Jessie Buckley’s brash new Bride of Frankenstein film leaves no artery unsliced – The Irish Times
The Bride!
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Cert: 15A
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz
Running Time: 2 hrs 6 mins
Those disappointed by the lack of daring in Emerald Fennell’s deconstruction of Wuthering Heights will be happy to learn that Maggie Gyllenhaal leaves no artery unsliced in her puzzling assault on various Frankenstein texts.
The Bride! (film titles are going in for exclamation points rather than quotation marks this week) has already received too many social-media reviews arguing that it cannot be faulted for the bigness of its swing.
Well, sure. The director exercises a good portion of Jessie Buckley’s talents – she emotes, she dances, she snarls – in a film that never walks when it can stagger theatrically. It is loud. It is brash. It is wilfully discordant.
But it also, alas, exhibits a contrasting strain of clunkiness that would be more at home in an undergraduate revue.
Some examples. Towards the close, lest we miss the film’s focus on consent, Buckley’s Bride wonders “What about me too?” (Apply hashtag where required.) A much-visited alleyway displays posters mentioning the dada movement and the Bauhaus style.
Nodding towards Young Frankenstein so vigorously that we worry his head may topple free of its stitching, Christian Bale’s Creature – identified as “Frank” throughout – does a song-and-dance routine to Puttin’ on the Ritz. Not just a few lines. Like Peter Boyle in the Mel Brooks film, he warbles the whole song. Get it?
To be honest, other moments in The Bride! are more reminiscent of Carry on Screaming than Young Frankenstein. Gyllenhaal’s film has a similar raggedy clutter to the ancient British comedy. But the principal reference here is, of course, James Whale’s imperishable Bride of Frankenstein, from 1935. As in that film, the same actor plays Mary Shelley and the Bride.
We begin with Buckley, voice poshed up, speaking to us from the author’s own corner of limbo. She tells us that we really need to know a little about the title character and, to that end, brings us back (or forwards, maybe) to the Chicago of the 1930s.
Buckley, first as a spirited partygoer named Ida, comes to a sticky end in a contretemps with the city’s fabled hoodlums. Some time later a mysterious figure with stitched forehead and blocky temples – as everyone else is mentioning Herman Munster, we will do the same – stumbles into the rooms of Dr Euphronius (a delightful Annette Bening), a mad scientist, and asks that she build him a mate. He is Frank, and the body they reanimate was once poor Ida.
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What follows is unfocused, ill structured and only occasionally as much fun as it thinks itself to be.
The Bride and Frank are a number of things, but, more than anything else, they are Bonnie and Clyde. We get that sense from their violent jaunts around the Depression-era United States. The impression is heightened as they evolve into folk heroes – here clumsily inspiring a sort of Riot Grrrl aesthetic.
This version of the Bride is less an expansion of Elsa Lanchester’s from the Whale film than an entirely new, thinly drawn creation. The film intermittently forgets she is a feminist crusader before shaking itself together and discovering random misogynist outrages for her to correct.
Odder still is Penélope Cruz’s semi-comic role as a police officer fighting sexism from Neanderthal colleagues and appreciating support from a nice partner played by Peter Sarsgaard, the director’s husband. All sincerely intended. All a bit rickety.
Still, The Bride! does just about get by on suave style and committed performances. Her lower face smeared as if sketched roughly in a quality comic, Buckley relishes every opportunity to gnaw at the beautifully designed 1930s scenery. Bale has more of a struggle with his one-note character but swells the gaps with undeniable charisma.
That cliche about taking big swings is justified. Yet such swipes too often lead to being caught softly in the outfield. Not for everyone (as they say).
In cinemas from Friday, March 6th
