“The Bride!” Exclaims but Never Explains - The New Yorker

A doctor uses an initial instead of her first name when publishing academic papers, in order to conceal her gender and be taken seriously as a scientist. A woman who works as the secretary to a male police detective is the actual crime-solver of the duo but can’t get the job or the recognition she deserves. The prevailing moral code doesn’t prevent a policeman from sexually molesting a woman during a traffic stop but does prevent her from reporting it. In gangland circles, women are casually murdered and mutilated, their killers operating with utter impunity. Look around: positions of authority are uniformly held by men, and white ones, at that. And a woman who complains is said to be defying nature itself. It’s enough to enrage a woman past the breaking point, and what happens when that break occurs is the premise of “The Bride!,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s thoughtful and wild new film, which revisits both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” and one of its odd cinematic offshoots, the loopy gothic shocker “Bride of Frankenstein,” from 1935.

That 1935 film, directed by James Whale, begins with a campy scene of Mary Shelley telling her husband—Percy Bysshe Shelley—and Lord Byron of her plans for a sequel, setting up the film as the fulfillment of that ostensible wish. In the new film, Gyllenhaal, who wrote the script as well as directing, borrows this idea but transforms it: in a furious opening monologue, Mary Shelley says that her novel was only half a story, that she is now bursting with the need to tell the other half, and that, to do so, she must enter the mind of another woman at breaking point. Shelley is played by Jessie Buckley, who also portrays the woman whose mind she is going to inhabit—Ida, a party girl on the fringes of Chicago’s gangland scene in 1936. First seen at a night-club table of menacing lowlifes, Ida, whose mother tongue is Brooklynese, suddenly switches to a heavy British accent and dispenses a torrent of highly literary sarcasms. To the film’s audience, this of course signals the presence of Mary Shelley, but to the audience at the table it looks like attention-getting or even madness. (It certainly throws off one gangster, played by Matthew Maher, who won’t stop pawing her.) When Ida leaps dramatically onto the table, the mobster boss, named Lupino (Zlatko Burić), has seen enough: he gives an underling the high sign. In short order, Ida is done away with.

Mary Shelley’s possession of Ida doomed her, but now Shelley’s original monster (played by Christian Bale) comes serendipitously to the rescue, emerging unexplained from the wilds of time to the turreted urban mansion of one Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), a modern practitioner of Dr. Frankenstein’s art of reanimating the dead. Frankenstein’s creature beseeches her for “an intercourse”—a woman, brought back from the dead like himself, whom he can love. This detail comes directly from Shelley’s novel. There, Dr. Frankenstein says no, but Euphronious, though she initially resists, ultimately decides to oblige the monster, apparently in the spirit of scientific research, and the fresh corpse she uses turns out to be Ida’s. The operation is a success, and, though the doctor wants to keep the couple in her tower for observation, they steal off into the night and begin making their romantic way through a cruel world that considers them monsters.

The path from death back to life has left the reinvigorated Ida with a permanent stain on her cheek, a side effect of the doctor’s treatment, and has erased all memory of her former life. She has no idea where she’s from or what her name is, and for much of the film she goes unnamed. Only much later, does she ask her companion—she calls him Frank—what her name is. At first, he teases her and says it’s Ginger Rogers; then he decides on the name Penelope, and Penelope she then becomes. Before her reincarnation, Frank has already scouted out the city and found his pleasure, in a louche nocturnal demimonde of sexual freedoms and extravagant costumes in which no one is treated like a monster. His scars and head staples are no object there, and he brings his newly created partner there. She fits right in with the women; one of them helps her with her makeup, after which the couple cut loose on the dance floor. But predators lurk; as they leave the joint, a pair of tough guys assault him and try to rape her. Displaying superhuman strength, Frank kills them both, in front of shocked witnesses. The killings make the headlines, and the couple go on the run, in an ever-more frenetic odyssey that leads them to New York City, to Niagara Falls, and eventually back to Chicago. They are pursued by a detective, Jake (Peter Sarsgaard), and his secretary—the one who actually solves crimes while he takes credit—who is played by Penélope Cruz. Also on the trail is a gangster named Clyde (John Magaro), who’s been sent to redo the job of rubbing out the mysteriously undead Ida.

The solid dramatic framework that Gyllenhaal establishes drives events onward with relentless force, and her film is devilishly clever in its fusion of gothic horror and film-noir tropes. Its true precursor, however, is the pair of “Joker” movies (from 2019 and 2024) directed by Todd Phillips, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays the Gotham villain as a comedian and song-and-dance man manqué. “The Bride!,” despite the compact fusion of its conception, ends up following the “Joker” movies into an expanded fantasy spectrum of spectacle and exaggeration. In doing so, it also shares those films’ debt to the genre conventions of superhero franchises. The fundamental trouble with such franchise films is that the construction of character is usually no more than gestural: with all the emphasis on extravagant spectacle and on backstories in the franchise universe, there’s rarely any room for personality, experience, or knowledge.

Unfortunately, “The Bride!” falls victim to this hollowing out of character, and the result feels simultaneously like a reduction and an expansion—or call it an inflation, an accretion of curious traits that crop up conveniently but remain undiscussed and undeveloped. Like “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the film is something of a musical, filled with song and dance, but what inaugurates that theme goes far beyond the ordinary delight of night-club revels. Frank is a movie buff—in particular, an obsessive fan of the (fictional) musicals star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose routines he loves to emulate on the dance floor. To evoke Frank’s passionate fandom, Maggie Gyllenhaal films ostensible snippets of Ronnie’s work, black-and-white pastiches of nineteen-thirties musicals, and then grafts Frank himself into some of them, as he imagines himself in the place of the actual star.

In genre terms, this makes a cute kind of sense: after all, the trope is familiar going as far back as the silent era (as in Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.,” from 1924). But in terms of character, there’s a problem: Frank’s Ronnie Reed obsession isn’t harmonized with anything else in his personality. What do movies even mean to Frank, given that he’s a character who came to life even before photography did? Frank, early on, astonishes the doctor by emphasizing that he was “born” in 1819 (the year after Shelley’s novel was published). But where has he been and what has he been doing all that time? What has he made of the changes that he has surely witnessed? (Frank burbles a line about the First World War in relation to Ronnie. Is it a memory? A fantasy? A memory of a movie?) It would be poignant to imagine Frank as an overflowing, overwhelmed stockpile of personal and historical memory, especially since his partner’s blanked-out memory renders her a kind of tabula rasa. But “The Bride!” completely ignores these implications. Similarly, though Frank must be more than a hundred by the nineteen-thirties, he doesn’t look a day over fifty; do the regenerated not age at all? If so, what does Frank know about his physical and mental capacities, and what can or does he tell the woman in his life about what her revived state promises?

What Gyllenhaal’s movie shares with far less substantial big-budget spectacles is the delivery of effects without causes. Thanks to Mary Shelley’s telekinetic puppeteering of Ida/Penelope, the feminist rage that sets the story in motion generates exciting and spectacular events. Gyllenhaal conveys the sensationalistic scope of the two creatures’ wild exploits with newspaper headlines, and it’s no spoiler (it’s part of the movie’s log line) to say that Penelope’s notoriety sparks a major social movement, a public expression of women’s long-stifled rage at the injustices they bear. But that movement is rendered onscreen in just a few brief flashes: a headline or two, a few shots of women running rampage in Penelope-style makeup. It gets about as much time and attention as the would-be bride’s eyebrows and proves even less consequential.

Gyllenhaal makes the past a parody, with cartoonish types and overdone styles, and dialogue spoken as if through megaphones. (Moreover, her filming of dance is disappointingly bland, done with mere snippets of gestures and offering neither the power of artifice nor the wonder of observation.) The movie may be set in a particular place and time, but she makes little of its specifics. There’s a notable contrast here with another historically based fantasy set in the nineteen-thirties—“Sinners.” In that movie, the writer and director Ryan Coogler establishes social and cultural specifics with fanatical attention, even including a biting reference to Ida’s home turf, with one character calling Chicago “Mississippi with tall buildings.” But race relations play no part in “The Bride!” There’s no Depression, either. (Just as the Depression-era hit “We’re in the Money” says, “We never see a headline / about a breadline.”) Nor are there Nazis or Fascists or Communists or any other contemporary details of importance.

Yet Frank is well spoken and well read and would surely be up on what’s going on, as well as on what had been going on since the age of Beethoven and Goethe. And Ida, both before and after reincarnation, is as sharp and bold as he is, but Mary Shelley’s telekinetic control of her undercuts the character. Although it’s an extraordinary conceit to endow Ida, the wisecracking night-club denizen, with Shelley’s knowledge and literary flair, giving her the author’s accent as well is unfortunate, adding an element of social snobbery and exoticizing Ida’s intelligence. The quick-change switch in accent and vocabulary gives Buckley some moments of theatrical virtuosity, but it diminishes the character’s range. So, by the way, does the fact that Ida doesn’t seem aware that the novelist has possessed her at all. “The Bride!” consistently offers little sense of states of mind and levels of self-awareness—factors that are central to the enduring fascination of Frankenstein’s monster.

The couple on the run, whooping it up at high speed on the open road in a stolen car, plays like the sci-fi counterparts to Bonnie and Clyde, but, without psychological construction or historical context, both characters are merely a collection of mannerisms. (The movie’s winks and nods—as at Ida Lupino, Ginger Rogers, and Herman Melville—are among them.) Buckley and Bale, though prodigious and fervent in their craft, don’t have much substance to work with. The direction reduces the lead performances to flash and flare, while actors in supporting roles are left inhabiting stereotypes.

For “The Bride!,” the original “Bride of Frankenstein” is both an inspiration and a target. The 1935 movie is an enduring frustration. When I first saw it, as a child obsessed with monster movies, I had the same trouble with it as I have now: the eponymous bride, played by Elsa Lanchester (who also plays Mary Shelley in the prologue), is onscreen for only a few minutes, near the end. The bride is utterly underrealized; it’s the male monster’s movie, and Boris Karloff, in that role, dominates it. Insofar as Gyllenhaal’s movie offers a corrective—emphasizing the social realities faced by women at the time “Bride of Frankenstein” came out, establishing the title character early on, and giving the couple a passionate and eventful relationship—it’s a conceptual delight. But, ultimately, the movie has the form of mismatched pieces stitched together and brought to life more willfully than coherently. ♦

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