Aretha Franklin delivered a word when she uttered the iconic phrase “Great gowns, beautiful gowns” when asked about how she felt about Taylor Swift as an artist. The phrase was quite the backhanded compliment and entered the lexicon as a great way to explain things that have style but no depth. While Cruella isn’t quite worthy of that scalding remark, it’s a movie that isn’t quite about anything more than surface level delights.
By now there are many clips of the movie’s more incendiary scenes, but this review will endeavor to speak around those. The movie starts off revealing that Cruella (Emma Stone) was born with her infamous white and black hair, as well as her infamous attitude. But she’s not evil, just has a different view on the world. After feeling like she contributed to her mother’s death, she falls into a life of petty crime with her two friends (Paul Walter Hauser and Joel Fry). She lands a work placement and after a night of drunken window display rearranging, lands herself employment working for the Baroness (the truly amazing Emma Thompson). The movie takes off from there as Cruella becomes more mad, secrets are revealed, and the garments become more stunning.
Disney’s live action movies are like gravity in Interstellar, a seemingly straight forward problem to solve that becomes near impossible. Some of them are successful, like 2015’s Cinderella, and Cruella shares some of the traits of that movie. This film, like that fairytale extravaganza, has dazzling costumes that both shine and move the story forward. Look after look after look by Jenny Bevan helped this film feel like a breeze. This movie also breezes by on the delicious acting decisions made by Thompson who revels in the villain-y of the Baroness. Whilst the movie is making Cruella out to just be a woman going against convention, the Baroness is actually living and embodying these aspects, twisted though she may choose to act upon it.
The main problem then is that the movie is quite empty. Even the aforementioned Cinderella has a moral to it, but what’s the reason for this film existing? Cruella aims to reinvent one of the most ghoulish villains in the Disney slate and here there’s moments where you know that she’s not all quite there. These hints to a seemingly evil nature call to mind Maleficent, but at least there was a character with kingdom leveling powers and racial differences from the other characters. The Cruella script provides many capers and gives the actors fun things to say and do, but ultimately doesn’t help them elevates these characters and all of the callbacks to the original films land with a clunk. At this point, simply passing the time should not be the goal of a movie with this level of talent and budget, but unfortunately this is all Cruella manages to do.