The Bride!
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is disappointed in the compromises of her life and legacy, her key work Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus having initially been published anonymously, the world unready for a mere woman to create such a story, the novel superceded over time by its adaptations, inevitably written, designed and directed by men who would be feted while she was overlooked and overshadowed, long since dead at only fifty-three in 1851.
Living in Chicago in 1936 in the orbit of gangsters and their henchmen, Ida is similarly compromised, forced to assimilate, to cheapen herself to remain relevant, an untoward turn at a gathering marking her as too much of a liability, excised from the establishment and her mortal coil, shocked to be reinvigorated as an amnesiac in the home of Doctor Cornelia Euphronious at the behest of “Frank” who pulled her from the shallow grave in which she was abandoned, forced into a second life in which she has no say.
A riotous cacophony of stitched-together styles and ideas, The Bride! is written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, inspired by both Shelley’s Frankenstein and James Whale’s 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, with Men’s Jessie Buckley refusing to diminish herself in her dual roles of the ghostly author who observes and wryly comments on proceedings or the revived Ida whom she has possessed, her mind and body sparking electricity and vocabulary.
Whether she is an experiment, a test subject, an example or a miracle, she is not compliant, unaccustomed to blind obedience and ill-disposed to begin even at this peculiar juncture, galvanised to a greater determination to push against rules and expectations, defiant and uncontrollable as she rages through the city with the patchwork and pining Frank (The Prestige’s Christian Bale) in tow, surprisingly gentle suitor and defender, unwilling to be tied to him unless she deems him as worthy.
The recreation of the era breathtaking, bright lights of city streets and shimmering nightclubs of debauchery hiding the darkness of the shadows, the dirt roads of police chases and shoot-outs, the nods to the classics are many with characters named Ida (Lupino), James (Whale), Myrna (Loy) and Greta (Garbo), and while Ninotchka proclaimed “Garbo laughs” here the tagline could as easily be “Bale dances” or “Gyllenhaal sings.”
The director having recruited brother Jake as Hollywood star Ronnie Reed, the other object of Frank’s obsession, drawn to the cinema as an opportunity to see people together, interacting, a pretence of company while he sits in the dark, his disfigurement concealed, his desire for intellectual discourse is met by Annette Bening’s Cornelia, and while her approach to the problem he brings her is clinical rather than personal it is Frank’s appeal to her humanity rather than her ego which persuades her to assist him.
The parallels with Bonnie and Clyde unavoidable, less expected is a musical homage to Young Frankenstein, but with Penélope Cruz as Myrna Malloy, ostensibly acting as assistant to Peter Sarsgaard’s detective Jake Wiles but without doubt his equal, and Doctor Euphronious obliged to publish her research as “C Euphronious” so as not to be similarly marginalised for her gender rather than celebrated for her accomplishments, it is not a film about well-behaved women who keep to their assigned places, the central theme the determination of men to silence women by any means.
While there is new life in the old body, The Bride! constantly reinventing familiar ideas and itself as it hits the railroad, the dirt road and the drive-in theatre, Ida and Frank are like fireflies in the night, destined to burn bright before they burn out, a film too defiantly eccentric to appeal to a widestream audience, neither horror story, love story, thriller nor musical although it jumps between all, but a film for the outsiders, the freaks and monsters who only belong in the spaces they create for themselves, taking Shelley’s advice to refuse to fit in.
The Bride! is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX
