Cruella: Darkly fun fashion fable about a Disney-villain-in-training, with no dogs harmed - yet
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
Of all the current kvetching I’ve seen on social media, objections to “humanizing” pop cultural villains like Cruella de Vil leave me cocking my head like a confused Dalmatian.
Prequel programming has told us how everyone from Hannibal Lecter to Maleficent came to be. So, who wouldn’t want to know the backstory of a woman capable of plotting making a fashionable coat from the fur of 101 spotted dogs? It’s fiction, folks.
A villainess in training with a punk aesthetic, Cruella becomes mystery fashion “it” girl.
As it turns out in Cruella, the lively live-action, loosely-connected prequel to Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, the most sociopathic woman this side of Oz’s Wicked Witch was simply a victim of fashion.
Set in London in the ‘70s, the story is far enough removed from any previous version of 101 Dalmatians, that there is practically carte blanche for Emma Stone to create her own character, a street kid with a punk fashion sense (topped by Oreo cookie hair) and an angry streak. This initially appears to be neither a case of nurture nor nature, since her ill-fated mother Catherine (Emily Beecham) is sweet and caring, and does everything to nudge her daughter Estella (Cruella is a name she adopts later) down the same decent path.
Estella (played as a child by Tipper Seifert-Cleveland) tries and fails to behave, out of love for her mother, and she both loses her and discovers the decadence of fashion parties in the same night. Now putatively an orphan, she falls in amiably with a couple of comical young street grifters named Jasper and Horace (remember those names?).
Add a decade of pickpocketing and Estella is now played by Stone, with Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser as her henchmen respectively.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
But she still burns for fashion, and in a destructive accident involving a trashed boutique store window, ends up being hired by the fashion icon/monster Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson), a credit-stealing raging narcissist who makes life miserable for her talented but ultimately ignored new employee.
Think of what we have as The Devil Wears Prada, if both the monster mentor and the put-upon employee were sociopathic and possibly murderous. Like an emerging super-villain, Estella rebels by adopting an anonymous persona named Cruella, who appears publicly at events to humiliate the Baroness and show off her own nihilistic fashion sense. Naturally, she becomes a media star in the process.
(On a point of fashion esthetics, I love the fact that costume designer Jenny Beavan won an Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road).
Ironically, no dogs are hurt or seriously threatened in the course of Cruella. The Baroness’s three Dalmatians play a traumatizing role in Estella’s life (though the trauma doesn’t quite cut it as motivation for eventually becoming a mass killer of the breed). And there are two cute ones with scene-stealing moments – Horace’s homely chihuahua and Estella’s own furball Buddy (so at one point, she actually loved a dog).
But amateur psychoanalysis seems out of place here. By taking a left turn into the fashion world, director Craig Gillespie does a decent job of taking something generationally familiar and giving it a genuinely fresh spin.
Who knows where Disney wants to go to connect this young offender to the gorgon-esque likes of Glenn Close’s Cruella in the most recent 101 Dalmatians? Stone’s Cruella is not yet near that level of villainy.
Who knows if they even should? Despite its winks at its source material, Cruella is very much a fun, stand-alone movie that lets two formidable actresses fly while everyone else stands back.
Cruella. Directed by Craig Gillespie. Stars Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser. Opens Friday, May 28 in theatres (where open) and as premium programming on Disney+