So, I finally saw Cruella. I didn’t hate it! I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and far more than Kyle did, according to his review. There is some really lovely costume and set design in the movie. There’s even a good stretch of like thirty minutes when it is a genuinely fun movie. A 1970s-set high-fashion battle? A delightful concept! A better movie would have made that the focus, especially because it would allow Emma Stone to full-on channel Glenn Close. When Stone goes full Close, the movie becomes ten times as entertaining.
But this is not a better movie. It’s not a good movie. Cruella is kind of a mess, sadly. But I’ll say this: Cruella, like Rise of Skywalker, is the kind of mess that highlights the deep structural flaws in the way Disney tells stories.They even share many of the same flaws, though Cruella is definitely the more competent and interesting of the two. But one thing Cruella excels at is demonstrating the Disney’s deep and abiding terror at alienating anyone for any reason. It must be relatable
“I’m Cruella.”
So, a quick, full-spoiler recap of the basic plot. This will be harder than you think, for reasons that will soon become obvious:
Estella was born in a rural village with a shock of white hair and black hair. This cute affectation is inexplicably treated as a horrifying deformity by literally everyone she comes across. She enrolls at school, befriends a Black girl, adopts a dumpster puppy, and fights a bully. But she fights too much, so teh school expells her. We see all of this because it is a movie about CRUELLA FUCKING DE VIL and it knows there’s going to be an uphill climb to making a wealthy dog-killer sympathetic. She’s not Mike Huckabee’s kid, after all; we’re supposed to like her.
Her mom takes her to London, but stops at a mansion along the way to ‘see an old friend’. Estella sneaks in, causes some chaos, and then witnesses her mom get murdered by a pack of savage dalmations. This is one of the most hilariously absurd revelations in film history, but we have to keep moving. Convinced that she got her mom killed by dogs, she walks to London and then just kind of vibes until a couple streetwise pickpockets — Jasper and Horace, her minions in the 1996 movie DO YOU GET IT — who adopt her and teach her to steal. But she never loses her desire to become a fashion designer.
Skip forward ten years. Nothing had changed, as is often the case for people who have been unhoused for a decade. Jasper gets Estella a job at a prestigious department store, which she hopes will be her ‘in’ to the fashion world. Instead, she is mostly just mistreated by her boss, because, again, dog-murder. After a drunken bender, she redesigns the window display of the store, getting fired but drawing the attention of the Baroness, a notorious fashion designer. She gets hired by the Baroness, who is also abusive but does recognize Estella’s incredible talents. However, she learns that the Baroness has her mother’s necklace, which Estella lost the night her mother died, so she decides to steal it.
Now, like an hour into the movie, we meet ‘Cruella’, Estella’s scenery-chewing alter-ego. Cruella will serve as a distraction at a major party, upstaging the Baroness and letting Jasper and Horace rob her blind. Unfortunately, the Baroness is wearing the necklace, so Estella just snatches it and runs. One of the Baroness’ evil dalmations swallows it, so she kidnaps the dalmations and waits for them to poop it out. Inexplicably, she seems to have the dalmations for months before that happens, which is wild, but time is a flat circle so who cares. During the confrontation, however, she realizes that the Baroness didn’t just take the necklace; she had her mother killed by whistling for the dalmations to come together in attack formation.
Now Estella has a vendetta. During the day, she goes to work for the Baroness as usual. But during the nights, she stages elaborate, hostile fashion shows meant to humiliate the Baroness. These are genuinely fun. The movie finally became fun. Estella sinks more and more into the Cruella persona as the game continues, alienating Jasper and Horace but not so much that they do anything about it. This is where we hit the movie’s halfway point, which is incredible because simultaneously so much has happened and also functionally nothing particularly interesting has happened. So I’m going to stop recapping here, because there’s one scene I want to focus in on.
“I was born brilliant.”
Just kidding, I need to do a little more recapping. At the end of Act 2, the Baroness finds out that Cruella and Estella are one and the same. Naturally, she goes to burn Estella to death and blame Horace and Jasper for it. After this, we learn that Estella is actually the Baroness’ daughter, her dead mother is actually her adopted mother, and the Baroness tried to have her killed as an infant. It’s a lot. In response, she rides to a fountain to tell her mother a sort of iconic line from the trailer. It goes something like:
“I’m Cruella. I was born brilliant. Born mad. And born a little bit bad.”
It’s a good line! It’s sing-songy but evocative, with great delivery from Stone. Here’s the moment. Estella becomes Cruella. Cruella is no longer an act, but the core of her personality. This tracks, both thematically (she’s been getting darker and more extreme in the performance as it progressed) and as set-up for when we know her (as a dog-killing billionaire).
So what’s the first thing she does after this?
She goes and apologizes to her friends. Indeed, rather than a statement of purpose — she is going to lean into her worst impulses — the movie immediately pulled back from the moment, frightened at what that would mean for the franchise. People don’t want to buy toys of a malevolent madwoman. Well, okay, Disney’s core audience doesn’t.
And Disney knows that. They spend the GDP of a small nation on marketing every year. So after an entire movie building towards the moment when a sweet-but-chaotic outcast finally snaps, finally breaks bad, Cruella… vanishes. Stone drops the Glenn Close imperiousness that made those early scenes a delight. She replaces it a pop-punk pastiche of marketable rebelliousness. Not bad, but “bad.” A smarter movie again has an ‘in’ there, on the cooption of counterculture by capital. Disney can’t make that movie either.
“Born mad.”
Disney’s villains are… well, they’re meant to be pretty purely malevolent figures. Literal children recognize them as villains. There’s something noble about finding the humanity in even the cartoonishly evil. But that’s not the goal. Instead, Disney wants you to relate to its characters the way you relate to a roller coaster: It’s okay to feel a little scared, but you should always be left feeling good.
That’s a problem.
Now, this is crucial: It doesn’t have to be! A version of relability exists in which we acknowledge the darker impulses that drive us all. I struggle with mental illness. I have for ages. Sometimes I treated friends badly because I was in the midst of a months-long depression. Sometimes I cut people out of my life because I simply didn’t have the emotional energy to keep up certain niceties. I feel bad about it, certainly. But it means I relate to, for instance, Marion Cotillard’s Sandra in Two Days, One Night. I’ve been scared and desperate and depressed.
But while I relate to Two Days, One Night, it certainly doesn’t make me feel good. I did not want to dress up as Marion Cotillard for Halloween. I do not have Two Days, One Night merch.
So on that level, I get what Disney is going for. Cruella cost Disney about $100,000,000. Should it have cost that much? Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing should cost that much. But they did it, so now they want it back. Movies that leave the audience feeling good tend to make more than movies that end on a low note. On a purely financial level, it makes sense.
“And born a little bit bad.”
The question then becomes, how do you do that? Cruella is a famously malevolent pop culture icon, right? Or… is she a tragically misunderstood girlboss? The girlboss trend started as a backlash to the 80s backlash against feminism. At the time, pop culture portrayed women who tried to compete at the highest level of businesses as almost monstrous figures — like, you know, Cruella de Vil. Even to this day, the trope of women ‘having it all’ is a hotly debated topic. Do you ‘lean in’? Should we ‘ban bossy’? Can a ‘power pose’ change everything?
Making a Cruella that functions as part of the ongoing girlboss debates is not a terrible idea. It’s just not one Disney is capable of doing. Because those debates and the cultural wars they represent feel like shit. Debating the inherent humanity of half the goddamn population against a reactionary mob? It feels like shit! The delicate balance between exploitation and empowerment at the heart of the #girlboss movement? It feels like shit!
The thing is, some stories make you feel bad. They just do. It doesn’t matter how you tell them or how much you dress them up. And Cruella dresses it up a lot. Part of the reason I went into such an extensive plot summary is because I wanted to illustrate how much of the film is extraneous.
The core of the film is simple: Can Estella defeat the Baroness and become a wealthy fashion designer and still maintain her humanity? The problem is, the writers answered: “No.” And that’s not really acceptable to Disney.
That won’t sell toys.