Cruella: 'There's something hollow at the film's centre'

Disney's latest villain origin story is "lukewarm" style over substance – with a narrative that's not as bold as its design, writes Caryn James.

There's a lot of Cruella-splaining, much of it from her own mouth, in Disney's origin story about the puppy-napper we think we know. As a young woman, the pre-Cruella is a talented, aspiring fashion designer named Estella, who lives in a 1970s London full of punk style and pop music. Emma Stone brings a winning charm to Estella and a languorous glamour to the unscrupulous Cruella she morphs into, who tries to take over the fashion world while avenging her mother's death. Revenge has rarely looked so stylish.

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The film's true heroine, though, is its costume designer Jenny Beavan, who takes inspiration from Alexander McQueen and other eye-popping designers. If its narrative had been as bold as its design, Cruella might have been spikier, more radical and more surprising. But this crowd-pleasing, sometimes fun revision only makes half-hearted moves in that direction. It fits all-too-neatly into a burgeoning trend of movies that put villains at the centre and reveal how they came to be so rotten.

The character of Cruella was purely evil in the animated 1961 classic One Hundred and One Dalmatians and its 1996 live-action remake with Glenn Close. But since 2014, we've seen Disney's two Maleficent films with Angelina Jolie, as well as more acerbic origin stories in DC's Joker and Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn). Like them, the new Cruella exists to explain but not excuse a cartoon villain, and to grab the commercial success likely to come from a popular character too exciting to waste. After all, who is the most memorable non-canine in the Dalmatians movies?   

The characters turn bad for reasons that are not intriguing in themselves: a broken heart for Maleficent; a warped childhood for the Joker and Cruella; and both for Harley Quinn. The trick is to make these outsized villains interesting in the days before they become evil, which Cruella tries hard to do but doesn't quite accomplish.

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