Maggie Gyllenhaal’s gonzo Frankenstein riff The Bride! is ferociously alive − it’s allliiiiiive!
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Jessie Buckley plays Ida, a 1930s party girl, in The Bride!Uncredited/The Associated Press
The Bride!
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
Written by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale and Peter Sarsgaard
Classification 14A; 126 minutes
Opens in theatres March 7
Critic’s Pick
The second movie within the span of six months to rework Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – the third if we’re counting Brett Ratner’s Melania, which focused on a different kind of monstrous beauty and beast – Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! takes the polar opposite approach of her fellow Frank-o-phile Guillermo del Toro. Whereas the latter’s film was as faithful an adaptation as they come, almost past the point of no return on Netflix investment, Gyllenhaal’s IMAX-sized version abandons the mythic nuts and bolts for something more delightfully absurd and rebellious, if stitched together.
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Maggie Gyllenhaal attends The Bride!’s New York premiere on March 3.Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
The first big, fat hint that Gyllenhaal is going full-on gonzo arrives in the form of Shelley herself, who is embodied in the film by Jessie Buckley through crisp black-and-white footage. Spouting poetic nonsense directly to the camera, Shelley exists in this movie as more of a medium-crossing spirit-slash-narrator than a flesh-and-blood character. And it only takes a moment after her introduction before Shelley is possessing the body and mind of Ida, a 1930s party girl, also played by Buckley, who hangs out with the wrong crowd in the backrooms of Chicago’s finest mob joints.
After raising the ire of a particularly sadistic gangster, Ida dies an inglorious death, her mangled body landing at the bottom of a staircase before being buried in a shallow grave. Which is where Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale), or just “Frank” as he’s soon christened, finds her.
Frank, new in town after traipsing around Europe for the past hundred years, has teamed up with yet another mad scientist, this time a widow named Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), as he seeks to alleviate a seriously morbid case of randiness. After resurrecting Ida, who is now undead and loving it, Frank and his new lady paint the town a deep, crimson shade of red.
Part lovers-on-the-run thriller in the vein of Bonnie and Clyde − right down to a side-of-country-road shootout − and part phantasmagorical musical, Gyllenhaal’s movie is a true fever dream of a movie, sweaty and delirious. It flails wildly from minute to minute, bursting with ideas and themes it barely has time to articulate, but the sheer unpredictability of its narrative and aesthetic gesticulations guarantee that your attention never threatens to drift, and that your nerves remain constantly on edge.
At one moment, we’re watching Frank brutally curb-stomp a pack of anonymous rapists, and at another the monster is performing a little dreamy soft-shoe routine with a big-screen matinee idol (Jake Gyllenhaal, who does his sister a solid), a ritzy sequence that briefly recalls the very best bit in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein.
And then there is the film-noir plot that the director throws into the blender, tracing the adventures of a Chicago detective (Peter Sarsgaard, who does his wife a solid) and his secretary-slash-partner (Penelope Cruz, fantastically miscast as a kind of neo-His Girl Friday) as they follow the trail of the creature-feature couple.
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Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in a scene from The Bride!Niko Tavenise/The Associated Press
Also oscillating wildly is Buckley, who seems to be taking inspiration from both Juliette Lewis’s unhinged work in Natural Born Killers and the very worst Katharine Hepburn impersonation that Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon never had the bad sense to attempt.
Loud and outrageous and with an inexhaustible supply of spittle accenting every shout and murmur, Buckley appears to be shaking off the Oscar-qualifying solemnity of Hamnet in real time. Audience mileage will vary as to how closely and for how long anyone wants to be exposed to such an eye-popping experiment, but it is impossible to dismiss the actor’s sheer commitment to the bit.
By contrast, Bale takes a more one-note approach to Frank, though he lands that single beat awfully well. As a big ol’ softie wrapped in the sinew of a freak, the actor’s take on everyone’s favourite pitchfork target is powerful and immediate. You feel for the guy even when he’s leaking pus and cracking skulls.
Already, critics are wondering if The Bride!, arriving in theatres just as Oscar voting is closing, might pull a Norbit and torpedo Buckley’s Academy Awards hopes just as that 2007 comedy blew Eddie Murphy’s chances. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t buy the argument. Not only because Hamnet long ago bewitched every voter on the awards circuit, but also because The Bride! is the kind of big-budget swing that everybody in Hollywood secretly wishes that they could make, too. Especially today, with this film’s studio, Warner Bros., about to be swallowed whole by Paramount, which has displayed no such boldness in recent years.
What would Paramount chief executive David Ellison make of such a movie as Gyllenhaal’s? Something tells me that he’d kill it dead before anyone got around to saying it was ever close to coming alive. Or, excuse me, “Allliiiiive!”
