Maggie Gyllenhaal’s tribute to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein isn’t anything like Guillermo del Toro’s recent movie of that name or previous adaptations. Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! isn’t even like the classic Bride of Frankenstein. In the black-and-white film from 1935, the Bride doesn’t say a word. In Gyllenhaal’s imagination, she simply won’t stop talking.
In Chicago in 1936, good-time girl Ida (Jessie Buckley) starts behaving strangely in the middle of pretending to enjoy herself with her older, wealthy patrons. The voice of Mary Shelley is ringing in Ida’s head and spewing out through her mouth, shocking everybody and Ida too. She dies at the end of that incident, but ever so briefly.
Victor Frankenstein’s monster, also called Frankenstein (Christian Bale), is prowling through Chicago, seeking a spouse to ease his loneliness. The scientist Euphronious (Annette Bening) reanimates Ida’s corpse, but not without glitches. Like a wind-up doll that is now malfunctioning, the revivified Ida is a hot mess, with fleeting memories of her past life and a tendency to shoot off. Frankenstein is nonplussed – and smitten.
These freakish outliers are forced to go on the run, followed by cop and his assistant (Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz) and a Mafia boss’s stooge (John Magaro). Frankenstein’s love for movies, especially the ones starring the era’s star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), creates a breadcrumb trail for the investigators. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film itself is filled with references to other films, including Bonnie and Clyde and Joker: Folie a Deux.
But The Bride! has a stagey, musical-like quality, with several set-pieces that don’t come together and far too many darkly lit, indoor sequences that undermine the liveliness of the lead actors. The film is a paradox: there’s too much happening at times, but not enough happening either.
The Bride! rests entirely on the mesmerising performances of its lead actors. Gyllenhaal’s ambition to reimagine a classic text as a manifesto for the present is most strongly realised in the presence of
Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale.
They are terrific as the misbegotten lovers, sharing an anarchic, go-for-broke equation and dredging up tenderness in their darkest moments. Bale’s heartbreakingly innocent and loyal Frankenstein eases past Buckley’s punk-feminist heroine at times.
Their chemistry survives the film’s didactic moments. The segue into sloganeering, with “Me Too” even yelled out as a line of dialogue, is at odds with the rest of the film’s uncanny, uncontrollable rhythms. The stranger The Bride! stays, the more inviting its off-kilter energies.
