I don’t know who was asking for a live-action origin story of an animated character who first hit the screen sixty years ago, but I’m glad they did.
Cruella stars Emma Stone as the fashionable villainess who loathes Dalmatians and longs to use them to make coats. Wait, let me back up – Stone stars as the young lady who later became Cruella de Vil. She starts off here as Estella, a young girl with a cool mom and an absent dad.
It’s 1970s London (this is *not* a spoiler) and Estella will lose her young mother to a nasty fall off a cliff, knocked over by, yes, some Dalmatians who’ve been set loose by the evil fashion designer icon, Baroness Von Hellman (Emma Thompson is deliciously nasty in a role that feels similar to Meryl Streep’s part in The Devil Wears Prada).
Motherless and eventually on the streets, Estella has turned into a clever grifter in order to survive. She and her little dog are a team. When she spots two other guys in the same business, or do they spot her?, they become a trio of young crooks, sharing a flat and the booty they team up to steal.
Here I will skip several spoilers to say just that Estella learns the truth about how her mother died – that cliff fall was no accident – and she sets about to seek revenge on the Baroness.
Turns out that Stella is a gifted fashion designer and she finds a way to get a job in the cool looking shop where the Baroness looks down from her office onto the floor of her sycophantic employees.
Again, maybe it’s because it involves fashion, but Emma Stone seems like she’s playing a kind of Anne Hathaway part from TDWP at times and the butt-kissing employees and assistants also seem taken, at least in spirit, from that 2006 film.
But that is not a complaint. It’s a compliment that a Disney film is able to sneak in that naughty, haughty flavor into a perfectly innocent PG-13 rated film. Although, they are definitely not going for tykes and toddlers here.
Apart from the amazing costumes and sets, all credit goes to Stone who shows us the reason why she went from Estella to Cruella, and how, underneath her increasingly menacing demeanor as the story moves along, she still has a heart. I mean, that jet black and shocking white hair is all the metaphor you need, but that sort of 3-dimensionality is a tricky thing to pull off, but she is always game, Emma Stone.
There are so many reveals that I’ve tread carefully and will leave the rest up to you. The 2 hour and 16 minute run time feels a bit longer than was necessary, but I suppose that director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) made his case to the producers.
And shout out to the soundtrack! Well selected tunes from yesteryear pop up at just the right moments. Queen, Supertramp, Nina Simone, ELO, and many more.
For some reason, this feels like the movie that will bring us back after our long time away from the cinema. For that reason alone, I feel very affectionately toward Cruella.
Cruella opens in theaters nationwide on May 28th. Buy tickets here.
You can also watch on Disney+ (subscription required, plus additional one-time fee for the film). Once the film is purchased on Disney+, it can be viewed as many times as you want. Paying the fee also gives you access to the film before it is released to all Disney+ subscribers at a later date.
