Always a Bride

I’ve been interested in the Bride (of Frankenstein) for about as long as I can remember. I saw the original flick on Creature Double Feature as a kid, along with the 1931 Frankenstein, both directed by James Whale. The first film is brisk and emotionally rich, with arresting visuals and indelible performances. Still, I fall in with the critical consensus: Bride of Frankenstein, Whale’s 1935 sequel, is the superior picture.

That version could go into my films that refuse to be one thing post from a while back. I won’t get into all the ways it’s coded, or its many thematic resonances. I’ll just say that the titular character, who appears for less than five minutes at the very end, made a big impression on me.

I’m Gen X, which means my arrested development expresses itself in collectable media and vintage “toys.” That said, my interests are fairly narrow. I’ll buy stuff tied to the original 1979 Alien, Godzilla here and there, and I’ve got some Bela Lugosi things kicking around too, because he’s my anti-fascist vampire grandpa. But the Bride looms largest: tchotchkes, paintings, toys, ephemera. That includes movie adaptations. I’ll watch pretty much any reimagining of Frankenstein’s monster’s mate. (Yes, including the one with Sting.)

The latest comes from Maggie Gyllenhaal, who a lot of us old-timers remember as an actor and who now directs. The Bride! is the first of hers I’ve seen, and stars Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, and Annette Bening. Having finally watched it, I’m offering some thoughts, because it’s one of the most audaciously unique—and polarizing—movies of the year. It was a box office bomb, and critical reviews were all over the place. I mostly enjoyed it. 

An aside: in some alternate universe, there’s an ’80s version of this movie directed by Jim Jarmusch, starring Rosanna Arquette as the Bride and Tom Waits as Frankenstein’s monster. I’m sure the me from that dimension owns the Criterion edition.

Here, Buckley throws sparks in the dual roles of the titular character and her original creator Mary Shelley (whose biography I have also long been compelled by). Buckley’s Bride is like a broken receiver picking up two frequencies—her original bodily form as a 1930s flapper, and intermittent possession by phantom Shelley, herself a deeply fractured presence. It’s a fun role to see brought to life with such gusto.

I thought I’d exceeded the clinically recommended dose of Bale, but he’s solid as The Monster—deeply sensitive, profoundly wounded, utterly brutal, and oddly heroic. Some of his best scenes are with Annette Bening, who plays Dr. Cornelia Euphronius. The name might be a riff on Dr. Septimus Pretorius from Whale’s film. Either way, Bening is exactly who you want to play an intellectually spicy and totally over it woman of science. Expectedly, Frank asks her to fashion him a mate. Daddy issues, meet mommy issues. 

Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal round out the cast, and they’re fine, but the movie seems to deflate whenever Buckley and/or Bale aren’t in frame. 

Like its cinematic predecessor, The Bride! is several films—in this case, a satirical farce, a period romance, a meditation on identity and self-meaning, a buddy comedy, a vaudeville romp, a grotesquely violent road movie, monster softcore, a critique of female roles and agency, and a feminist revenge flick. No wonder that it confused critics and went over the heads of mainstream audiences. 

The Bride! is by no means a perfect film. I’m not even sure it’s a good one. It loses focus in the middle, is overlong, has an intrusive score, and it’s definitely goofy and heavy handed in parts. But I’ve seen far less electric reanimations. I hope to be around for the next one.