“The Bride!” isn’t for everyone. It starts off taking a big swing and doesn’t really stop until the end credits…actually even those, set to “The Monster Mash” (yes, seriously), are another anarchic act of ambition from writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal. This film is awkward and gangly in many ways, but it’s also beautiful and impressive in many more; it’s a true exquisite corpse of Mary Shelley’s creation filtered through 20th century pop culture in ways utterly surprising and delightfully amusing. If you told me you hated various aspects of the movie, I would probably totally understand why they put you off or agreed they were odd decisions by the filmmakers in most cases. But….I also loved those bizarre touches of these theater kids trying to SAY SOMETHING in big glittery fonts with their weirdo choices. In an era where everything is antiseptic and product tested and audience approved, “The Bride!” stands in defiance as a unique creation that doesn’t really make sense but remains horrifically fascinating all the more for it.
It’s Chicago in the 1930s…actually, it begins in the netherspace between life and death…well, really it starts with both. Famed “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), long since dead, decides to reach out through the veil of the beyond and touches the mind of Ida (Jessie Buckley), a gangster moll that hangs out with some various goons. Unfortunately, Mary doesn’t have great control over Ida, and one thing leads to another, and Ida’s dead.
Moving on.
It’s still Chicago in the 1930s. And Frankenstein (Christian Bale), the creation not the mad scientist, has arrived to speak to a promising doctor (Annette Bening) about her research into reanimation in the hopes that Frankenstein can have a suitor after his century’s solitary existence. They happen to dig up and bring back Ida—what a coincidence!—who only has flashes of her memory and Mary’s sporadic interruptions. The two soon take to the town, unfortunate events ensue, and the couple finds themselves on the run from panicked people, crooked cops (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz), and some of those goons from earlier (John Magaro). Along the way, Frankenstein gets to indulge in his love of big musical movies and The Bride inspires a cultural revolution across the nation.
“The Bride!” occasionally feels like zeitgeist MadLibs, throwing in various artistic movements and genres amongst each other to see if it works in the cut-up method or if it’s all just too much noise. Mostly…it works surprisingly well as this blended up cocktail of lovers on the run, musical theater, gothic homage, art deco period piece, feminist outrage…thing that comes together with brilliant inspiration that refuses easy reduction. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s awkward, it’s angry, it’s beautiful, it’s cloying…and yet it doesn’t feel like all these disparate aspects are disconnected from each other. It’s the gestalt of the film with all these strengths and weaknesses, charms and repugnancies, that feel organically of one piece together. It’s an impressive aspect to “The Bride!” that it embodies that kind of “sure, that might as well happen now” spirit to its storytelling and its universe.
Maybe it’s the tortured poet/theater kid in me that Gyllenhaal’s movie landed so well. There’s a repeated reference to a Melville short story that I loved, turning a sentence from a catchphrase of a recalcitrant scrivener to a rallying cry of defiance in exceptionally clever fashion. There are the numerous references to the various forms that Mary Shelley’s creation has taken over the years, from the Universal classics to the Mel Brooks hilarity to, yes, even the kooky camp of “The Monster Mash.” “The Bride!” announces all these references and rolls about in glee with them doing something weird and unique like turning refuse into origami, but even folks that don’t get Meville quotes or Busby Berkeley nods will find something engrossing in the mutation that the filmmakers have assembled.
Everyone is seemingly in their own movie, but they all show up and work well in “The Bride!” Buckley is truly going for it in her three-in-one role, acting to the rafters with all her various gyrations and accents and more at a whole spectrum of volumes. But again…it works. Somehow, it feels right for this particular character to be at war with herself and to be a personality trifle of Beatrice from “Much Ado About Nothing,” Mabel from “A Woman Under the Influence,” and Mae West. Meanwhile, wounded freak Frankenstein is captivating in his own right, a soul-crushingly lonely person who finds magic in the movies and life in his love affair. Even romantic ne’er-do-well Sarsgaard is great in his “yes, all men” role as a doofy detective that also is admittedly a bit of a shit. The film would’ve benefitted from showing a bit more of its feminist rage in violent form – as opposed to just a few allusions to it by Cruz and Sarsgaard – and a few more sequences where The Bride becomes a true pop culture phenomenon and cause célèbres around the country.
It’s hard not to notice the discourse around “The Bride!” as being mainly negative from certain bedrock critics. All I can say is that I feel sorry for them; they have closed off parts of their minds that allow them to be entertained and surprised by what cinema can be when it doesn’t follow cookie cutter baking instructions. “The Bride!” is weird and off-putting and a bit challenging, but not to any great length that makes it hard to endure or impossible to discern. Yes, it’s about many minds occupying one brain, but it’s also about a beating heart that propels us through our own fractured lives to new experiences at passion in all of its forms. And if that’s not something worth celebrating in art, then I simply don’t get it.
4 / Stars
Directed by: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Starring: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, John Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal
