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*/**** starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
by Walter Chaw I can’t tell you how excited I was for this. I love the Frankenstein myth for how malleable it is, how easily it slots into various syndromes and traumas. How contemporary it is, always, in its dissection of the masculine will to power. It can be told from the perspective of the pain of Icarus or the agony of Daedalus. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives; unwholesome desires, lost weekends. Frankenstein author Mary Shelley was, of course, the shit, a true progressive two centuries ahead of her time who likely helped a transgender man assume his new identity and kept a piece of her drowned husband’s heart in a folded copy of his poem Adonais. That poem is an elegy for John Keats. It’s arguably the best thing Percy Shelley ever wrote, not the least for the slight undertone of disingenuousness in its profusion. It’s like a Smiths song. This is my favourite line from it: “He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely.” I don’t think Percy liked how Keats was a genius while he, Percy, was not. I know that Keats, at least, was leery of Percy’s attention, especially as Percy began their relationship by dismissing his work. It doesn’t matter. I love how Mary Shelley chose Adonais as the shroud for her husband’s pickled heart. She was as good a literary critic as she was an author–and she was a phenomenal author. Mary would’ve torn Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! apart.
The ideas in The Bride! have all been done, and done better, in movies more coherent, more graceful, and less head-slappingly obvious in their pedantry. This is not to dismiss it simply because it’s assembled from bits and pieces of other films, Frankenstein’s Monster-like (most filmmakers are magpie artists, after all), but The Bride! is just so pleased with itself and, worse, so patronizing towards its audience, arguing things that no one interested in seeing it would disagree with as though it were fire among the savages. It is that never-graceful, never-successful creature: a film striving from its inception to be a cult classic. And it’s an attempt at camp by a creator who asks a game cast to act like theatre kids at the closing-night afterparty–which is only fun, let’s face it, for the ones in ripped tights screaming Marlowe and drinking absinthe–and otherwise doesn’t seem terribly witty. Gyllenhaal has said she was inspired to pen this project after watching James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein for the first time and feeling upset that the Bride (Elsa Lanchester) didn’t get more time to express her opinion about being literally made to be the wife of a man. Which suggests she doesn’t think much of either Whale, director of a few of the more poignant films concerning identity and the patriarchy from his time, or Elsa fucking Lanchester, who pretty clearly gave us her opinion in a performance legendary for, not despite, its brevity.
Godard believed the best way to critique a film was to make one, now here’s Gyllenhaal demonstrating the critical capacity of the people who thought the original Black Christmas wasn’t feminist enough. Set in 1930s gangland Chicago following the repeal of Prohibition (circa The Bride of Frankenstein), The Bride! opens with drunken Ida (Jessie Buckley) becoming a conduit for the spirit of Mary Shelley (Buckley) and screaming emotively at gangster Lupino (Zlatko Burić). Ida Lupino, get it? The only woman director during the classical noir period? DO YOU FUCKING GET IT? Ida subsequently falls down a staircase in slow-motion and perishes. Cut to: a mysterious stranger dressed like the Shadow, cutting through the Second City on his way to meet dotty Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who is apparently named for the Greek vase artist because why not? The stranger is Frank (Christian Bale), naturally, a.k.a. Frankenstein’s Monster–but don’t call him that or you’ll hurt his feelings. Allegedly well-acquainted with the origin of Frank’s creation, Dr. Euphronius accedes to his demands that she reanimate him a bride, so long as the cadaver isn’t too pretty. Ida, alas, is too pretty, but they reanimate her anyway. At this point, Dr. Euphronius says she doesn’t understand all that shit about stitching together spare parts, to which Frank responds that his dad wanted to make something beautiful. Dr. Euphronius scoffs. As a critical reader of Shelley, I believe she wrote the stitching together of parts to refer to her own approach to writing the book–how she’s essentially needling the British Romanticists in her immediate orbit (i.e., the rich ones) by mimicking their styles each in turn, sometimes cruelly. Successfully, too. The book was initially published without a byline, leading contemporary critics to speculate, based on the prosody, that one of the men hanging around Mary Shelley was responsible. She was, as I say, a superlative literary critic. At this point in The Bride!, I really began to worry, since the lack of understanding of Shelley by a person writing in the voice of Shelley is likely not going to end well.
Frank is impotent but, upon murdering a couple of rapists, discovers that he does, in fact, have the juice. Cut to: Fight Club fuck montage. In Bonnie & Clyde, the film’s other major point of reference, Clyde (Warren Beatty) is impotent, and sublimates his pent-up erotic aggression into the brandishing and discharge of phallic firearms. He’s only able to perform once a poem Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) writes about their rampage is published in the paper. It isn’t bloodlust that “frees” Clyde, then, it’s legacy. What is Gyllenhaal saying by having Frank first objectify Ida (having idealized her corpse), then gaslight her about their marital status when she demonstrates some limited amnesia? What is she saying about Ida when Frank apologizes for the deception and she…forgives him? There’s a Jacob’s Ladder scene in a nightclub where Ida–still possessed by Shelley sometimes but not always, I guess (given that her accent jumps around between American and British)–dances in the wild, uninhibited way of the Tasmanian Devil among a flock of chickens as Frank watches from the shadows. Frank likes to watch. He loves going to the movies to see his favourite crooner, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), cut a mean rug and sing like an old phonograph amplifier. Is The Bride! about how male object choice is attached to the gaze and sometimes formulated by early onanistic suture with projected images, while female object choice is slightly more complicated? My friends, it is not.
A subplot pits two detectives, Wiles (Peter Sargaard) and Malloy (Penélope Cruz), in lackadaisical pursuit of our outlaws. Their entire purpose appears to be ventriloquizing monologues like, “You disrupt the status quo [as a woman] and they are fucking on you! The whole world is on fire over a lady criminal. It’s turning them on. Imagine if they got this excited over a lady astronaut or a lady brain surgeon or a lady detective!” Tell me, what was the conversation around astronauts in 1936, male or female? The first “lady” brain surgeon was Dorothy Klenke Nash, who began her career in 1928. Is that who Wiles wishes had better press in 1936? A better question is, who is Wiles actually railing against? This is after the Bride has executed a cop and made the front page of the TRIBUNE. “Killer Bride Ignites a Revolution!” goes the headline, alluding to how a bunch of young women have invented Hot Topic and started rioting in early-goth garb. Is Wiles angry at the young women burning bras in the streets? Isn’t the Bride (!) designed to turn us on? The Bride is a fetish object, after all–a sexy Halloween costume who insists on driving with a snarled, “I’m driving.” I get it. Do you get it? Post-Hamnet, this is the second performance in a row in which Buckley spends most of her screentime screeching, neck tendons popping, one eye closing; Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian character recognizes a challenge when he sees one. I like how her tongue is only black some of the time. I like how, for as badass as she supposedly is, she has a little panic attack as a cop (Louis Cancelmi) pulls her over for speeding and another when he tries to rape her. Mary–who is supposedly possessing her, I thought–berates her from Hell. Why is Mary Shelley in Hell? I don’t know. Does Mary’s possession of Ida, which robs her of autonomy, not contradict the movie’s message of autonomy? Luckily, Frank is there to save her again.
Though I lost track of what it’s trying to say, I know exactly what The Bride! is going for. You can find it in Frank Roddam’s sweaty, overheated 1985 film The Bride, Frank Henenlotter’s insouciant Frankenhooker, and even Zelda Williams’s gender-tweaked Lisa Frankenstein. You can find it in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy, too. Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body? Yes, please. Mostly, you can find it in Red-era Taylor Swift. Honestly, for smart, galvanizing, occasionally no-kidding genius-level feminist pop poetry, look no further. Her “Anti-Hero” strikes the precise chord of mordant, self-knowing irony the picture fails to strike. All the stuff about the fans in The Bride! is, forgive me, Swiftian, no? And, yes, she was on my mind because of “All Too Well,” a lyrical masterpiece that remembers a failed romance with Jake Gyllenhaal and a scarf left behind at his sister Maggie’s house in upstate New York. Where’s the fucking scarf, Maggie? I will say this about Gyllenhaal’s misguided, message-heavy-yet-empty-headed boondoggle of a film: it looks expensive. The costumes, the cars–every penny is up there. On the other hand, it isn’t any more aesthetically pleasing or impressive than Bernard Rose’s comparatively low-budget Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, whose narrative hits many of the same beats as The Bride!‘s. Is it too late to mention that Ada has fashioned her nonconformist personality after Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”? (A fact she nails home by identifying Melville by name at least twice, in case you’re not familiar with this Final Jeopardy College Edition question.) Right now, you’re probably thinking, “Didn’t you mention somebody named Lupino?” Be sure to stay through the credits for a cheap afterthought of a shoehorned resolution to that subplot. Looking forward to the Director’s Cut and Gyllenhaal blaming the studio. Hell, it probably is their fault. Were you even paying attention?
