You've probably heard "Cruella" compared to "The Devil Wears Prada," because it's about duelling fashion designer divas, or "Joker," because the title character has been reworked to be a stylish anti-hero. However, I feel it's important to establish up front that the most important antecedents to "Cruella" are "Wicked" and "Maleficent." This is not a prequel to the beloved "101 Dalmatians," or any kind of remake. This is a full reimagining of the Cruella DeVil character, that paints her as the misunderstood outsider who was the victim of bad press. Did she kill dalmatians and make a coat out of them? Just a nasty rumor, darling.
In fact, Cruella (Emma Stone) turns out to be a dog lover. She starts out as a little girl named Estella, with a darker troublemaker side that her patient mother (Emily Beecham) dubs "Cruella." Alas, misfortune leaves her an orphan in London, where she and her pup Buddy form a gang of thieves with fellow vagabonds, Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser). Despite this checkered history, Estella wants to go straight and become a fashion designer, eventually securing a position at the fashion house of The Baroness (Emma Thompson), the most successful and demanding designer in London. The Baroness becomes her mentor, but the relationship soon turns sour, provoking Cruella into making her return to the spotlight.
There is a lot of story stuffed into "Cruella," and the film is way too long. It keeps morphing into different films - "The Devil Wears Prada" for a good chunk of the running time, then a heist movie, a campy revenge movie, and of course the action-heavy Disney live-action spectacle with a lot of bad CGI. It takes a considerable amount of patience to get through the early scenes of Estella/Cruella's childhood, and some seriously iffy story choices. The big one is giving a reason for Cruella to hate dalmatians, which is totally ludicrous any way you look at it, and turns out to be a red herring anyway. The best thing I can say about these parts of the film is that director Craig Gillespie keeps them moving along briskly, with a lot of slick editing and catchy needle drops.
Because once Emma Thompson hits the screen as the impossibly demanding Baroness, and Emma Stone transforms into her rival, the film finds its groove. It is so much fun watching two over-the-top divas go at each other, upstaging each other, catfighting for status, and using haute couture to do it. "Cruella" is set in the late 1960s and 1970s, which puts a lot of classic British rock and pop music on the soundtrack, and plenty of vintage fashion on display. Cruella's style is built around the idea that she invents punk rock about a decade early, and pulls a series of PR stunts worthy of Lady Gaga and Banksy to show herself off. Cruella plays up her bad-girl persona on purpose, until it's no longer an act.
It helps that this is one of the best looking live-action Disney features. There's still way too much CGI, and some of the cutesy nods to "101 Dalmatians" are too much, but there's also some gorgeous production design, and tons of lavish costumes, designed by Jenny Beavan. The dresses, particularly Cruella's big showpieces, are absolute knockouts, and provide the film's biggest wow moments. And the film knows it. There are the requisite chase sequences and farcical bumbling, but everyone involved with the production understands that we're there to see Emma and Emma look fabulous and menacing.
Thompson is the one likely to get awards attention for her wonderfully disdainful grand dame, but I want to give Stone full marks for putting her own spin on Cruella DeVil. She's able to be theatrical and showy and an absolute monster when she needs to be, but also human enough to be sympathetic and vulnerable too. The connections to the previous versions of Cruella are only surface level, and this really is an entirely new creation - a maniacal artistic genius and outcast who it's fun to see clawing her way to the top. She won me over, and that was an uphill battle considering how little interest I had in seeing this film.
There have been the usual complaints circulating about why this movie was made, and "Cruella" gives a very good answer: when you look at Disney's IP, the classic villainesses were always far more interesting and fun to watch than the boring old princesses. And this is a case where Disney really let the filmmakers go wild, and turn "Cruella" into something different and fabulous. It's not a great film by any measure, but this one turned out so much better than I ever thought possible, and it's got all the earmarks of a future cult classic.
I'm all for Disney remixing and reimagining whatever they want if it means more films like this one.
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