Disney’s latest live action tale of villainy is less a portrait of a fledgling maniac and more the examination of the birth of an iconoclast. Unlike so many of Disney’s more fantastical villains with their desire for power or rule and a few magic tricks up their sleeves, Cruella DeVil is presented to us as a fashionista school friend of Anita’s. The sum total of her desire in the animated film is to create a statement piece. And her unwillingness to use synthetics, we can then suppose, is the Achilles Heel that finds her, Horace and Jasper high and dry in a pile of parts by the road whilst Roger, Anita and all 101 Dalmatians make plans to move to the countryside. And so, when it comes to expectations for Cruella, with Emma Stone in the titular role and Emma Thompson as a grande dame of 70s London, the only true impression must be that there will be fashion, and perhaps answers, if there’s time.
Dear reader, there is fashion. The at-odds worlds of haute couture and punk rock collide in an effective mirror for the social divide between young grifter Estella — not yet come into her nom de terror — and the rest of the London, but especially between the young upstart and her design idol, The Baroness. Perhaps the only two people in London not looking down on Estella are her devoted pals and frequent co-conspirators, Horace and Jasper. Bonded as only kids who’ve had to take care of each other when no one else would can be, Estella, Horace and Jasper live a happy enough life on the strength of their schemes and heists. But when Jasper, kinder and more insightful here than we’ve known him, sets Estella on the path to legitimacy, so she might put her design talents into the world, he sets her on a course to becoming the chain smoking baddie of lore.
It’s not that Estella doesn’t want to play by the rules so much as it is that there’s no path for her but to make a splash or be lost in the shuffle. And so it is that a series of plot machinations force Estella to become Cruella, not just for her dreams, but for something like justice. Meanwhile, the audience is left to watch as her single-minded pursuit turns out marvels of fabric and some pretty awe inspiring marketing maneuvers even amidst an increasing series of subterfuges and capers. It really is quite a lot to be getting on with — but the indulgent two-plus hour runtime is almost forgivable for the fun and frenetic energy that rockets from frame to frame.
Director Craig Gillespie, working from a story developed by Aline Brosh McKenna (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) and written by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara, deploys sweeping sets and music cues that smack of cool to immerse us in the excitement and rebellion of the punk movement even as he leans into fan service and winks at what we know must come later. It’s a riot of color and righteous angst that paints the blossoming Cruella as the hero of her own story more effectively than any other such reframing we’ve seen from Disney. By turns it is convenient and conventional, but just as often it is wacky and unexpected. Emmas Stone and Thompson play off each other with the witty talons that keep so many eponymous Real Housewives in Bravo’s good graces.
Cruella is not a film that passes by. It crackles. With nods to Sunset Boulevard and the fickle nature of fame and genius, it is the rare Disney film grounded in the outlandishness of real life rather than the metaphors of fairy tales — and for that it stands worthy of its iconic namesake. Cruella didn’t have to be fun. It might have been dark or bleak, menacing even, but it instead reminds us that the line between icon and villain is often as thin as a spare bit of thread.