Cruel­la

It should be tak­en as fact, giv­en how far down the nar­ra­tive line we are, but it seems Hol­ly­wood needs a reminder: the beau­ty of a good vil­lain doesn’t lie in their trag­ic back­sto­ry. The trend towards giv­ing every bad­die some sort of child­hood trau­ma might have stemmed from the Star Wars pre­quels, but stu­dios have real­ly tak­en to the con­cept with it since then, bring­ing us an expla­na­tion for Maleficent’s wicked ways and now the ratio­nale behind 101 Dal­ma­tians’ icon­ic pup­py skin­ner, Cruel­la de Vil.

It seems unlike­ly that any­one would watch Glenn Close’s glee­ful­ly unhinged per­for­mance as the fash­ion­ista pur­su­ing a Dal­ma­t­ian-fur coat in Stephen Herek’s 1996 film and think, ​“I won­der what deep-seat­ed trau­ma is hid­den beneath that mono­chrome bonce”, but that’s where we’re at with Hol­ly­wood sto­ry­telling nowadays.

Trans­port­ing us to 1970s Lon­don, direc­tor Craig Gille­spie employs anoth­er wry voiceover (a tech­nique that just about worked in I, Tonya but quick­ly out­stays its wel­come here) to estab­lish why it’s high time anoth­er vil­lain gets her turn at the mic. A back­sto­ry fol­lows, estab­lish­ing young Estel­la as a plucky orphan thief who dreams of becom­ing a famous fash­ion designer.

Joined by her friends Jasper and Horace (Joel Fry and Paul Wal­ter Hauser) the adult Estel­la (Emma Stone) cross­es paths with haughty sar­to­r­i­al leg­end The Baroness (Emma Thomp­son), a cross between Miran­da Priest­ly and Edna Mode. As Estel­la uncov­ers the truth about the inci­dent from her past that has haunt­ed her for a decade, she unlocks the wicked side of her per­son­al­i­ty – that’s right, Cruel­la – and must utilise this to exact her revenge.

Tak­ing style cues from Jubilee, Smithereens and every Vivi­enne West­wood fash­ion show (with a touch of Alexan­der McQueen thrown in for good mea­sure), Cruel­la ges­tures at the punk aes­thet­ics of the peri­od, though it’s all in a sani­tised, fam­i­ly-friend­ly way befit­ting the House of Mouse.

Sim­i­lar­ly, the sound­track is com­prised large­ly of pop­u­lar hits from The Rolling Stones, Nina Simone, Blondie and The Stooges. Don’t expect to hear X‑Ray Spex, Pat­ti Smith or Siouxsie and the Ban­shees, even though that would have been more apt giv­en the qua­si-fem­i­nist vibe writ­ers Dana Fox and Tony McNa­ma­ra are shoot­ing for.

Those nee­dle drops start off mild­ly enter­tain­ing but become increas­ing­ly tire­some as the film goes on, com­pet­ing with Nicholas Brittell’s orig­i­nal score (why hire one of the best com­posers work­ing today and then upstage him with pop songs?) to the point it all feels dis­tract­ing rather than complimentary.

There’s some­thing a lit­tle grim about co-opt­ing the imagery of a move­ment that devel­oped out of dis­sat­is­fac­tion with pol­i­tics, cap­i­tal­ism, and restric­tions on per­son­al free­doms in order to sell the sto­ry of a woman whose entire per­son­al­i­ty is that she wants to turn dogs into coats, though it’s hard­ly surprising.

Stone cack­les and struts her way through the lead­ing role, but nev­er reach­es the heights of Close’s per­for­mance. Paul Wal­ter Hauser is the stand-out here, clear­ly hav­ing a ball adopt­ing a shaky Cock­ney accent as one of Cruella’s hench­men, and Thomp­son is a deserv­ing foil who nev­er real­ly gets much of a look-in against the over­bear­ing try-hard script­ing for the title character.

The film also runs at a rather dra­mat­ic two hours and 15 min­utes, and could lose at least 30 min­utes of that by tight­en­ing up the schem­ing and show­ing a lit­tle more cre­ativ­i­ty with Cruella’s back­sto­ry, rather than rely­ing on the same nar­ra­tive twists employed since the days of The Empire Strikes Back.

The grand reveal of her name­sake is as tedious as it was when Dis­ney pulled the same trick in Solo, and sug­gests the stu­dio won’t be hap­py until there’s no ele­ment of mys­tery remain­ing in their grand IP sta­ble. A mon­tage is cribbed from Mean Girls right down to the musi­cal cue, lead­ing one to won­der if orig­i­nal ideas are even thin­ner on the ground than the premise of a Cruel­la de Vil ori­gin sto­ry suggests.

Cruel­la ulti­mate­ly wants to have it both ways, sug­gest­ing its anti-hero­ine is both a prod­uct of her trag­ic cir­cum­stances and also bad for the sake of it. But the lat­ter is a more ter­ri­fy­ing propo­si­tion, and demys­ti­fy­ing Cruel­la by giv­ing her a sad child­hood takes some of the shine off her future as a pup­py-steal­ing mani­ac (not to men­tion the addi­tion of a non­sen­si­cal mid-cred­its sting, hint­ing at the future).

Noth­ing in this ori­gin film can sur­pass the pageantry and light hor­ror of past depic­tions, be it the ani­mat­ed Cruel­la of 1961 or the live-action ver­sion from 1996, and with all its care­ful pol­ish and on-the-nose musi­cal choic­es, it’s about as punk as doing your tax assess­ment. But with Jok­er doing num­bers in 2019 and a Willy Won­ka pre­quel on the way from Warn­er Bros, the stu­dios are appar­ent­ly putting all their chips on this for­mat, pre­sent­ing audi­ences with famil­iar char­ac­ters in new sit­u­a­tions. Mark our words: we’ll have a Scar ori­gin movie before we know it.