At this point in my career as a film critic, it’s not often that a film leaves me truly baffled – perhaps for that alone Maggie Gyllenhaal is deserving of some kudos. Unfortunately everything else about her woefully misguided take on The Bride of Frankenstein invites ridicule rather than recognition, to the extent that watching The Bride! evoked a deep feeling of second-hand embarrassment. How could a filmmaker who showed such promise with The Kindergarten Teacher and The Lost Daughter deliver such a spectacular misfire?
Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale reanimate the titular Bride and Frankenstein’s Monster (who goes by ‘Frank’ in 1936, still kicking 117 years after his creation), shooting for Bonnie and Clyde but landing closer to am-dram Joker and Harley. The socially awkward Frank has arrived in Chicago in search of renegade scientist Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening) in hopes she might be able to bring his decades of clawing loneliness to an end by creating a lover for him. Across town, good time gal Ida (Buckley) has just been thrown down a flight of stairs by gangster Clyde (John Magaro) after a particularly wild night where she became possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley (also Buckley) and caused quite the scene at dinner. Unfortunately for the already unlucky Ida, she’s the pretty corpse stolen from the local graveyard for Frank and Cornelia’s science project, and her dramatic rebirth as ‘Penelope’ sets in motion a convoluted plot involving Chicago’s seedy gangsters, crooked cops and a Fred Astaire/Gene Kelly stand-in played by Jake Gyllenhaal.
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If this all sounds a bit frantic and incoherent, that matches the energy of Gyllenhaal’s film. Buckley, playing essentially three characters at once, delivers an animated but undeniably odd performance, with the ghost of Shelley still present post-resurrection, manifesting in verbal tics that read similar to those experienced by people with Tourette Syndrome. Qualifiers like “good” and “bad” don’t seem to exist for a performance like this. Buckley’s certainly doing a lot, matching her director’s “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach to the script. It’s the sort of role that one imagines a middle-aged male studio exec thinks is wildly progressive – a notion underlined by a scene where Buckley monologues about her pain and rage, culminating in a repeatedly cry of “WHAT ABOUT ME TOO?”
The Bride!‘s bolshy insistence that it’s a radical story of female emancipation is not backed up by Gyllenhaal’s writing which is fixated on a worldview that feels comically dated. When Penelope and Frank go on the lamb after a string of murders, her distinctive appearance sparks a violent revolution among young women who apparently idolise her, while repeatedly instances of sexualised violence tell us absolutely nothing we don’t already know about what life was like for women in the 1930s (not that the 2020s are much improved). Even Penelope’s rage against her repeated exploitation feels hollow; she’s extraordinarily quick to forgive Frank despite his continuous betrayals and there’s never any real sense that the love between them is anything more than proximity bias. Gyllenhaal seems determined to make The Bride! a love story at odds with everything we’re seeing and hearing these characters do.
The cloying, laughably broad and dated gestures at feminism are at least an intentional artistic choice no matter how poor. More egregious are the multiple continuity errors and poorly staged dance numbers – there’s a slapdash quality at hand which makes The Bride!‘s rumoured $100 million budget as confusing as the overburdened plot. As such it’s difficult to not look at The Bride! and compare it to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, which similarly draws from Shelley’s novel and concerns an abused woman dragged back to life through no desire of her own who must set out to discover both her past and future. While Lanthimos’ maximalist odyssey could hardly be accused of subtly, it seems shy and retiring next to a film as obnoxiously misguided as The Bride! yet explores female autonomy and exploitation with considerably more thought and care.
This lack of subtlety extends to the references that overload The Bride! with stars including Ginger Rogers, Marlena Dietrich and Ida Lupino all getting a namecheck, and poor Jeannie Berlin subject to the indignity of reciting ‘Romeo & Juliet’ in reference to Frank and Penny. Such brashness could be forgiven if the result was a film that felt remotely challenging or disruptive, but The Bride! doesn’t have a single original thought worth pursuing. The fact that this film appears so shrilly convinced of its radical praxis speaks to a bizarre disconnection from reality.