The Bride!

Frank (Christian Bale) and The Bride (Jessie Buckley) try to find their way in a violent world in The Bride! (Distributed by Warner Bros.)

All art is seen through the eyes of the artist. That is whose vision takes over by the time the project is completed. When it comes to the movies, that could mean the director, writer, star, editor or producer. Generally, those are the people most likely to have control. In the case of The Bride!, a new twist on The Bride of Frankenstein, the artist is unquestionably writer/director/producer Maggie Gyllenhaal.

She clearly had a vision here, crossing Frankenstein with Bonnie and Clyde, throwing in themes of misogyny, love and humanity. It is certainly ambitious. However, it isn’t cohesive, with some really good pieces that don’t connect to one another. This is a mood more than a logical story. The mood is intriguing; the story is not engaging. It doesn’t work, but it is so disorganized and bursting with ideas that don’t fit together in the least that I was oddly entertained. It is a bizarre mess that is still kind of worth seeing.

Things open in Chicago in the 1930s. The monster Frankenstein, having now lived for more than 100 years, is lonely. Desperate for a mate, he finds a doctor willing to help him reanimate a recently deceased woman. Soon, Frank and his Bride are on the run together, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.

The Bride! (117 minutes, minus the end credits) begins with a weird choice that throws the rest of the movie off-balance. It starts with Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, introducing us to the title character. That is Ida, who is out to dinner with some friends. Ida is being passive so, in an effort to get the story going, Shelley decides to inhabit Ida, causing a scene leading to Ida’s death. Both Shelley and Ida are played by Jessie Buckley, Shelley with a British accent, Ida with a Chicago one. For the next two hours, Buckley flips between these voices, with Shelley’s always the more aggressive. It is an impressive performance by Buckley, one of the best actors working today. However, I struggled to understand what purpose it served, narratively or thematically.

It is a confusing distraction. A lot of this feels that way. The central relationship between Buckley’s Bride and Christian Bale’s Frankenstein is interesting in how it pulls from Shelley’s original version rather than from the famous film characterizations. Frank wants companionship and to be treated like a person, instead of a freak. His anger comes from his despair. The arc around The Bride concerns how women are dismissed as second-class citizens in this world, just along for the ride as the men make all the decisions. Though Frank cares for her, he has chosen her life for her, lying to get her to believe they had a loving bond prior to her accident. That is a pretty compelling journey for both of them that fits the themes, yet it is taken away from by the gangsters, cops and random Mary Shelley interludes.

In addition to all of that, there is also Frank’s obsession with a movie star. It has no real payoff, but does lead to a superfluous dance sequence that is exactly the kind of oddball digression Gyllenhaal should have leaned into more. It is those aspects, juxtaposing Frank’s lonely romanticism with The Bride’s cynical reality, that gets me close to recommending this. While it isn’t good, it is different and entertainingly unpredictable. The individual viewer must decide if that’s an acceptable trade-off. For me, it’s a near miss.

3 out of 5

Cast:

Jessie Buckley as The Bride

Christian Bale as Frank

Annette Bening as Dr. Euphronius

Penélope Cruz as Myrna Malloy

Peter Sarsgaard as Jake Wiles

Jake Gyllenhaal as Ronnie Reed

Written/Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal