In one sense Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! reflects its subject matter perfectly: The movie is a monster, stitched together out of wildly disparate sources of inspiration. It pays shout-out homage to everybody from Melville to Ida Lupino to Young Frankenstein, among others. And at times it does come to life, albeit chaotically.
Although the period gets a little blurry – it includes pre-code musicals, 3-D movies and punk parties – the story is ostensibly set in the mid ’30s. The Frankenstein monster (Christian Bale) is thus well over a century old, and he still has never gone steady. He shows up in Chicago at the clinic of Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), who is also capable of “reinvigorating” the dead – sounds much more therapeutic than “reanimating,” somehow – and asks her to create a bride for him.
It takes some persuading, but eventually they rob the grave of a gangster’s moll (Jessie Buckley from Hamnet) and soon her mortal coil is up and around again, sporting a frizzy Jean Harlow mop and rather elegant black coloring in and around her mouth. She and “Frank” slip out into the city, get into serious mischief and pretty soon they’re on the run together, a la Bonnie and Clyde.
Not an unworkable premise, and many individual scenes are potent or funny. But the movie lurches around from one episode to another for a long time without seeming to take hold. Gyllenhaal has a theme in mind, to be sure – the plight of women who are, for instance, resurrected from the dead without their consent, to serve the agenda of others, and are met with rage when they would prefer not to. There’s a great moment when the Bride is asked what she would like to do, and she gestures toward the ceiling, as if to say, was that so hard?
It honestly never occurred to me that the original 1933 Bride of Frankenstein plays into traditional male relational nihilism. In that move, the Bride (Elsa Lanchester) is brought back to life and immediately thrust at Karloff’s Monster. When she understandably screams at him, he immediately decides to blow her up, along with himself. There’s a sense of sympathy for the rejected Monster, but who spares a thought for the baffled Bride?
It’s a potentially rich theme, but in general Gyllenhaal doesn’t seem to have a driving narrative on which to dramatize it. About halfway through, when a dawdling police detective (Peter Sarsgaard) and his much more competent assistant (Penelope Cruz) start tracking our heroes, the movie seems to hit a stride of sorts, but it even then it seems like Gyllenhaal can’t figure out how to end it.
Thus The Bride! is a bit of a train wreck, but it’s also full of brilliance and wit, and superb acting. Buckley, who kept reminding me of Chloe Webb in Sid and Nancy, has a marvelous insouciant deadpan as the nattering Bride, covering a fiercely angry heart. Bale has probably never been more likable than he is as the romantic, movie-loving Monster, and Bening is droll as the mad doc. The big supporting cast includes ripe turns ranging from the director’s brother Jake as a swanky toe-tapping movie star to Jeannie Berlin as the doctor’s crusty maid.
The Bride! is so frustrating that I can’t recommend it, but I wouldn’t want to have missed it, and I know there are plenty of people who will like this lavishly produced mess. I might want to see it again myself.
The latest Disney/Pixar animated feature, Hoppers, is another tale of weird experiments from a lady mad scientist, and it isn’t much less peculiar than The Bride!
It’s about Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), a college student and environmental activist who’s determined to save a little grove, where she and her departed Grandma used to commune with nature, from a planned highway overpass. To do this she needs beavers to return to the stream, and when she learns of a scientist (Kathy Najimy) at her school who has developed a technology by which a person can transfer their mind into the body of a robot animal for up-close research, Mabel “hops” into a beaver to make this happen.
Revelations and wackiness ensue, including the schemes of a glad-handing Mayor (Jon Hamm) and the sweetness of the guileless Beaver King (Bobby Moynihan). There are genuinely strange and imaginative ideas and images here – a huge shark carried aloft by a flock of seagulls isn’t necessarily the strangest of them – and there’s also heart, and even some subtlety and complexity of thought. By the end, Hoppers takes on an epic quality, without ever losing its cute factor.
