“Cruella” - Film Review
There are many aspects of Cruella that are easy to love. The campiness of Emma Stone’s performance as the titular Cruella, Emma Thompson doing her best Meryl Streep in a The Devil Wears Prada impression, the fashion, the development of Anita Darling’s character (lovingly played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste). All of these things make Cruella the perfect summer movie. It’s a film that doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to follow, and it leaves the audience feeling light and happy. This is a summer blockbuster with loose ties to a beloved franchise and a guaranteed instant hit for Disney.
The issue with Cruella lies in the why of it all. Why give a redemptive backstory to a character the audience has been conditioned to hate for fifty years? It made some sense for Maleficent, the movie about the evil fairy from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, but as soon as the audience remembers what Cruella did in the original animated film, this prequel falls apart. And that is a shame, because it was a particularly inspired choice to set Cruella in the ’70s with the punk rock movement in the background. The movie is an easy-breezy delight until the audience is forced to remember where Cruella came from.
So much of today’s film industry is filled with reboots and revivals and adaptations. Big companies no longer want to take risks on mid-to-high-budget original screenplays. Instead, they are relying on retooling intellectual property and banking on name recognition to fill seats in the theatres. Ultimately, that cowardice hurts storytelling. Instead of trying to figure out how to shoehorn Stone’s Cruella into the plot of 101 Dalmatians, the movie should have just been Disney’s punk rock Devil Wears Prada. With names like Stone and Thompson, the seats would have still been filled. Now, there is a looming reminder of the Cruella de Vil who kidnaps puppies for their fur that colors the rest of the movie.
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
In the lead-up to the film’s release, another topic cast a shadow over the film. Quite a bit of the press coverage speculated about whether a shopkeeper named Artie (John McCrea), who looks like David Bowie, was gay. For years, Disney has been trying to pass off blink-and-you’ll-miss-it LGBT representation. The live-action Beauty and the Beast, Frozen, Onward, the upcoming Jungle Cruise. All of these have been touted as having an “exclusively gay moment.” Cruella has now joined that list. It is a shame that one of the largest movie studios in the world will not make a more meaningful stand for LGBT representation than these small characters who vaguely allude to identifying as something other than straight. These moments, had they not been the focus of press leading up to the premieres, would go entirely unnoticed.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to deny that Cruella is fun. Stone is clearly enjoying being eccentric as she flounces around London in her outlandish costumes, bringing mayhem wherever she goes. It is a movie that should be a mindless blockbuster the entire family can enjoy. There are genuinely funny moments, and the collection of characters feels cartoonish in a good way. It is a shame the audience is forced to reconcile these positives within the limits of the original character.
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