Cruella hopes for the Maleficent route in the Disney cash grab, I mean, live action remakes/reimaginings of their IP. On paper, all the makings are there of something great: The battle of the Emma’s, a British Devil Wears Prada, puppies! But making your movie from pure monetary purposes means a rotten core that appears if you even go one level below the surface.
The dastardly Dalmatian attempted murdering Cruella De Vil, turns out comes from humble beginnings. Born Estella (Emma Stone), the young girl was a perennial line stepper, challenging a system she hated because it lacks any creativity. That level of abrasiveness gets Estella kicked out of every school she attends. With no other options, Catherine (Emily Beecham), Estella’s mother, begs to the societal elites to help her daughter. Instead, Estella is left to fend for herself, where she becomes a local street urchin with new pals Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser), stealing her way to a job for the Baroness (Emma Thompson), the greatest fashion designer on the planet.
I’ll give this to Cruella, it’s not lacking for flash and pizzazz. The smartest choice was the casting of Emma Stone. You can’t help but keep your eyes focused on her as she goes about all sorts of physical and emotional transformations, with Stone clearly having a blast in the devilish role. Equally important was the casting of Emma Thompson as the Baroness. With a look or a succinct, cutting remark, Thompson oozes power, royalty and a ruthlessness with an elegance only Meryl Streep could conjure in the Devil Wears Prada. The best scenes of the movie are set in the British anarchy era, with the upstart Cruella taking aim at the Baroness’s fashion empire with all sorts of over the top protests and performances that fit the movie like a faded, torn, metal laced leather glove. Props to Jenny Beavan, the Cruella costume designer, for coming up with all sorts of strange but evocative looks each face off between Stone and Thompson. Because of their efforts and the plot’s clever fusion of The Devil Wears Prada and Ocean’s Eleven, Cruella entertains from beginning to end, heaping a plethora of style and charm on the audience.
But here’s the rub. This movie is clearly aimed at families and older kids, but Cruella’s behavior at its core is much harder to justify than say, the fantasy world of Maleficent. Disney’s calculus is that if they make the villains of this movie SO abhorrently vile, Estella’s terrible behavior is somehow justified as a result. Estella constantly defends her bridge burning as something noble, clearly not considering the fact that her selfless mother was constantly hurt in the process. There are times where Estella flirts with learning from her actions, but the movie consistently lets her off the hook by inserting a villain into the lesson so Estella doesn’t have to learn anything and can poo poo away her bad behavior blaming someone else. Her self-destructive behavior should lead the smarter Jasper and the Baroness’s valet John (Mark Strong) to just walk away from Cruella on certain jobs, but they never do for illogical reasons so the plot can keep going. On top of that, for a Disney movie there’s an awful lot of discussion about murder and abortion. The morality line Cruella the movie has to walk is basically impossible, and Disney oversteps more than a few times which sends some tough, not great messages to kids who think Cruella is awesome (cause she is a lot in this movie).
But maybe we can fix those issues in the sequel. There, the baroness can rebrand herself as Miranda Priestly, get cast as Meryl Streep, and we can have the Cruella/Miranda showdown we all want to see. The eyerolls alone will be worth the price of admission!