity with hardnosed business acumen, and then welding that onto the endless capitalist drive for more, would make one successful in the masculine world.
Far from being the female boss of the 1980s and 1990s, a defeminized creature who has to take on masculine identity and ideals (ironically, like Glenn Close's character in The Devil Wears Prada), it's a altogether warmer, more positive, and more feminist concept; and coupled with its very nature, a beast of social media. The patriachy could, very easily, be shopped around-indeed, it came with a caveat that you were almost obliged to to help your fellow woman out, women could help each other up the ladder, to success, and, for a few years, it became oh so very feminist to shop. Until, of course, the allegations of, to misuse the now memetic line, #girlboss #gaslighting #gatekeeping rolled in, these #girlboss led enviroments found to be just as toxic as male led ones, with often horrifying allegations coming from companies that adopted a feminist wellbeing image. This, of course, is without mentioning that this was a trend that extended only as far as the preserve of white, middle class, conventionally attractive, openly capitalistic women, with early proponent of the #girlboss, Leigh Stein annoucing its death on 22nd July 2020
Of course, ala Twain, over at Walt Disney, rumour of the #girlboss's death have been greatly exaggerated-indeed, the girlboss is in rude health in Anheim California. We've had several of them already, including Aladdin's Princess Jasmine, bumped up to second lead to sing her two songs of empowerment inside staid monarchical circles, Belle (already a fairly feminist character for the Disney Princesses) punched up into a veritable female liberationist against her backward village of jocks and curtain twitchers, and of course, the girlboss queen herself, Beyoncé, as Naala, a character who does nothing different from her animated counterpart and basically stunt-casting on high. Cruella, though, is the girlboss to end all girlbosses. And it's here that we come back on track, the music fades, and we turn to...Well, not Cruella yet. We still need to fill in a few gaps.
We turn to the elephant in the room. Step forward, Joquain Phoenix.
We need to talk about Joker. Or more accurately, we need to talk about how Cruella ended up this way. Joker, alongside giving edgy teenagers everywhere a poster to slap on their wall of Joquain Phoenix in full clown makeup descending the stairs, in full pomp, was a character driven piece of someone pushed too far by society wreaking their revenge, in a slick, if overly derivative homage to the mid to late 70s heyday of Martin Scorsese. A fragile man riles against the world, before giving in to their inner demons and unleashing them on an unsuspecting city that they eventually bring to its knees, and the fact that that person just happens to be one of the most famous comic book characters of all time is perhaps the greatest trick that mainstream cinema has ever pulled. It also made over a billion dollars, impressive work for an R-rated film.
So, when the first trailers, cut to 60s and 70s rock music arrived for Cruella, the penny dropped. Disney had taken notes. They wanted a slice of that pie-not a new tactic for Disney, but certainly the strangest film it's been aimed again. It's painfully apparent. They were going to make Joker, for the most important demographic in cinema after overly nerdy men into foreign cinema. Teenage girls. Teenage girls who are very into the mid-1970s work of Martin Scorsese. Because, even in the minute and a half trailer, of grungy London, tautly cut action, scuffed up typefaces, and a wild-eyed and chaotic Emma Stone waxing lyrical about madness, Todd Phillips' (and by extension, Marty's) grubby fingerprints are all over this film. This is before we even get into the meat of just how lazily this film lifts from a lazy homage to one of cinema's greats. More on that later.
So, we have Cruella as our heroine. And herein lies the biggest problem of Cruella as a piece of cinema. This is a prequel to a film where De Vil tries to kill ninety nine puppies to make a coat. That's literally her modus oparandi. She wants to kill nearly a hundred animals to make something to wear. There is no side to her; she doesn't have Ursula's incredibly well wrought character arc of the quasi mother, and crone and swinging swipe at gender politics by way of basis on the great Divine, nor the spurned medieval politic of Maleficent, nor the understandable "good man twisted to low villainy" of Scar, Dr Facilier, and Hook. Hell, she doesn't even have a motive to go after the dogs, unlike the put-upon Hades or Shere Khan. She is a woman who wants a goddamn coat made of dogs. Maleficient was a hard sell at the best of times, but one that I personally think used its very nature as half prequel, half reimagining to its success. Cruella is utterly hamstrung from its first to its last seconds by the fact that our heroine will go on to steal and try and kill nearly a hundred animals for the sake of fashion. And I'm not even a big fan of dogs.
So, of course, the film tries to do all three of those; Cruella is now a violent and quick tongued quasi-alter-ego, a fashionably clad punkish and puckish upstart, for most of the film, as the mousy Estella makes her way into the upper climes of the London fashion world, ruled over by Emma Thompson's misplacedly hammy Baroness. We see how she turned to desperate measures by her ability as a seamstress and a designer of clothes since childhood, see her create costumes for Cruella, and her motive against both the Baroness and Dalmatian dogs is now the death of her beloved mother at their hands. From a lack of a motive, from a lack of a remotely redeemable aspect to the character, (she is, indeed, perhaps one of the weakest Disney villains from their weakest period, despite the superb voice work by Betty Lou Gerson and animation by Marc Davis), shs is now overwrought with a surplus of motive, all of which basically feel like so much desperate paddling to make our heroine's future actions redeemable. Much like Maleficient, there is a sense of corporate filing off of the edges, turned from an enjoyable arch villain to simply a so-so anti-hero.
Indeed, a lack of edge perfectly describes this film. Which is, in a word, typical Disney. For, helming this sorry mess is, of all people, Craig Gillespie, the director of the excellent I, Tonya, the solidly charming Fright Night and the enjoyably off-beat Lars and the Real Girl. Little of Gillespie's style is present anywhere in the vicinity of Cruella, let alone in the film itself; but for the voice-over at the beginning of the film that leans into the same fourth wall breaking commentary that I Tonya opens with, and a couple of visual flourishes, that style that endeared Gillespie to many including me, is gone. Hardly surprising-with the exception of Taika Waititi, Brannagh, and Joe Johnston, Disney have pretty much brought back the studio-mandated style for their live action films, into which directors are essentially slotted to add prestiege. One has to wonder exactly how both Chloé Zhao and David Lowery, directors with a unique visual style and cinematic sensibility, will fare with The Eternals (2021) and Peter Pan and Wendy (2022). But that's for another day.
Thus, we're introduced to Cruella, essentially in media res, with her birth, with the older Cruella (Emma Stone) narrating, in the classic "I bet you're wondering what I'm doing here", several moments of messy narration dashed through with "I am woman, hear me roar", pseudo feminism. We're taken on a whistle-stop tour of her childhood, including her striking visual appearance, her love for designing her own clothes, and the occasional moments of cruelty toward other children that gain her the nickname Cruella, together with "most unorthodox"ing stiff-upper lip teachers and one-note bullies. We're briefly introduced to her friend, Anita (played as an adult by Kirby Howell-Baptiste (of Killing Eve fame, and soon to play Death in The Sandman)), before the film boots her out of school, and we arrive at the most ridiculous moment of cinema that 2021 has yet deigned to give us.
Which, given my last two reviews, is saying a lot. For, expelled from school and on their way to London, the duo arrive at a manor house, and following Cruella's mother turning up at a party at athis this country house, to ask for help, the Disney machine clicks, whirrs, and decides that, yes, this is the right moment to underline why our heroine would possibly have a motive for canine genocide, let alone becoming an outright villain. It is a moment of utter cinematic buffoonery, the absolute crux of the film's narrative arc merrily set alight for the hell of it. It is the moment Cruella stops being good. It is five minutes into to the film. It goes a little like this:
Cruella, bored, turns up at the party with her dog in tow, and is, understandably spellbound by the world of fashion, in one of the few excellent shots of the film, a remarkably done sweeping shot that intoduces us to most of our major characters. Said dog escapes and, together with Cruella, is chased by the dalmatians belonging to the host of the party, who is talking outside to get a favour with the host. Said host, by the by, is so obviously and transparently the Baroness that the film never really bothers to hide her identity, even before the film springs this as though it really is a secret. Cruella and her dog are then chased outside, Cruella trips, and the camera, in a desperate attempt to try and do something visually interesting to visually show rather than tell how Cruella's world is going to be turned upside down, flips upside down as the dogs lunge. Cruella's mother is summarily punted off the edge of a nearby cliff, and falls to her death. It is absolutely hysterically funny, with all the pathos and pacing of a Looney Tunes skit. It fundamentally breaks both the film, and any immersion you ever had in it. It is ridiculous. So ridiculous in fact that I had to pause Disney+ (for, yes, I coughed up £19.99 for this garbage, a fiscal decision that I still regret, but the cinema remains essentially a minefield) for several minutes.
What's funnier is that the film plays this for dramatic license-this is meant to be a harrowing moment, a loss of innocence for our heroine, which sees her shed her appearance, turn to thievery, and swear revenge on the murderers of her mother. What it is is just the first of many moments that should be stacked with pathos, but clunk to the bottom of the film in often ridiculously stupidly funny sequences. At this point, Cruella decides it's actually going to be a somewhat acceptable film for a bit. For one, the costume design, by Jenny Beavan, the genius behind Mad Max: Fury Road, perfectly captures the opulance of the period's fashion, and when she's allowed full rein, it's some of the best moments in the film. The production design, itself immaculatedly recreates the 1970s. To a point. For another, the film's main trio of Estella, Jasper and Horrace, especially as children, are a well-acted trio that gives the film at least a centre point from which to develop. A jump forward ten years, to the Rolling Stones' "She's a Rainbow" an-
No, we need to talk about the soundtrack of this film. Because if this film's conceptual framework owes a substantial debt to Joker, its visual sensibilities, with overlays, visual trickery, saturation and all manner of saturation and colour work, and its jukebox soundtrack, owe a substantial debt to, of all things, Suicide Squad (2016). Disney, in short, want to both have their dark reimagining of Cruella as girlboss supreme cake, and to eat it with a side of colourful muso-visual frippery. Over the two and a bit hours of the film, not including Florence Welch, Machine et al, being seemingly poked into covering the one song that remains from the original 101 Dalmatians, in a moment that rivals Arcade Fire covering "Baby Mine" for pure headscratching choice, there are thirty two pieces of music from across the 1960s and 1970s (the film, by the by, is set in 1977. More on that later).
Much like Suicide Squad, the majority of these are deployed in such an obvious way that you can practically create a drinking game from it, often delivered in barely thirty second bites that almost certainly have to have some financial choice behind them as to why they're dropped in mere excerpts. It's messy, it's jarring and some of it is so on the nose it's painful. A chase involving the trio's dogs as the five of them are chased by a policeman? "Watch the Dog that Brings the Bone" by Sandy Gaye. Estella's drunken makeover of her workplace? An utterly out of place "These Boots Were Made for Walking" by Nancy Sinatra. Cruella's mad car chase? Gotta be "Stone Cold Crazy" by Queen. Cruella's first appearance, shocking the London fashionistas? Ike and Tina Turner's cover of Whole Lotta Love. Cruella's finale, in which our heroine finally gets to the top, becomes the #girlboss of London fashion, vanquishes her foes, and proves it's good to be bad? A one-two of Black Sabbath's "The Wizard" which basically is little more than Geezer Butler's basslick, and then, with the subtlety and predictability of a wrecking ball, the Stones once more with "Sympathy for the Devil" in perhaps the most obvious usage of it since, well, Suicide Squad.
It's so painful, so obvious, and some of the song choices so predictable that it almost becomes fun to guess what Disney exes could possibly choose next. So, with Estella now an adult, and turning from thievery to working in Liberty of London, to the strains of "Time of the Season", we get the next Scorseseism. It's the tracking shot, from Goodfellas, in reverse, with the camera descending through the roof of Liberty to travel into the bowels of the building, past customers, fitting rooms, racks of clothing, and the everyday work of a department store. The film does not hide it. It doesn't try to. We're thus introduced to Estella's every day life, the menial cleaning role and her run-ins with her smug, sub-Steve Coogan boss. Put upon, and frustrated, Estella proceeds to get drunk, redecorate the drab window of Liberty in pseudo-punkish style, and, following the appearance of Emma Thompson's adicic Baroness to, uh, "Five to One" by the Doors, she promptly captures the eye of the fashion designer, and is hired by her. We're thus introduced to the Baroness fashion house, and the film sets up its next battle of wits.
And its here that the film launches into girlboss v defeminized 70s and 80s boss, the battle of punkish charm against the hard shoulderpads and the powersuit. There's more than a little of Anna Wintor, the long-running editor of Vogue in Emma Thompson's crystaline performance, a cold-blooded beast of fashion that marches through the film to oppose Stone. It's a tad measured, even as Cruella rises to oppose her, and whilst Thompson is clearly having a good time in the film, the performance feels too restrained, too staid to be a true foil for Stone. Stone, in a word, rules this film; much like Phoenix's Joker, there is an unpredictability to her, a sense of, in a film that struggles so much to have a personality other than a vague girlboss message with 70s dressing, an immaculately formed character with quirks, tics and an increasingly split personality; the sweet if determined Estella giving into the wild abandon of the upstart Cruella.
Unfortunately, before the film lets her become Cruella, she first needs to have the rivalry with the Baroness. And here, of course, we are introduced to The First Canon Gay Disney Character™. You can tell he's the First Canon Gay Disney Character™ because he is a) very flamboyant and b) is thus picked upon by the Normal People, because, of course, he is the First Canon Gay Disney Character™. Except it's 1977. You've told us it is 1977, film, because you showed us it was 1977. Which, even before we get into the mechanics of the First Canon Gay Disney Character™, just simply does not work. One, it's pretty obvious that this is a fashionable part of London; it's goddamn Portabello Road. This is the epicentre of London's second hand markets. I've been there. Secondly. Barely four years earlier, glam rock had swept through the country. David Bowie had worn a unitard on Top of the Pops. Flamboyance and outlandish outfits were derigeur. This shit doesn't make sense, Disney. You haven't researched it. Yes, punk rock was brewing, but it's goddamn London, a place where, even in the 1970s, people dressed oddly and pretty much got on with their lives.
And, thus, we come to the First Canon Gay Disney Character™. Guys. Please. Stop it. John McCrea is very good in this, the idea of a fashion-set film having no LGBTQ+ character is frankly laughable, but please. This is the seventh time you've introduced your First Canon Gay Disney Character™. Please. Either admit you're queerbaiting your audience with scraps in your live action works, or just stop doing it. It's not as though Disney are struggling to write LGBTQ+ stories, and their animated work is remarkably progressi-
It's exhausting, even from my perspective. So much more could have been done with this; it doesn't take a genius to see the mousey Estella, as the closeting of the loud, proud, and fearlessly "out" Cruella, such that it can be read, albeit in subtext, as a tale of coming out, and even if the film never really doubles down on that narrative, it's another could-have-been that the film never really bothers to address nor act upon. This needs to be the final First Canon Gay Disney Character™, this needs to be the line in the sand where Disney finally stop baiting, and start delivering. They won't, but one can only hope.
Back to the rivalry, as Estella finds herself the protege of the Baroness, soon entering her inner circle. Of course, this quickly finds itself unravelling, with the necklace that Cruella's mother wore now reentering the story around the Baroness's neck, and a plot begins to form to get it back, and get revenge. Cue heist planning, with Cruella re-emerging from the shadows as the distraction for the heist, where Beavan's costume design, the soundtrack, and Stone's performance merge most perfectly. It's still a peculiarly messy moment, undermined by another rock-back into the 60s jukebox as, for some reason, Cruella knows how to fight with a stick in a moment that feels like it's out of, well, one of Harley Quinn's more enjoyable cinematic appearances, and Deep Purple's "Hush" thunders into life.
Because of course it does. Face to face with the Baroness, the film engages in what I'm going to label, advisedly, good-tempered bitching, as Stone and Thompson bat the conversation this way and that, and Cruella's ambition comes clear. As Horace and Jasper's plots to capture the necklace merrily unravels and the Baroness is revealled, in the most transparent way possible, as the murderer of her mother, so the film launches itself back into action, as the trio escape. Worse still, the necklace is swallowed by one of the Baroness's dogs, and a new plot has to be hatched. Enter, inevitably, Cruella as our protagonist, and here, undeniably, Stone is enjoying herself as the character, a mix of off-kilter anti-hero, violent thug, and superbly dressed sociopath. The performance alone saves this film from being, simply put, the worst thing I have ever seen, because every minute Cruella is on screen is at least a moment of Emma Stone being the best camp villain since, well, Glenn Close in 101 Dalmatians. Enter, thus, #Girlboss Joker.
Thus, as the quartet, with Artie now on the team, and the dalmatians now captured, events gather pace, with Cruella now plotting to undo every last element of the Baroness's life, from her upcoming collection to her confidence, and this the film does in clattering montage, as the film hurriedly shoves together several of Cruella's appearances through newsprint, and snapshots, as the duo do battle in both the fashion world and the workplace. It's all rather rushed, as though the film is less interested in the buildup than it is in the final confrontation, though it's also where the film's visual design, its mix of fashion pages, power struggle, and Beavan's design gels best. These deserve to be full montages, moments in which Cruella decides to strike, than a pop-video sensibility thrown together for a cheap thrill and to push the film towards a final confrontation. Where it comes together, piecemeal as it is, is in Cruella's final stroke of villainy, as the quartet plot to destroy the collection with a dress full of moths, as the young upstart sets up her own punk-inflected (as Iggy Pop goes into full pre-grave multi-RPM spins) fashion show to rival, and finally destroy the Baroness, where the film's energy finally seems to coalese into something resembling a thematic struggle.
It is also where the darkness of Cruella begins to seep in, the maniacal, the controlling, the power hungry engine at the heart of the film. Whilst Cruella "gets things done", the film does, at least, balance itself nicely; she is, after all, cruel, self-destructive, and, increasingly distant from her friends. Her rise to power is destructive, and cruel. But unlike Joker's Arthur, there is no moment of catharthis, no moment of absolution. Cruella is not a mentally ill loner finally finding their identity, at the head of a mob aimed at the powerful and corrupt, she's a power hungry maniac determined to take power in the multi-billion pound world of high fashion. She's not a weaponised example of the 99%, she's a gaslighting gatekeeping girlboss.
And, as she's summarily trapped and left to die in a burning building by The Baroness, so the film finally admits what it is, perfectly, from its girlboss Joker energy to its co-opting of the DC style to make a so-so edgy reimagining of a b-tier Disney villain as punk heroine. "Smile", as an instrumental, first appears in 1936's Modern Times, the final film in which Chaplin plays the Little Tramp, and his only sound film as the character. It's a meditation upon the Great Depression, from the point of view of a little man caught up in an ever industrialising world. It's a film that unabashedly shows Chaplin's socialist leaning, so much so Goebbels banned the film in Nazi Germany. It is a masterpiece, and "Smile" appears right at the end, in perhaps one of cinema's greatest marriages of music and image.
Nat King Cole adds lyrics in 1954, and it quickly becomes a standard. Jimmy Durante covers it in 1964, and this cover appears, with almost heartbreaking precision, in the second trailer for Joker. It's the thing that sold the movie to millions, a nigh perfect musical representation of Phoenix's Arthur. A year previously, in 1963, Judy Garland covered the song, and it is this recording that swells into life as Cruella faces her own mortality. It is the moment the film gives up, that it co-opts the film it owes so much to, and the moment the film removes that black and white suit, swipes clown paint across its face, and reveals itself, in giggling insanity, as what it's always been; nothing more or less than. Girl. Boss. Joker. But the film marches on, cackhandedly dropping exposition via Mark Strong's butler, that Cruella was the Baroness's daughter all along (hello, lifted plotline from Joker), and Cruella speeds off to rescue her friends, finally put Estella to bed, deliver cacklingly insane dialogue to a spot off camera, and finally defeat the Baroness.
What follows, in short shrift, is half an hour of the most bizarre, chaotic, and cinematically baffling decisions in mainstream cinema history, as the film thunders through a prison break, our trio reconciling into a dysfunctional family unit that will then go on in future years, to casually collect and attempt to murder nearly 100 dogs, scheme to create outfits for a complete gala party, once more in a montage.Whilst the trick that Cruella plays is a smartly done bit of trickery, leading up to the smartly shot moment where the plan comes together, it's also, in a word, unbelievably stupid. Astonishingly, impressively, dumb. Lavishly ridiculous. And that, pretty much, sums up the finale, an elegantly shot, clamouring mess of a sequence, positively baroque in just how overblownly idiotic it is, ending, inevitably, with a callback to the death of Cruella's mother, and the Baroness is thwarted and promptly arrested in front of a full audience. Cruella dubs herself De Vil, someone drops the needle on Beggar's Banquet, and this whole sorry mess comes crashing to a halt in a shower of black, white and red.
Cruella is a mess of a film. Let alone the fact we're rooting for one of the most openly and unapologetically evil characters in the Disney canon, let alone the fact that this film is just the latest in a long line of intellectually and conceptually bankrupt offering from a company that has spent the last decade regurgitating its greatest hits in perhaps the most openly capitalistic and economically driven trends mainstream cinema has ever witnessed. Let alone its co-opting of the anti-capitalist and anti-government aesthetics of the punk movement, by way of Madonna's 1980s wardrobe and aesthetics, let alone that this is a film cobbled together from other films' own plundered aesthetics, and let alone that this is a film that celebrates female empowerment in purely financial and capitalistic terms.
In October 2009, the late Brian Sewell, that master of the withering critical putdown, reviewed an exhibition by Damien Hirst, the enfant terrible of the Young British Artists, at the Wallace collection, that venerable estabishment of collected art that sits on the very verge of London's busiest shopping street. Like Disney, Hirst was by now nigh untouchable, more brand than artist. Like Disney, his work has become essentially incestous, the same revolving door of death, death, dots, death, animals cut up in large vitrines, skulls, etc, the same autocannibalism that the House of Mouse now find themselves a decade into. Parked between the Dutch Masters' meditations upon these subjects, and largely derivative of the great Francis Bacon, Hirst's paintings are the daubings of a smart sixth-former, only lent their prestiege, and sizable pricetag excused by the adjacent words "Damien" and "Hirst".
In the same way, Cruella is little more than juvenalia. It is edginess without edge, the cutthroat world of fashion turned teenage escapism, Disney Punk™. Whilst Stone's performance is as enjoyable as it is high camp, it is a moment of rebellious energy in a staid, stolid and boringly safe film, machined to perfection to give girls growing up on Disney another #girlboss to represent them as they buy £100 action figures, £38 backpacks, £49 jackets, all in the signature black, white and red, of their girljoker, their idol, as Disney Punk™ et al rocks through another set to the backbeat of beeping cardmachines and cash drawer rings. They'll have to, we've got a sequel, darhling. But, without the brand recoginition, without the words "Walt" and "Disney" on the front, this film would have crashed and burned somewhere in mid April, never to be seen again.
Cruella is the nadir of the whole Live Action Remake experiment at the once noble House of Disney, a film fundamentally broken from top to bottom, from concept to execution, from soundtrack to performance. It is the single worst film of 2021, stealing, within mere weeks, the crown of the worst film I have ever seen. I take this as license, my dear, dear readers, to declare this detestable movie, this disaster of Ms De Vil, fucking dreadful. Or, to borrow some of Cruella's own words, certainly utterly lacking brilliance, largely lacking madness, but, absolutely, undeniably, very, very bad.
Rating: Avoid at All Costs.
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