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3 hours ago
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Did you know that “Frankenstein” isn’t the name of the monster, but the mad scientist who created him? The answer is almost certainly yes. But that’s no thanks to the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, which appears to have created this monstrous misconception – because let’s face it, the idea of a middle-aged Swiss scientist getting married isn’t all that shocking. In that sensational Frankenstein sequel with Boris Karloff returning as the monster, Elsa Lanchester was his bride and Mary Shelley, a doubling that may have inspired this new riff on the monster’s other half from writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal. There’s another barnstorming performance from Jessie Buckley as the sinister spouse, leaving savage bite marks all over the scenery and on her gallant co-star Christian Bale. It’s her name, not the title, that deserves the exclamation mark..
This new monster’s-wife tale is a rackety, violent black comedy with twists of Rocky Horror and extended homages to the top-hat-and-tails sophistication of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. It’s also a gangster joyride from the roaring 20s and 30s with Mr and Mrs F-M reimagined as a kind of post-death Bonnie and Clyde. It takes as its premise the idea that Mary Shelley is an angry ghost, spewing out into the shadowy netherworld her patrician contempt for the mediocre menfolk that surrounded her in life, and longing for a suitable living woman to insinuate herself back into.
Shelley lands on Ida (Buckley), a tough yet slinky broad who hangs out at the Chicago joint owned by wiseguy Mr Lupino (Zlatko Burić). When Shelley’s ghost enters Ida at this place one night, her body convulses with possession, gibbering and jerking and free-associating in Mrs Shelley’s British tones, like a cross between Regan in The Exorcist and a very posh version of the cult comedian Charlie Chuck, who randomly shouts “Woof! Bark! Donkey!” Lupino has Ida rubbed out, but then Frankenstein’s monster himself shows up poignantly at the offices of scientist Dr Euphronious (Annette Bening), piteously asking for a mate to salve his loneliness and conjugal frustration. So she digs up Ida and zaps her back into life; undead Ida now sports frizzy hair, a black tongue and inky black marks on her lips.
Bale’s monster is a very different creation from Jacob Elordi’s romantic hottie in Guillermo del Toro’s more intricately tasteful account. He has the Munster-ish stitches in his forehead; his face is battered and bruised like a punch-drunk old boxer; and there is something at first diffident and almost fatherly in his concern for Ida. His idea of masculine style is the dapper Hollywood star Ronnie Reed, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. The young lovers off a couple of nogoodniks, then escape together pursued by careworn Chicago cop Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant – and better detective – Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz).
For all its qualities, it feels as if there are a couple of missed opportunities: I wish we had had a wedding ceremony; and I wish that Buckley had been allowed to keep going with the Mary Shelley voice, which was very funny – instead, Gyllenhaal appears to lose interest in that idea after the first act. A pity. But Buckley gives it such outrageous craziness and she is a great pairing with the stolid Bale, especially when they go into a uncontrolled jerking and twitching choreography with the other revellers at a classy white-tie event. Without Buckley, this would have been lacking; with her, it’s a very bizarre and enjoyable spectacle of married bliss.
