A nicely stitched monster romance with Fred Astaire and Tim Burton appeal.
There’s going to be a lot of comparisons and contractions to both Guillermo Del Toro’s vision of “Frankenstein,” Emerald Fennell’s eye-popping but whiny vision of “Wuthering Heights,” and the cynical DC sequel “Joker: Follie A Deux” in “The Bride.” This is the new film version of Mary Shelley’s classic monster lovers, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and while lacks the fully developed complexity of that Netflix gem, it has a more gothic appeal that Tim Burton may appreciate, a Bonnie and Clyde feel, and when it goes for that Fred Astaire approach, there’s more optimism in the leads here than what Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga had.
When you stitch these formulas together, you keep the good organs and throw away the bad ones. And that’s one way of looking at this movie.
Gyllenhaal guides one of her “Lost Daughter” stars Jessie Buckley as Mary Shelley, who appears in black and white scenes as the narrator, and her main heroine whom she likes to call Ida, a crazy, outspoken girl who gets murdered by two gangsters (John Magaro and Matthew Maher) in 1936 Chicago. And Gyllenhaal also reunites with her “Dark Knight” co-star Christian Bale, as he plays Frankenstein and crosses paths with the scientist Dr. Euphonius (Annette Bening) and her maid (Jeannie Berlin with that Anjelica Huston appearance). He’s looking for another walking corpse to have sex with and make bride, and that’s where Ida becomes revitalized without any memory, but has frizzily blonde hair and black ink marks on her face, tongue and hands.
Both in her former life and her new resurrected one, the Bride is the kind of woman who knows vulgarity (“F off Frank,” she says). And when she goes to an underground club, it plays like a modern day film with Fever Ray’s electronic music playing and her partying like there’s no tomorrow. Imagine her in that opening house sequence of “Babylon,” which I still give more credit than most people did.
The Bonnie and Clyde genre kicks in when Frank kills two guys who are about to rape the Bride, and they soon kill a cop tracking them down. So they travel from Chicago to New York to Niagara Falls while being trailed by two detectives: Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard, Gyllenhaal’s husband) and his assistant Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz). That’s right. She’s a female detective in the 1930s. Anyone in that time period got a problem with that? Even Wiles gives her the B.O.T.D.
And the Fred Astaire tone kicks in regarding Frank’s idol: the singing, dancing, and charming actor Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal, brother of you know who). In fact, the stitched together monster imagines himself in the black and white pictures, sometimes he’s in the background, sometimes he’s replacing Reed, and sometimes the Bride comes in.
I was skeptical about how “The Bride” would turn out based on my recent experience with the new “Wuthering Heights,” but I found it dealing with the right themes. Besides the movie nostalgia that kicks in and praises or flips off other movies of its kind, it also allows the women to be smart and outspoken without seeming so self-indulging. Both the Bride and Malloy care less about what society respectively tells these women, and they know how to use their words, kudos to Buckley and Cruz.
Like “Wuthering Heights,” this movie has a great production design, but unlike that version, it doesn’t upstage the characters. I love how the look of Dr. Euphonius’ lab, the 1930s New York look way before TV screens tried to upstage it, the drive-in movie theater, and let’s not forget that underground night club. And the make-up for Frank and the Bride are delightful and artistic.
I’m not sure how Boris Karloff would approve of movies these days, but I try to find the optimism that movies can reflect on the past without being so cocky. And as Frankenstein, Bale has a versatile appeal of a movie monster in the 30s who seems more human than the pyrophobia and stitches that try to label him. I like how he chews a drinking class and spits it out like he’s in a musical, which he might be in, and I like how he meets his idol without going for that Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis approach in “The King of Comedy.”
Guillermo Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” differentiated between a man and a monster, while Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride” differentiates between a lot of movies and characters.
