Good grief, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is a trainwreck. It’s the sort of disaster that only male directors used to be allowed to make: incoherent, feverish, self-indulgent, crammed with more ideas than the filmmaker can adequately develop. Even though this comes four months after Guillermo del Toro’s version of Frankenstein, the better comparison is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 take on Dracula. An approach like this didn’t make for good filmmaking back in the 1990s, and it doesn’t now, but when the director is this talented, it exerts a perverse sort of pull. So it does on me as I pick through the wreckage here.
The story begins in Chicago in 1936, where Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) rocks up at the door of a scientist (Annette Bening) who’s been disgraced for working on the reanimation of dead organisms. More than a century of solitude has driven the monster close to insane, and so “Frank” demands that she make him a companion. Fortunately for her, a local escort (Jessie Buckley) makes a scene at a speakeasy until her mobster boyfriend (John Magaro) accidentally kills her by pushing her down a flight of stairs. The movie turns into Bonnie and Clyde after she’s brought back; her desire for a night out leads Frank to brutally murder two men when they try to rape her. Our undead heroes hop a train out of town and leave behind dead bodies in Chicago, New York, and points in between.
Where to start with the issues here? How about the framing device where Buckley also portrays Mary Shelley? In her capacity as narrator, Mary compares this story to the brain tumor that killed the real Shelley at the age of 30, a vivid figure of speech that the resulting movie isn’t near twisted enough to live up to. Mary’s spirit occasionally takes possession of our heroine — who prefers to be known as The Bride — and while it’s easy to admire Buckley’s switching between American and English accents, Gyllenhaal gives that entirely too much play.
The Bride spills out words willy-nilly after she comes back, and it’s cute that she quotes Shakespeare, Melville, and Percy Shelley, but it comes to feel that the writer-director is the one suffering from logorrhea. The idea that Frank and The Bride’s cross-country crime spree inspires women all over America to kill the men who’ve wronged them is one that’s set by the side of the road as quickly as it’s introduced. Calling this movie “feminist” is inaccurate, because it’s too undisciplined to make a feminist statement, or a statement of any other kind.
The monster outlaws are pursued by both the mobster and by a Chicago homicide cop (played by the director’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard) working with a Weegee-like crime scene photographer (Penélope Cruz). While there’s decent character work between the latter two, the movie too often loses track of these people. There is a spasmodic ensemble dance number set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which will at least raise a laugh with Mel Brooks and fans of his Young Frankenstein.
Frank is an inveterate moviegoer, and it makes sense that he idolizes Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), a Fred Astaire-like song-and-dance man who captivates audiences with his superhuman elegance and grace. These qualities are neither less nor more admirable in a man than physical strength and resolve, even though movies tend to celebrate the latter more, and Maggie Gyllenhaal might have profitably explored Frank’s ideas about why Ronnie embodies his ideal man. Instead, while she has a great time imitating 1930s musical films and showcasing her brother’s musical skills, there’s no payoff to that, not even when Frank meets the real Ronnie in New York and a hostage situation ensues.
Even less forgivable is the fact that our heroine never emerges as her own person. This is a common shortcoming of movies about women brought back from the dead (starting with James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, which I find overrated), but you’d expect a woman in charge of this much talent to correct that. For all The Bride’s chafing at her newfound monstrous existence, she never comes close to developing like Emma Stone’s character in Poor Things. Notable as this film’s gonzo spirit on such a large budget might be, you’re hard pressed to make out what it’s about when everything is just splattered against the wall like this.
The Bride!
Starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale. Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Rated R.
