Talking Through One of the Odder Choices In A Very Odd Film
The first character we meet in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is neither the Bride of Frankenstein nor her undead paramour. No, instead we’re greeted by Frankenstein author Mary Shelley herself, played by Jessie Buckley who will in mere moments appear on screen again as the titular (motherfucking) Bride. Encased in a black and white purgatory, Shelley laments not just that she’s dead, but that she’s only remembered for Frankenstein when she had other, better stories still to tell. Namely: The Bride!
It’s a bold choice at the onset of a film that is two-plus hours of pretty much nothing but bold choices. In this particular case, though, there’s a bit of precedent for what Gyllenhaal’s playing at. While The Bride! is in conversation with a whole century of Frankenstein adaptations and riffs, it’s primary influence is James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, the crown jewel of the original run of Universal monster movies. Like The Bride!, Bride of also double-casts Mrs. Shelley with Mrs. Frankenstein, with Elsa Lanchester hissing her way into immortality in the closing moments of the film. Bride of also boasts a cold open in which Mary Shelley speaks rather dismissively of her original work while teeing up a continuation that will be scarier in every way.
Either film invoking Mary Shelley’s seal of approval is rather rich. First of all, she’s dead and has continued to insist on being so for quite some time. You don’t see Peter Jackson shuffling out some tweed-clad character actor at the start of Lord of the Rings to give Tolkien’s forged assent to the Bombadil-free proceedings. Both of James Whale’s Frankenstein films play as fast and loose with their source text as an adaptation can, while Gyllenhaal’s film having the temerity to open with the claim that Frankenstein was a hatchet job and this is what Shelley wanted to write all along is…you remember what I said about bold choices? I mean for God’s sake, Shelley’s novel doesn’t even have a Bride character in its pages!
There’s a crucial difference to how the respective Bride films utilize Mary Shelley as an onscreen figure. In The Bride of, she’s only seen in the cold open, a framing device to recap the original film and set the tone for the Gothic freakout that’s about to unfurl. Lanchester disappears from the movie after this until being unveiled in her bandaged-wrapped, beehive hairdo’d glory as her Bride incarnation.
But The Bride! opts to have Shelley be an integral component throughout. Miserable in her afterlife, Shelley decides to tell her new story by hijacking the body of lowly gangster’s moll Ida (Buckley again), inadvertently(?) getting the young woman killed when she starts blathering mob secrets in this possessed state. Once Ida is resurrected as an amnesiac companion for “Frankie” (a staple-faced Christian Bale), Mary continues to literally haunt the film, both as a voice spewing unbidden from the Bride’s stream-of-conscious rants and in dreams and visions in which she urges her doppelganger towards establishing a new and distinct identity.
This second approach presents a few issues, the first and foremost being that it doesn’t make any goddamn sense, ever, at all, and The Bride! is too stodgily paced to get away with the sort of freewheeling, never-mind-the-logic-just-take-the-ride ecstatic truth storytelling that would make an audience give itself over to such a choice, interior logic be damned. The ‘that doesn’t make any goddamn sense’ siren is too loud to ignore. The Bride! posits that Frankenstein is a story that Mary Shelley wrote, sure…but also it’s a real thing that really happened because here’s the actual Frankenstein’s Monster stomping in heads and carrying on as he is wont to do. The vibes aren’t strong enough to overcome cognitive dissonance levels at red alert.
Trying to engage with the Shelley material on a thematic level only inspires even more frustration. Her intrusions are all geared towards bringing the Bride into a new and independent personhood, shedding the identities and expectations imposed upon her by men. This journey towards selfdom takes up the entirety of the film, but scarcely has the Bride finally declared her liberation then she’s already running back to ‘Frankie’. Her first and only autonomous action after claiming a name and title is entirely centered on taking care of the gaslighting man she’s still beholden to (but voluntarily, this time, I guess).
Like so much else in The Bride!, the Shelley material isn’t a problem because it’s too bold a choice but because it doesn’t feel quite bold enough. Doing a new Frankenstein riff with Mary Shelley’s unruly ghost weighing in from the netherworld while throwing an occasional lighting bolt at her characters like Zeus’s sallow Goth cousin is an idea with tons of potential that The Bride! just isn’t interested in unpacking.
The double-casting of Lanchester felt like both a nod to Whale’s origins on stage, and to the relationship between authors and their creations. Gyllenhaal’s movie is more directly concerned with notions of authorship and creative intent, and there’s a version of The Bride! where the dueling Buckley performances collide and the movie gets to sink its teeth into where a creator ends and a creation begins.
That’s not to say there aren’t places where Gyllenhaal’s meta flourishes…flourish. Frankie’s habit of imagining himself onto the silver screen works in large part because of the aching sincerity Bale communicates beneath the prosthetics and the stacked layers of reality. The idea of a Creature that desperately wishes to escape his assigned role in a monster movie and become a song and dance man instead is deeply sweet and builds to the triumphant centerpiece of The Bride!: An out of left field musical sequence that finds Bale and Buckley tearing up a dancefloor with a new rendition of “Puttin’ On the Ritz”. You don’t have to have seen Young Frankenstein to be thrilled in this moment, but it certainly helps.
There are a number of sequences throughout The Bride! that hover around that same level of success, that find Gyllenhaal taking the Frankenstein story and cultural legacy down to its component elements and refitting and recombining the pieces into new dimensions. While it’s easy to wish that The Bride! focused on a specific core idea and really dug in, somehow that feels like a betrayal to the spirit of unapologetic mess and experimentation running through The Bride! like electricity through the veins of necrotic flesh made ambulatory.
The “Mary Shelley in purgatory” stuff ends up being the film in a nutshell: A simultaneously terrible and compelling idea that’s poorly executed and implemented but still kind of sort of remains compelling? Like The Bride! as a whole, it doesn’t work at all and yet I still find myself turning it over in my head, trying to unpack it and find the path that unlocks the whole film. Until then, I can only sit back and admire the misshapen object beautiful because of, not despite, its ragged edges and proud scars.
