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As candidates for image rehab go, 101 Dalmatians' Cruella de Vil poses a particularly vexing challenge. The lady is most famous for trying to make coats out of stolen puppies — vile stuff even by villain standards, and difficult to explain away. So the new Cruella hardly bothers to try, choosing instead to tiptoe around it in killer stilettos.
Cruella, a character once memorialized in song as "an inhuman beast," is reimagined as Estella (Emma Stone), a fashion genius who's not so much evil as misunderstood and maligned — not unlike Tonya Harding in director Craig Gillespie's last film, I, Tonya. Her backstory is framed as a more unhinged Devil Wears Prada, with Emma Thompson filling the role of the boss from hell. (In fact, The Devil Wears Prada screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna gets a "story by" credit here.) As a prequel, it's half-baked nonsense. As an excuse for the two Emmas to trade ever-bitchier quips and ever-more-outrageous outfits, it's a ball.
'Cruella' is less interested in retracing old visions than dreaming up new ones, having a good time, and looking fabulous while doing it.
But Cruella needs to make a few stops before we get there. In its first half, the film skews more sweet than spiky, charting her journey from birth to grade school to a budding criminal career. Young Estella finds a family of sorts in fellow misfits Horace (Paul Walter Hauser, a cheerful scene-stealer) and Jasper (Joel Fry, a low-key heartthrob), and the three grow up picking pockets together in 1970s London — often with the help of their beloved dogs Buddy and Wink, because Cruella cannot emphasize enough that Estella is not the anti-canine monster you remember from those other movies.
It's not until Estella lands her dream job working for a high-fashion designer called the Baroness (Thompson) that she turns heel into Cruella, and even then it takes several plot twists to get her fully there. When she does, though, it's worth the wait. Estella is a role Stone could play in her sleep, cute and clever and easy to root for. Cruella, on the other hand, feels like Stone stretching her wings. With the help of a slinky walk, an extra-husky voice, and costumes to die for (oh, we'll get there), Stone refashions herself into the diva we never knew she had inside her.
And still she's eclipsed, intentionally, by Thompson, who not only matches Stone's Cruella smirk for smirk and insult for insult, but makes it look effortless — she'll ruin a person's whole life with less thought than she puts into her lunch order. Liberated from the burden of trying to appear even remotely relatable, Thompson plays up the Baroness's terrifying iciness; she is to this movie what Cruella herself was in the Dalmatians movies, which I suppose means she'll be due for her own revisionist prequel in about two more reboot cycles.
Image: Laurie Sparham / Disney
The most purely pleasurable stretch of Cruella comes in its middle, when these larger-than-life figures battle for headlines with increasingly elaborate gowns and the stunts to show them off. (This film takes place in a universe where one designer upstaging another is considered front-page news, and I want to go to there.) The Baroness's dresses are stunning in their own right, all luxe fabrics and elegant silhouettes, but it's in Cruella's that costume designer Jenny Beavan truly outdoes herself.
Cruella's designs are deliberately alienating, even ugly, and get edgier as she falls further into her wicked side; at one point, she literally turns trash into couture. They're outfits dreamed up by a woman who cares less about looking beautiful or tasteful than in making you look, period, and they represent as strong a statement about the character's renegade spirit as anything in Dana Fox and Tony McNamara's script or even Stone's performance.
These clothes are the boldest element of a movie that otherwise wears its supposed punk-rock influences like a kid discovering Hot Topic for the first time. Fun though it is, Cruella defaults too frequently to the safe and obvious: You can tell immediately that this is the kind of movie that's going to have the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" on the soundtrack, and lo and behold, there it is. Even the script struggles to leave well enough alone, padding its 135-minute run time with not just an extensive voiceover but multiple scenes in which Estella recaps recent plot points, and Dalmatians references that feel more obligatory than organic.
Then again, these are choices that make perfect sense for a family-friendly Disney crowdpleaser —which is what this actually is under all that jet-black eyeliner, even if Cruella and Cruella would prefer you to forget from time to time. Seen in that light, stacked against the studio's other recent live-action remakes, reboots, prequels, and sequels, it stands out as a pleasant surprise. Like the fashionista who gave it its name, Cruella is less interested in retracing old visions than dreaming up new ones, having a good time, and looking fabulous while doing it. And also like Cruella, it succeeds with flying colors.
Cruella is in theaters and on Disney+ May 28.
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