Most modern stars fit a prototype. Clark Gable begat George Clooney, Robert Redford passed a torch to Brad Pitt, Katharine Hepburn paved the way for Cate Blanchett. But Emma Stone has no precedent on Earth. Stone can play shrewd, silly, gorgeous, repellent, frail and frightening simultaneously, in a register at once intimate and grand-scale. If she didn’t exist, some of her movies couldn’t exist — especially not the ones she’s created with edgy director Yorgos Lanthimos, who whisked her to the Oscars twice for “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” the latter of which won Stone her second lead actress award.
Those decadent period pieces were like elaborate jewel settings designed to showcase Stone’s range. Now with the paranoid comedy “Bugonia,” Lanthimos has stripped away all the ornamentation. Stone controls focus with nothing more than a shaved head, a filthy coat and a tight smile in the basement where her character, Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, is being kept prisoner. Greased all over with a ghastly white antihistamine cream (I’ll get to that), Stone’s Michelle stares unblinkingly toward the audience in massive, mesmerizing close-ups, coolly explaining why she must be let go. Even in starkness, she shines.
Michelle’s captors are cousins Teddy and Don (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis), two working-class conspiracy theorists halfway down the slope of sliding off the grid. When you scan their rural town, a wasteland of Dollar General stores and fast food chains, most of their neighbors seem to have already faded away. So has Teddy’s opioid-addicted mom, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), glimpsed in eerie black-and-white flashbacks. Teddy, a hobbyist beekeeper, opens the film alarmed that now the bees have disappeared, too.
Why is his backyard colony collapsing? Teddy has a couple theories — the climate is poisoned, the workers are scrambled — which also apply to humankind. (This isn’t a subtle movie, it’s a barbaric yawp.) But Teddy thinks the real problem is Michelle. She doesn’t merely manufacture toxic chemicals. She’s an alien manipulating our world.
Specifically, Michelle is an Andromedan from the galaxy next door. Teddy, the ringleader, is sure he can prove it. For one, Michelle’s cuticles are suspiciously thin. For another, there’s no way this taut, wrinkle-free woman is 45 years old, as her many magazine profiles claim. Her beauty regimen is so expensive, it’s literally beyond belief. (To save you the trouble of looking it up, Stone herself is merely 36.)
Teddy has a plan to make Michelle take him to her mothership during the next lunar eclipse. But first — and, just as crucially — he needs Michelle to admit he’s right, for the sake of his ego. He’s a guy with nothing: no money, no prospects, no future other than more soul-draining hours of scanning boxes at a warehouse where Michelle’s headshot looms on the break room wall. His alien research is all he’s got.
Will Tracy’s script, an adaptation of the glumly funny 2003 Korean satire “Save the Green Planet!” is itself a study of online brain rot, which has become exponentially more perilous over the last two decades. “I don’t get the news from the news,” Teddy boasts. Beyond that, it’s about the human need to have a reason to get out of bed, to have a purpose to exist. Teddy is so proud of his mission that he’s chemically castrated himself to focus on defeating the Michelle-things and, in a harrowing conversation, he tries to flatter Don, a vulnerable young man with autism, into agreeing to get neutered, too. The pairing of Teddy’s conviction with his limp ponytail tilts the scene from tragic to absurd.
Michelle’s confession will vindicate such sacrifices — it will make Teddy and Don’s invisible lives exceptional. And Teddy is fine extracting it from her by torture. From “Civil War” to “Game Night,” Plemons has a knack for playing characters who are doggedly, dangerously obtuse, a key he’s still working in here. But he’s so pathetic that you can’t help but feel for the guy. Still, it’s Delbis’ Don, with his halting speech and flimsy grasp of the stakes, who really breaks your heart.
The two cousins appear so unhinged that Lanthimos doesn’t spend much time teasing us to question if they’re correct. He trusts we’ll focus on what’s wrong with them, which is pretty much how the world already works: Angrily question the system and get called crazy. Calmly maintain the status quo, as Michelle does, and be treated as rational, even if continuing to do things the way they’ve been done is a disaster. For the record, Teddy is apolitical. “Alt-right, alt-light, leftist, Marxist,” he says, checking off the groups he’s sampled and abandoned, concluding that “99% of activism is just personal exhibition.”
Michelle suffers so much abuse that a plot rundown would sound like a “Saw” film. But Stone makes it OK for us to laugh at Michelle’s torment. Forced to smear herself with a lotion that Teddy claims saps her powers, she does it with feathery spa fingers like she’s getting a facial. This celebrity CEO who buddies around with Michelle Obama is near-impossible to break. “Let’s just unpack the problem here,” she says with pitch-perfect composure. Michelle is fluent in the perky command, the passive voice, the slippery non-apology, the kind of language that frames cruelty as blameless happenstance. Her corporate-speak makes her sound inhuman.
At first, Lanthimos uses her character as a spoof of lady-bosses who feign enlightenment while reigning over the same bad workplace. Yet Michelle, terrifying as she is, proves to be admirably sharp and resourceful. Unlike her jailers, she doesn’t have to tie people down to talk them into doing what she wants. “I agree,” she insists over and over again, with steely cheer that bends Teddy and Don’s resolve. Her assurance even mind-melted me. There’s a beat when Michelle casually insists that a clear piece of glass is actually opaque. Even as I’m writing this sentence, I still don’t believe my own eyes.
But Michelle and Teddy are at an impasse. They talk past each other like speeding spaceships, continually smashing into the same blockade: Teddy simply doesn’t believe that Michelle is a person. So none of her arguments — and nothing in the Geneva Convention — matters to him until she says exactly what he needs to hear. Meanwhile, it’s hard to root for the one sheriff in town, Casey (Stavros Halkias), to save the day. He has a history with Teddy that makes him no hero.
The truth is, the rich and the poor do live in different universes, places that the production designer James Price and cinematographer Robbie Ryan capture succinctly, contrasting Teddy and Don’s cluttered farmhouse with Michelle’s sterile mansion and office park surrounded by dead grass. The men eat microwaved taquitos, she pounds vitamins. As H.G. Wells warned in “The Time Machine,” the classes are on track to evolve into separate species, so it’s no wonder Michelle feels entitled to behave like a predatory Great Black Wasp.
“Bugonia” is a hilarious movie with no hope for the future of humanity. What optimism there is lies only in the title, an ancient Greek word for the science of transforming dead cows into hives, of turning death into life. Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” described the process roughly two millennia ago: “From the rotting flesh — a well-known fact — bees everywhere are born.” Like everyone in the movie, he sounds confident and totally cuckoo.
The post It’s Emma Stone’s planet now as the alien comedy ‘Bugonia’ proves appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
