Directed By Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring – Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Benning
The Plot – Dr. Frankenstein and his lonely Creature (Bale) travel to 1930s Chicago to seek the aide of a Dr. Euphronius (Benning) in creating a companion for the Creature. The doctor reinvigorates a murdered young woman (Buckley) and the Bride is born. She is beyond what either of them intended, igniting a combustible romance, the attention of the police and a wild and radical social movement.
Rated R for strong/bloody violent content, sexual content/nudity and adult language.
POSITIVES
Regretfully, this is a film that I respect more for its boldly fearless ambition than adore for its creatively conflicting execution, particularly in Gyllenhaal’s punk rock approach to repurpose such a legendary story of American literature into a 1930’s Bonnie and Clyde contortion, complete with impeccable art direction and production designs that breathe life into the familiarities of Chicago and the surrounding Midwest during the gangster age. Everything from the evolving deviation of the costume designs, to the vibrant familiarity of the set decoration, to even Lawrence Sher’s Gothic cinematography command such a vitally infused aspect of authenticity to the established atmosphere that truly brings this darkly depraved world of cop corruption and female abuse to life with unapologetic observance that feels so unlike any Frankenstein project before it, combining luminating beauty and picturesque pageantry to stunning sequences that enact the fantastically imaginative elements of a story framed entirely from author Mary Shelley’s reclaiming perspective, without anything remotely derivative or redundant from past film depictions of the characters before it. Likewise, I found an overwhelming majority of the performances to truly appraise meaningful personalities to their respective portrayals, dominated by the impressive work of Christian Bale, who never struggles surmising the very tragic element of the creature that has been stitched into the fabric of the character for over a hundred years. Bale’s slumping physicality reflects the extensive torture that the aging process and societal abuse has inflicted on him, enacting a more physically frail side of the creature than we’re used to, but it’s his emotional vulnerability that is most compelling in the air of Bale’s disappearing performance, opening up the softer side of the monster that seeks love and affection to balance his man-made curse. Bale’s single greatest approach is that he’s far more energetically reserved than that of Buckley, allowing the audience accessibility to attach themselves firmly to the tragic aspect of his situation, but beyond that never enacting a confrontational side to the movie’s overall appeal, and while this isn’t the monster’s movie in title or exploration, Bale does more than enough within concealing make-up to steal the radiance of the spotlight from beneath it, cementing another meaningfully impressionable performance that once more solidifies him as one of the very best actors working today. Lastly, while the film lives or dies on the ambitious swings that it takes towards implementing a fresh perspective to an ages old story, as a longtime Frankenstein fanatic, I did appreciate the few clever Easter eggs towards the cinematic history of this character and world that were utilized without feeling detracting from the scenes they were deposited in. While keeping the spoilers to a minimum, I will say that one strangely surreal music sequence does pay homage to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, particularly with the instrumentals of a song choice that not only brought a smile to my face, but also proved that Gyllenhaal has done her homework on the extensive past of this celebrated franchise.
NEGATIVES
The pleasantries stop there, however, as I found The Bride to be one of the more alienatingly frustrating experiences that I’ve had in recent memory, featuring some of the most bizarre and sloppily enacted executions that directly squander away the limitless potential of this movie attaching an audience to its unique voice. Creatively, this is a film completely overwhelmed with a buffet of thematic impulses and sociological talking points, without the proper time or energy to coherently flesh them out and dissect them meaningfully to the film’s integrity, leaving this often disjointed spontaneity and tumultuous tediousness to the two hour engagement that feels twice of that length with the lack of attained momentum in scenes that fail to find a way to flow naturally with so many of the contending subplots and ridiculously clumsy framing device taking away focus from the integrity of the narrative. While I wholeheartedly understand the purpose of Mary Shelley attempting to reclaim the character that was taken from her by society and cinema, her frequent outbursts within Buckley’s performance of The Bride hilariously make it feel like this character has Tourette’s syndrome during the most defining moments of her portrayal, in turn condemning this year’s best actress at the Oscar’s to an approach to ridiculously overzealous to ever be taken seriously. While Buckley’s incessant energy deposited to the character, both physically and emotionally, is commendable, her obnoxiously ruthless demeanor during her deliveries of such nauseating dialogue, make it all together impossible to invest empathetically to even the design of her undead character, with far too much time donated to the abrasively theatrical Mary Shelley side of her dual demeanor, and considering she and Bale have no semblance of palpable chemistry between the declared romanticism of their characters, perhaps as an intentional means of outlining man’s will to utilize women in the ways that they see fit, it doesn’t even enable a magnetizing dynamic for us to indulge in, leaving Buckley a compromising detraction in a movie that is quite literally made for her titular protagonist. For my money, a lack of urgency certainly plays spoiler to a two hour engagement involving such sluggish pacing, but there’s also an abundance of supporting characters who are frivolously wasted in thankless turns that feel unappreciated of the commitment and presence that they bring to the magnitude of the engagement, where the film could omit so many of their respective arcs and essentially lose nothing for it. The biggest example of this is clearly a detective duo played by Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz, who remain hot on the trail of Frank of The Bride, with Sarsgaard’s character unveiling this attached history to The Bride. Not only does this development come completely out of nowhere midway through the movie, without anything even remotely hinting at this past connection, but it also doesn’t lend itself to anything measurably impactful on the registered stakes and power dynamic involved with their undead adversaries, creating this obligational exploit that predictably only goes to show that The Bride was a living, breathing person before she was dead, and in turn leaving much head-scratching about the variety of outsider perspectives involved in the storytelling, the likes of who constantly took away from developing these monsters love with any kind of focus to get over their aforementioned lack of synergy between them. On top of a siesta of unfulfilled story points and an animated performance from Buckley, there’s also these distracting aspects to the illustration of the 1936 time frame that doesn’t even remotely make sense in the confines of their creation, even in a story framed from an outsider’s perspective that more than frequently enacts the fantastical element of its rendering. Drive-in movie theaters and 3D films are just two such examples of illegitimate aspects that don’t line up linearly within the captured time frame, though there’s plenty more about the soundtrack and instruments of depicted bands that certainly lend themselves to the confusion, and while this film clearly indulges in taking creative liberties in more than one facet of the silly screenplay, as a means of firmly establishing cinema’s escapist quality in a cruelly unforgiving world, there are plenty of other ways to convey this sentiment that doesn’t require elements outside of the realm of possibilities to effectively flesh them out, leaving this Baz Luhrman kind of channeling to Gyllenhaal’s direction that immediately stole my attention away from the dialogue of the involved characters. Speaking of Gyllenhaal, Maggie’s single biggest hinderance as a screenwriter, and one that ultimately has followed her over from her debut directorial effort; The Lost Daughter, is definitely that of her meanderingly mind-numbing dialogue, which here compromises so much of the emotional candidness of scenes involving character interactions dissecting the movie’s social commentary. Because of such, there isn’t a single solitary interaction in the film that feels earnest with the naturalism in subtlety, but easily the worst of them pertains to the movie’s admirable cause to adopt talking points pertaining to female abuse, including lines like “Me too” repeated twice, in order to get the point across. While it’s not quite as desperately obvious as something like the 2016 version of Black Christmas, it is a bit too on-the-nose and shallowly enacted to feel moving, and while I definitely think that The Bride character’s cinematic history certainly lends itself to being a slave to male necessity, here it feels closer to a slogan than it does substance, a fact made all the more embarrassing with The Bride, a murderer of guilty AND innocent people, becoming a cultural revolution of younger women painting their faces to mirror her unique look.
OVERALL
The Bride! is a clumsily concocted science experiment of an engagement that boldly and audaciously takes major swings with the cherished source material, but ultimately only connects on a visually arresting film complimenting Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ambitious efforts. Featuring a cluttered abundance of unrealized talking points and stitched-in social commentary, as well as an obnoxiously exaggerated double performance from Jessie Buckley, the film is a disjointed corpse of contention that is never brought to life by the very chaos that it leans so heavily into, leaving a lack of cohesion and tonal abrasiveness that seemingly seeks to alienate its audience in the confines of a monstrosity of a misfire that painfully lumbers through two hours.
My Grade: 4.9 or D