This is a line from the 1961 Disney animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians, shouted over the phone by one Cruella De Vil. The villainous fashion designer is of course referring to what should be done to the ninety-nine dalmatian puppies her hired goons have kidnapped for her so she can skin them and turn them into a coat. This is also the character the Walt Disney Company in their infinite wisdom has most recently decided to rehabilitate. Because everyone secretly wants to sympathize with a serial dog killer.
Don’t get me wrong, Cruella is one hell of a great villain -and probably among Disney’s best -both for her iconic look and personality and for her terrifying pursuit of mass animal cruelty. She is not however a good choice for a sympathetic origin story -she’s just a little too genuinely evil. On some level Disney knows this, which is why their new interpretation of Cruella, played admittedly rather well by Emma Stone, bears no resemblance to the character previously established. Much like Maleficent, this Cruella is not a bad person at all, and the film wants you to know she would NEVER harm a dog. She’s merely misunderstood.
Yet the movie also wants you to think she’s a little bad, a little deranged -because she’s cooler that way, more edgy. Disney however has no business being edgy, and as it tries its’ damnedest to make Cruella the Disney Villain equivalent of Joker of all things (a movie nobody should try to emulate), it comes off massively pathetic and extremely confused as to what it’s trying to be. But then, identity issues have become something of a staple of the Disney reboot.
Cruella De Vil has already gotten this treatment. The 1996 101 Dalmatians was the precursor to this modern age of creative shallowness at the Walt Disney Company -it was also the first movie I ever saw in a theatre, which makes my now seeing this film in a theatre some twenty-five years later “poetic” as Cruella might unimaginatively call it. That earlier film wasn’t particularly good itself but there’s no denying Glenn Close made an incredible impression as the live-action variant on this character by playing up to eleven every side from the comically camp to the frighteningly evil. This was not lost on Stone, who also plays up the most extravagant sides of the character: her attitude, her style, her poise, her diction (it’s in these where she’s most enjoyable). Unfortunately this isn’t a considerable portion of her performance -Cruella being merely the name for the darker side to the character of tragic orphan girl Estella.
It’s all rather tedious, clumsily written, and appallingly direct: her mother was literally killed by dalmatians pushing her off a cliff in one of the most hilarious bits of tragedy presented by a movie in recent years. So she made her way to London where she fell in with a pair of street thieves straight out of Oliver Twist: these of course are Horace and Jasper -far closer to her than in any other iteration- played by a poorly accented Paul Walter Hauser and an honestly pretty good Joel Fry (I like him, he should be in more movies!). The trio form a makeshift family of thieves over the years, plotting weirdly elaborate heists for how few resources they have. Peppered in are obligatory nods to the original story: an old school acquaintance called Anita Darling (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) a bumbling lawyer called Roger Dearly (Kayvan Novak), and all the while the films’ tone flips between the openly cartoonish and gestures to real drama, the latter failing precisely on account of the former. The movie makes fun with things like Cruella’s voiceover, extremely heightened levels of egomania, and just the inherent silliness of the name “Cruella”, but then a moment later expects to be taken seriously with emotional stakes far above its’ capacity to understand.
The film takes a long time to get to the meat of its’ story: Cruella’s apprenticeship and ever-evolving feud with Emma Thompsons’ Baroness, the exorbitantly wealthy and pathologically narcissistic queen of Londons’ fashion world. And it’s not all bad. Because discarding the Disney elements, the basic premise is essentially All About Eve by way of The Devil Wears Prada. An elder fashion designer takes on the tutelage of a promising younger one, both driven by vast egos, to ultimately compete against the backdrop of the dramatic fashion upheavals of the 1970s -with the sophisticated and regal posh tastes of the older generation going up against the rising underground punk aesthetic. On paper that could be a pretty decent movie, and it shows on occasion. Each time Cruella makes a scene crashing one of the Baroness’ galas, it’s exceptional -and the costume designs are fabulous. But this story doesn’t coalesce with a Disney IP and all its’ accompanying nonsense spray-painted over it, much as Disney desperately wants it to.
What’s sad is that Disney wants Cruella to be different, they want it to be taken as a bit more punk, more off-colour than what they’re used to producing. The soundtrack is filled out with a random assortment of 70s pop hits to seem more slick, but they are either too on the nose (“Stone Cold Crazy”, “Bloody Well Right”) or bizarrely unfitting (“Car Wash”, “Should I Stay or Should I Go”) -and they come far too frequently. Disney even hired director Craig Gillespie, whose last movie I, Tonya, was all about a woman with a big personality and how she was wronged and traumatized. But this studio is incapable of doing that sort of thing with Cruella, it goes too far outside their comfort zone -attesting for the extremely disjointed tone. Is it self-aware or too self-serious? Vibrantly light-hearted or bluntly dark? Is it for kids or is it trying to be for adults? It’s attempt at a Joker-like dark twist works about as well as that movies’ did -although in this case, the film is backtracking almost from the moment of its reveal to assure audiences that no, it will not go where you’re thinking it will. Where it would be more narratively right to do so. Ultimately, it’s just as toothless as any other Disney project -the original cartoon is way darker. That movie strongly implies Cruella has skinned at least some grown dogs for fur coats, while this one won’t even touch that possibility. And I don’t see why, none of this movies’ dogs were real anyways, each and every canine being yet another awkward CG anomaly.
Cruella has a lot of the same problems as the movie Solo, another bad prequel produced by Disney not even interested in a little moral complexity. It isn’t as beholden to dumb fan service as that film -though it does feel the need to contrive an explanation for every element of Cruella’s persona (except for the hair, which she was apparently born with, rather than the obvious aesthetic dye job it always seemed to be). But like Solo, for the neat moments and flashes of inspiration in it, it hasn’t any clear sense of purpose, and fails at the most basic function as an origin story by refusing to show how she becomes the character we know (calling herself a “psycho” that one time doesn’t count). And the reason is pretty clear: she’s a Disney villain known for trying to kill puppies. That is not someone easy to like while keeping true to their character. For Disney, softening is the only option, a lukewarm movie the only result.
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