Directed by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Penelope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal
The Bride! comes equipped with an exclamation point but has nothing for us to be excited about. Maggie Gyllenhaal's retelling of The Bride of Frankenstein is complete with a feminist twist, hints at MeToo, and an annoying bride. It is told in overly artsy fashion in which Mary Shelley's ghost inexplicably possesses Ida (Buckley), who is getting drunk at a Chicago mobster's party circa 1936 and makes enough of a spectacle of herself to soon be murdered by the mobster's goons. The Bride! like Frankenstein's monster is an ungainly spectacle of ill-fitting parts.
The Bride! steps wrong in the first frame with the black and white spirit of Mary Shelley yapping about some nonsense before stepping into the body of Ida at the worst possible time. Soon after Ida's death, Frankenstein's monster (Bale) appears at the doorstep of Dr. Euphronius (Bening), who was inspired by and written books on Dr. Frankenstein's work. "Frank" as the good doctor soon calls him, is pent up with a century of loneliness and wants the doc to reanimate a dead woman to be his, er, companion. They dig up Ida, jolt her with electricity, and then she's back to life with little memory of who she was. Frank is ecstatic, or as ecstatic as anyone is allowed to be in such an ironically lifeless film, which is telling considering how much activity Gyllenhaal wants to cram into it.
Once Ida and Frank become an item, they visit a nightclub which wasn't likely to be found so easily in 1936 and following a confrontation in which two men try to rape Ida and Frank kills them, they find themselves on the lam like Bonnie and Clyde. Do they go on a crime spree? Not intentionally, but bodies soon pile up and Chicago detectives Wiles and Malloy (Sarsgaard and Cruz) are on the trail of the couple to New York and all over the country where they are taking in the movies of actor Ronnie Reed (Gyllenhaal, who has the mannerisms of a 1930's movie star down). By then, The Bride! has become all but incomprehensible.
Gyllenhaal saddles the actors with too many subplots, questionable motivations, and no real reasons to care. They try mightily, but ultimately The Bride! just isn't much fun to watch and even less fun to think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment