Stars: Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser, Mark Strong
Director: Craig Gillespie
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Costume*, Makeup & Hairstyling)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars
(Spoiler Ahead) The movie is about Estella Miller (Stone), a precocious young girl with a flare for design, who as a young woman watches her mother die, initially assuming it's from her accidentally releasing a pack of dalmatians at a party. Orphaned, she meets two young street toughs Jasper (Fry) and Horace (Hauser), who become her surrogate family. A chance encounter with Baroness von Hellman (Thompson), a celebrated fashion diva who needs fresh young talent in her design house, gets Estella a job, but eventually she sets her sights on retrieving a locket her mother had as a child from the Baroness, and after realizing that the Baroness killed her mother (by sicking the dogs on her), she vows revenge, and gets in the guise of Cruella DeVil, a vigilante fashion icon whose impressive gowns far exceed the talents of the Baroness. As the story continues, we figure out that Estella is actually the Baroness' daughter, and also that Estella has become Cruella, far more monstrous than the sweet Estella we knew at the beginning of the picture. In the end, she frames the Baroness for Estella's murder (essentially "becoming" Cruella forever more), and takes over her home, renaming it Hell Hall.
The movie uses a lot of the iconography from the original movies if you look hard enough for it. Anita is, indeed, an old school chum of Cruella's, and Roger is a struggling musician (and also the Baroness' attorney, a deviation from the original story). If you're devoted to either the 1961 or 1996 films, though, there are anachronisms that will drive you batty. Cruella genuinely likes dogs in the film (she has two pet ones), and literally gifts the dogs she eventually will try to kill in the future film to Roger & Anita (Pongo & Perdita are presents in a mid-credits scene), and she seems like an (at-core) good person who has a villainous streak.
That's one of the problems that Disney struggles with here. They can't make a character like Arthur from Joker, where they create a villain that is humanized, but ultimately watches that humanity stripped away. Cruella is fun, but it also doesn't know how to land the conversation about the title character's villainy, because it needs to remain cute & friendly. We can't have Cruella essentially sidle into outright cruelty to her friends Jasper & Horace, even though that's what's required of her to be the "bad bitch" attitude we're promised in the film's final moments. This juxtaposition makes the movie too long, because it literally feels like the writers can't decide how bad to make Cruella, and it also gives you a bit of an eye-roll that they made the film in the first place since they are fully-capable of making a proper cartoon villain (the Baroness), but they can't do it with the central figure (the same exact problem plagued the Maleficent movies).
The picture's other real problem is the soundtrack. This is lazy bad, and far too sporadic. It's a great series of 1960's British pop, but it also infiltrates every corner of the movie, serving as a way to cover up one-too-many montages, and it gets a bit cringeworthy how little the writers seem to have to say about a movie that is stretching to make sense. This is a case where less is more, and without moderation, the movie suffers, feeling like it can't pinpoint a motif.
That said, there are two marvelous aspects to the movie, that make it easy for me to understand the love for the film, even if I can't share in it because the movie itself strains credulity. Both of the Emma's, but particularly Stone, are great. Stone is giving a world-class bit of acting, better than I can remember seeing in any Disney live-action film in recent memory (she's better, by a longshot, than Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker), understanding the gaps in the script and painting over it by truly making Cruella deliciously evil, even if the writers can't bring themselves to do it. And she's accompanied by a bevy of costumes from Jenny Beavan that will demand an 11th Oscar nomination (and possibly a third trophy). When you have a figure who is the "new voice in fashion" you need looks that match, and this picture does that with aplomb, the best being the train effect of Cruella's garbage dress. Stone, Thompson, and Beavan are operating in an entirely different league than the picture itself, and as a result we get a juxtaposition of strong & weak elements...for me the latter outweighing the former when it comes to the collective picture.
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