Nice day for a fright wedding
What if you took the most iconic goth-horror characters, cast two acting mavericks to play them, and set them on a crime-fueled road trip in the 1930s? In short, what if you crossed The Bride of Frankenstein with Bonnie and Clyde?
In The Bride!, that’s what we get. Director Maggie Gyllenhaal has some fun setting up a tale wherein Mary Shelley—author of Frankenstein—comes back from the dark ethers of time to launch a new chapter, casting Jessie Buckley as a post-flapper in gangland Chicago, suddenly possessed by Victorian Tourrette’s. Her outbursts lead to her taking a bad tumble down a stairs at the hand of gangsters and ending up in a pauper’s graveyard; meanwhile, across town, patched-together “Frank” (Christian Bale) seeks a companion and coaxes Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) to help create him one.
So far, so Shelley. Gyllenhaal soon takes some radical turns, including with punctuating her title, and The Bride! becomes a film about female identity in the post-#MeToo era.
Speaking of that title, we’ve seen several women filmmakers these days reach for punctuation touches to subtly reinvent genres. We’ve had Don’t Worry Darling (sans comma) to hint at director Olivia Wilde’s twist ending, and recently we’ve had Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adding quotes to declare her “take” on Bronte’s classic goth novel. Here, Gyllenhaal suggests a more declarative, affirmative message.
The director of The Lost Daughter wrote and directed this version, which is a crazy quilt of stitched-up influences including Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (a song-and-dance number quotes that film’s Puttin’ on the Ritz) and nods to Arthur Penn’s 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde.
Bale and Buckley are game here, giving their all to a story that sets up Frank and his Bride a hundred years after the novel, navigating Chicago, New York, and the American West in stolen cars, finding their liberty along the way. They occasionally break into song, which pairs it a bit with Joker: Folie à Deux, that prison-set fantasy starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga. As filmmaking, both films go for big gestures, transgressive moves, and disturbing tonal shifts that never let you remain all that comfortable in your cinema seat. This might be the point.
As it is, The Bride! is often messy and excessive (the love scenes are like a porno shot in The Pitt), and Buckley’s Victorian outbursts often pull you out of the moment. (That extra meta level was perhaps not necessary.) There’s a back-alley nightclub bit that seems airlifted out of a ‘30s Berlin Cabaret, not Chicago, and the scenes of drive-in theaters and 3D movies showing up in that era might seem anachronistic, though technically such innovations did arrive as early as the 1930s (I checked). A side story with Peter Sarsgaard (Gyllenhaal’s husband) and Penelope Cruz helps frame the story around male hierarchy.
As entertainment, personal tastes may vary. The Bride’s radical makeup and pre-Riot grrrl energy spark a national trend, reflecting repressed female energy. Frank, meanwhile, is a more mainstream male, a big galoot hooked on Hollywood endings (Maggie’s brother turns up onscreen as popular cinematic crooner Ronnie Reed, which Frank watches obsessively), spurred by romantic, if awkward, yearnings. In a way, they belong together: two misfits, abused and rejected by society, find common passion and love in abandoning the rules. If only Sid and Nancy didn’t exist, this would be the alt-love story of the ages.
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The Bride! is released through Warner Bros. Pictures.
