Producers: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Talia Kleinhendler and Osnat Handelsman-Keren Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal Screenplay: Maggie Gyllenhaal Cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz, Jeannie Berlin, Zlatko Burić, Louis Cancelmi, Linda Emond and Julianne Hough Distributor: Warner Bros.
Grade: D
The exclamation point in the title is a clear indication of the gonzo, way-over-the-top intention behind Maggie Gyllenhaal’s aggressively feminist pseudo-redo of James Whale’s 1935 film “Bride of Frankenstein,” which some consider superior to its classic 1931 predecessor. Few will consider “The Bride!” superior to much of anything, least of all Guillermo del Toro’s lavish, reverential reimagining of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel from last year. To put it simply, this is less a horror film than merely a horrible one.
It opens with Shelley herself, played by Jessie Buckley in one aspect of what amounts to a triple role, ranting, in oppressive black-and-white closeup, about the story she’s always wanted to tell but presumably wasn’t allowed to by the sexist attitudes of her day, which explain, among other things, why “Frankenstein” was first published anonymously. Her anachronistically foul-mouthed harangue, like the proto-feminist arguments of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft amped up to intolerable decibels, ends with Shelley introducing us to “the mother….ing bride!”
We’re then dumped into a sleazy club in 1930s Chicago where Ida (Buckley again), a flapper type in a slinky, shiny red dress, is cavorting at a table with two mobsters, James (Matthew Maher) and Clyde (John Magaro). She’s acting out with hysterical abandon, and when James force-feeds her an oyster, she vomits all over him. That might have been tolerated, but when she insults big boss Lupino (Zlatko Burić), he orders them to get rid of her. They take her outside, toss her down a stone staircase, and bury the body.
Cut to Frank (Christian Bale), as the hundred-plus-year-old Frankenstein’s monster is called here, ambling around the city. A heavily scarred, patched-together creature, he’s looking for Dr. Euphronius, whose books demonstrate a skill similar to his creator’s, to beg the scientist to make him a companion; he’s terribly lonely, you see, his sole pleasure, it seems, watching the song-and-dance movies of debonair Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), whom he imagines himself emulating. Euphronius turns out to be a woman (Annette Bening) who has concealed her female identity, a drawback in her field, by using only her first initial in print.
It takes the mad doctor surprisingly little time to agree, and, after they dig up Ida’s body (which the mobsters have apparently left in an easily discoverable grave), and, more surprisingly, practically no time to regenerate it. (That sequence, stunning in most Frankenstein movies, is perfunctory here.) Ida, now The Bride, is if anything even less inhibited that before her murder, and is prone to respond to requests by saying “I would prefer not to,” presumably indicating what women should always be prepared as a rejoinder to any male demand. (At one point Jeannie Berlin, playing Euphronius’ maid Greta, blurts out the Melville reference, apparently because it’s assumed viewers won’t get it.) Elsewhere The Bride is even allowed to shout out “Me too!” This is not a subtle film.
Anyway, Frank and The Bride go off to paint the town red, which he does literally when two skeevy slimebags try to rape her. That forces them to go on the lam, abandoning the Windy City for the Big Apple, but it results in their pursuit by a world-weary Chicago detective, Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard), who, it will eventually be revealed in a pro-forma monologue badly delivered by the actor, had been important in Ida’s life, and his Rosalind Russell-style partner Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), who never gets any recognition because, you won’t be surprised to learn, she’s a woman, and nobody can accept a female cop.
There follows a series of episodes in which Frank and The Bride cause mayhem, the most notable a ritzy gathering in New York where Frank gets to meet his idol Reed face to face, with a result that puts them even more decisively on the wanted list. But Gyllenhaal isn’t yet satisfied that she’s pummeled us sufficiently with her message: in addition to having Shelley reappear periodically to hammer home her intentions, she devises a particularly ugly sequence in which a highway patrolman (Louis Cancelmi) decides to rape The Bride during a traffic stop on a lonely rural road. A denouement back at Euphronius’ lab involves not only scads of police but Clyde, who’s been dispatched by Lupino to put an end to a problem he and James had failed to deal with earlier.
As if the suffocatingly repetitive feminist point-making in the Frank-Bride plot weren’t enough, Gyllenhaal inserts a nutty subplot about how The Bride’s notoriety spawns a revolution among the women of the day, who emulate her vampiric look—black tongue ad lips, with a smear of black paint across the right cheek—and attack their abusers. Nothing much is made of this beyond the premise, though.
Gyllenhaal uses anachronism to try to make all this seem somehow timeless, not only by resituating the Frankenstein story to the 1930s but then adding tweaks to make it unusual—yes, there were some drive-ins during the depression, but they didn’t become popular until later, and there certainly were no 3D movies shown in major theatres until the 1950s—but by inserting pop tunes into Hildur Gudnadóttir’s blowsy score.
The needle drops are merely adjuncts to the movie drops. “The Bride!” is propelled not just by excerpts from songs but allusions to films that make it as much cobbled together as the monster. “Bride of Frankenstein” is, in fact, the least of them. More important are the obvious debts to “Young Frankenstein” (“Puttin’ on the Ritz”) and “Bonnie and Clyde” (especially in the big finale), but there are winks to many others (Lupino’s takedown of James looks back to “The Untouchables,” for example). Cataloguing the allusions would be a tiresome exercise.
As to the look of the picture, garish would be an understatement. Karen Murphy’s production design is eye-popping (consider the Times Square sequence) even in Lawrence Sher’s often gloomy cinematography, and Sandy Powell’s costumes, especially Ida’s dresses and Myrna’s suits, are voluptuous. (The hair styling for Buckley’s Jean Harlow coiffure and Cruz’s Russell one, and the makeup and prosthetics on Bale, are skilled as well.) But the pacing of the film—joint responsibility of Gyllenhaal and editor Dylan Richenor—is ponderous.
Garish is also the appropriate description of Buckley’s performance. She’s only doing what’s asked of her, of course—but her ravenous, scenery-chewing exhibition is as boring as it is exhausting. (One can only imagine the effect on her current Oscar campaign if voters had seen it months ago.) Bale should be glad that he’s very much playing second fiddle to her; his discomfort is less noticeable as a result. Among the others one feels most sympathetic to Sarsgaard, a good actor reduced to playing a scowling non-character who’s hard to understand even after his big revelation. Cruz is just posing; one hopes she got to keep er wardrobe as compensation. Bening, frantically attempting to seem wildly eccentric, doesn’t even have that justification to fall back on, and one wonders what childhood wrong Maggie is taking out on Jake. The others mostly overdo badly, with Cancelmi coming off worst, though everyone else among the supporting cast is vying with him.
You have to give Gyllenhaal some credit for sheer audacity; it takes nerve to waste a studio’s money on a picture that’s probably going to be box office poison, a sophomore disaster that’s likely to erase whatever goodwill she won with her far more interesting, if flawed, debut directing effort, “The Lost Daughter.” But then “The Bride!” is clearly a personal project designed to make a point rather than curry favor, a swing for the fences that misses by a mile. It’s a pity that however valid the point it’s aiming for, this awful movie makes it stupefyingly badly. “The Bride!” is this year’s “Joker: Folie à Deux.”