Fairly early on in The Bride! our title character and Frankenstein both go to Chicago’s well-known “pre-war Berlin” neighborhood for a night of dancing. Which makes sense, as it’s a safe space — or is it?! — for people that society might consider outcasts or, maybe even… monsters? You can tell it’s the queer neighborhood, because someone has meticulously written graffiti on the wall that reads “2 + 2 = 5?” There are no rules here! Question everything!
That’s not the one thing I like about this movie. I just have to mention it as the clearest sign of how it works, and how it’s just not something to be taken that seriously. Later on, there’s a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which is corny as hell but is also just almost clever enough for me to give it a pass. But over the end credits, “Monster Mash” plays. This is a movie that takes as much as it gives.
I was completely won over by the teaser trailers, with shots of a black void with Jessie Buckley’s head in a bell jar, speaking to the camera, intercut with flashes of dance numbers and Bonnie and Clyde references and huge title text. This was clearly a movie that was taking a big swing, and I was going to see it no matter what.
Even though early impressions weren’t great. Alonso Duralde described it as “if Moulin Rouge! were a proto-feminist horror movie,” which seemed both promising and intimidating. That movie kept trying to throw me off, by being so loud and corny and over-the-top, but it eventually won me over completely. The Bride! is similar in that there’s a lot of movie there, and it demands a lot of patience from the audience, taking all of the excess in stride. But it also doesn’t have anywhere near as much earnest sincerity.
Not that it’s insincere; I have no trouble believing that the movie believes in everything it’s saying (whatever that may be, exactly), and that all the performers are fully committing to the bit. Just that it never loses the feeling of a bunch of well-known actors sinking their teeth into an acting exercise. Annette Bening never stops being Annette Bening, even while playing a mad scientist. Same for Penelope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Peter Sarsgaard. Even the bad guy from Superman (Zlatko Buric) never fully became “menacing mob boss,” not through any fault of his own, but just because the movie feels so purposefully artificial that recognizable actors remain recognizable actors.
The fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal is writer and director of this is all over the marketing, and it’s an essential part of what this movie is, but I kind of wish I hadn’t known that going in. Because I was never really able to watch it as anything other than a famous person getting a bunch of her famous friends and family together to do a very expensive piece of experimental theater. The earnestness of The Bride! is similar to the earnestness of a very personal one-act play. One that an acquaintance has invited you to come watch, and you weren’t able to come up with a sufficient excuse to bow out.
I went in expecting to have a take-away like, “you’ve got to respect how it was such a big swing!” There’s no shortage of big swings — and the movie is an early front-runner for any awards in the category of Most Acting — but they rarely connect.
Possibly the most obvious example is the conceit of Mary Shelley’s ghost. She opens the movie in a monologue delivered from a black void, saying essentially that Frankenstein is what became her legacy, but this is the story she really wanted to tell. She possesses the body of a gun moll in 1930s Chicago, who becomes our main character. It’s not used as a framing device, but is carried throughout the movie. Sometimes in conversations between Ida and Shelley, sometimes in passages of dialogue where Shelley takes over, and most often in the form of sudden outbursts, like a near-incessant verbal tic.
It sounds like it could be interesting, but it’s off-putting more often than not. I could only make out about 60% of what was actually being said at any given moment1I had a problem with all of the dialogue apart from Sarsgaard and Bening, who seemed to be purposefully speaking the most modern, unaffected American accents possible. And Bening spends most of the movie speaking in Star Trek technobabble, which I would’ve been on board with if it hadn’t felt like such a deliberate attempt to make absolutely certain the audience understood how the science wasn’t the point., but based on the parts I could make out, I don’t think I was missing that much. A lot of it is sudden outbursts of wordplay, which always felt self-consciously written by a 21st century American to sound like what a literate Victorian would find clever. The other day at CityWalk, I saw a guy with a T-shirt that read “REAL EYES REALIZE REAL LIES” in big letters, and I felt like a lot of the wordplay in The Bride! had a similar vibe.
But that also leads into what I think was the best scene — or at least most effective one for me — in the movie. It’s pretty early on, where Ida/The Bride is in the middle of a dream in which she’s talking with Shelley’s ghost. We see her floating above her own body down on the operating table2And pressing uncomfortably against the glass ceiling, because I can’t stress enough how much this is not a subtle movie, and they’re talking about identity. I can’t even remember any specific lines of dialogue, which I’m taking as a sign that it was one of the few scenes that was actually speaking to me. Conveying ideas opposed to reciting dialogue.
It’s not some post-modern, 21st century invention to use the writing of Frankenstein as a framing device for a story. Neither is it to invite comparisons between The Bride and Mary Shelley herself by casting the same actor in both roles. The Bride of Frankenstein did both in 1935. But with this scene, The Bride! is demanding that you consider all the implications of that, essentially giving you a visual breakdown of all the levels of irony.
It all but literally draws a straight line between Shelley’s ghost, the currently-lifeless body on the table that used to be Ida, and the essence of a different, synthesized person floating in between, still in the process of defining who she is, exactly. I think it’s an acknowledgement by Gyllenhaal of the audacity of the main conceit: she is basically reanimating the corpse of Mary Shelley for a specific purpose, to serve as her mouthpiece.
It’s also a kind of defense and justification, by suggesting that every interpretation or continuation of Frankenstein — the story itself, and the story of writing it — will unavoidably be saddled with that irony. Whether you’re putting it forward as a humanist story or a specifically feminist one, you’re still taking a story with a core idea of self-identification and imposing your own identity onto it. The movie is full of constant, explicit reminders that women are defined in terms of what other people want from them, and the limited idea of what other people think they’re capable of achieving. Putting Mary Shelley forward as a feminist icon and an under-appreciated creator of the entire genre of science fiction is itself imposing your own definition of who she was.
At least, that’s my interpretation. Which is, obviously, imposing my own definition of what Gyllenhaal was trying to say, which is an issue that carries on throughout the movie. The Bride! is simultaneously obtuse and unambiguous, often unclear of what it might be trying to say beyond the most patently obvious, but at the same time so direct that it doesn’t really invite you to try and come up with a more complex interpretation. But I thought this specific scene did exactly that. And the effect lasted throughout, turning the off-putting outbursts and verbal tics into a visual representation of how fraught it is to talk about feminism without descending into a self-contradicting spiral of irony.3Kind of like America Ferrera’s more on-the-nose speech in Barbie about how women can never be too this or too that.
So I’m pretty critical of the movie, with the one scene that I think works the best actually being just a justification for the big swings that don’t really connect. Why am I interested in it at all, instead of dismissing it?
Because if you’re going to make a movie that is essentially just giving recognizable actors an opportunity for over-the-top acting exercises, you couldn’t pick a better pair of actors that Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that they make the movie work, but they absolutely make the movie memorable.
Bale seems well aware of what the movie is about and who is the focus, so he doesn’t try to meet Buckley’s energy, but deliver a contrast to it. His version of Frankenstein is awkward and beaten down from living too long as a monster, always conscious of not scaring people or taking up too much space. He’s prone to violent outbursts or the occasional fit of jealousy, but the entire plot is driven by how much of a romantic he is. When you see him sitting in a theater, grinning during a musical number and imagining himself on screen, it’s just plain charming.
Later in the movie, the characters are at a drive-in theater4What’s a drive-in?, and a conversation between The Bride and Frankenstein plays out both in the audience and on the screen. They mention Dr Euphronious, the mad scientist that brought her to life, and Frank casually, wistfully, almost reflexively, observes, “She’s a genius.” It’s a small, weird detail, perfectly delivered, and for me it was one of the only genuine laughs in the whole movie.
And it’s really difficult to imagine anybody who could’ve pulled off the title role as well as Jessie Buckley. She’s constantly having to jump between Ida, Mary Shelley, and this gradually-emerging identity of The Bride, and it never feels natural or believable — because the movie seems to have decided early on that it wasn’t shooting for believability — but it’s rarely so jarring that it feels like nothing but an affectation. There’s something oddly subtle about it, in a movie that’s otherwise completely unconcerned with subtlety, where you get the sense that every thing this character does is a performance, until the moments when a real person starts to peek through. And to be blunt: I can’t imagine anybody else playing this part without its being insufferably annoying.
So the movie is a showcase for two outstanding actors, and it does have an interesting take on what it even means to make a movie like this in the first place. But ultimately I was pretty disappointed that this movie would seem to take so many big swings and having so few of them actually connect. To the point of making me wonder how many of them were actually big swings in the first place.
Going back to the Moulin Rouge! comparison: whether you love that movie or hate it, you can’t deny that it has a go-for-broke energy to it. If this doesn’t work out, we are all going to look very, very silly. For all of its weirdness, I could never shake the feeling that The Bride! was a cautiously controlled experiment.
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