The Bride! is one of those movies where I am still sitting here an hour after it ended trying to figure out exactly what the hell went wrong with it because this thing comes out swinging in the most bizarre version I have seen of Frankenstein story, not Frankenstein himself but the story around him. They drop you into 1930s Chicago, Jessie Buckley shows up as Mary Shelley in some kind of purgatory state, monologuing about her own legacy and what the world did with her work and then she just decides to possess a mobster girlfriend named Ida who happens to be sitting at a fancy dinner table with some very bad men and a crime boss named Lupino. She starts mouthing off to Lupino right there at the table, gets knocked down a flight of stairs, dies on the spot and the whole opening is so aggressively weird that I start thinking how tf does this has anything to do with Frankenstein aside that it was clear she was going to become "The Bride" now that she is dead. Then Christian Bale walks into the office of Dr. Euphronious wearing a head covering, desperate and lonely, begging the scientist to make him a companion and that is where the actual chaos really starts cooking, because on other movies it takes a while before we get to the Frankenstein lonely part. Maggie Gyllenhaal is swinging for the fences on her second director movie, she wrote this thing herself and for better and for worse, you can feel a very specific vision trying to make its way but it keeps tripping over, and Im going to get into more details latter, not a rant but I just hope this was better, not bad as you wont be able to finish it but for sure a different version of what we are use to. The movie cost somewhere around 80 to 90 million dollars and pulled in only 24 million at the box office, so yeah this was always going to be a polarizing ride, and after watching it I get why people could not agree on it because half the time I was with it and half the time I was not.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30851137/
- Platform: PRIME VIDEO
The parts of The Bride! that actually work are dope and make you wish the rest of the movie could have stayed at that level, with Annette Bening as Dr. Cornelia Euphronious is completely unhinged, rocking these crazy glasses and acting like a scientist who cares more about satisfying her own ego than about any consequences of what she is doing, she uses her initials to publish her work so men in the industry do not dismiss it and the scene where she agrees to help Frank purely out of scientific curiosity is a great moment, small I would say but it counts, so that the movie does not give her enough room to breathe, the script I would say. Bening brings this mad scientist energy that feels completely natural in this 1930s aesthetic it almost feel like the lab with reanimation might have a lot to tell, almost like she could have half of the movie. Then there is this underground bar sequence where Frank and the newly reanimated Penelope go to hide and she gets so overwhelmed by the music that she just throws her entire body into this completely unhinged dance routine, Buckley going full physical comedy and it is one of those moments where you see what this movie could have been if it had trusted that energy more consistently. The best character detail in the whole thing is Frank calming his anxiety by sneaking into local cinemas to watch Ronnie Reed musical pictures in black and white, Jake Gyllenhaal playing this Fred Astaire type movie star and watching this massive stitched together monster quietly put on a pair of glasses to stare at a tap dancing musical is so funny it earns a real laugh. Christian Bale gives this hulking sad creature a real softness in those moments, like a guy who just wants to disappear into somebody else is fantasy for a few hours, and those quiet character details are what separates the parts that land from the parts that crash, as you can tell there are many good parts about the movie and why its not total trash.
But then you have all the surrounding garbage that drags everything down, specifically the whole detective subplot centered on Jake Wiles, played by Peter Sarsgaard and his assistant Myrna Malloy played by Penélope Cruz, who is doing all the real investigative work while the men around her take the credit. The movie tries to squeeze emotional weight out of Wiles by revealing he had a past relationship with Ida during the period when she was tied to the undercover police operation against Lupino, but it lands more like a weak gossip because we barely know anything about either of them, so watching Sarsgaard act conflicted about the whole thing does almost nothing to the entire plot. Wiles eventually resigns and hands his badge to Myrna, basically letting her take over the case, which is obviously a nod to the feminist themes running through this thing, they were not too heavy but present during the entire movie and Im fine with it, but in this case it feels completely unearned because the investigation has been so paper thin throughout the movie that her promotion does not mean anything. Cruz clearly feels comfortable in the role and you can see what Gyllenhaal was going for, this woman doing all the brain work in a world that refuses to acknowledge her but the script gives Myrna so little to actually do that later on you forget about her when the movie is over. Then there is the social uprising where regular women start painting the black chemical stain across their own faces to mimic the Bride and just start running through the streets armed and furious, you get these quick montages of women shouting and causing chaos, basically when a symbol becomes a movement is interesting but its the execution that feels completely disconnected from the actual personal story of fkn Frankenstein Bride.
When you step back and look at what Gyllenhaal is actually trying to build here, it like a mix that goes head to head, between a Bonnie and Clyde crime spree and the kind of social comentary chaos you get in a Joker movie, Frank and Penelope on the run after that bar fight, unintentionally racking up bodies and landing on the front page of every newspaper as monster killers, driving from city to city and ducking into local cinemas to catch another Ronnie Reed picture whenever the heat gets too close. That fugitives against the world setup should be good enough, especially with two characters this visually striking but the problem is there is no real romance underneath it, Frank is just desperately lonely and Penelope is constantly at war with herself, so their connection feels more like two people stuck together by circumstance than any actual love story, yes they are rejected by society and humans to a level but dont feel anything like other Frankenstein movies but I guess thats the entire point. The women spontaneously forming a revolutionary mob because they are inspired by a lady criminal is a direct reference to the way clown makeup turned a whole city in Gotham, but in The Bride! the revolution feels like it is happening off screen in a different and more interesting movie. The vintage aesthetic of the 1930s gangster world is sick though, the production quality is impressive from end to end, and the makeup department nailed the stitched together corpse look on Bale and the massive black chemical stain running across Buckley face. But you can see where things were heading with all the feminist themes, the problem is stuffing a Bonnie and Clyde escape road trip inside a Frankenstein monster story inside a Joker style uprising inside a Mary Shelley ghost possession story creates a confusing mess that never commits to any of it fully with basically Four movies worth of ideas with not enough time to fulfill any of them.
#thebride, #frankenstein, #maggiegyllenhaal, #christianbale, #jessiebuckley, #annettebening, #petersarsgaard, #penelopecruz, #jakegyllenhaal, #horror, #thriller, #gothic, #romance, #feminist, #maryshelley, #movieblogger, #moviereview, #cinema, #filmcritique, #cinephile, #monster, #reanimation, #chicagomob, #vintage, #hollywood
Posted Using INLEO