The Bride!

Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal veers about as far from the intimate subtlety of The Lost Daughter as possible in her sophomore effort, the wildly over-the-top The Bride! Imagine Moulin Rouge! (both films earning their exclamation points) remounted as a proto-feminist horror movie, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the wild swings being taken here. Alas, this ambitious melding of Bride of Frankenstein and amour-fou film noir (plus two or three other classic film genres) flashes and dazzles before it sputters and collapses.

There is no metaphorical hat upon which Gyllenhaal won’t place another hat, and then another, and then a veil, and a wig: She opens the film with Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) in limbo, telling us that she’d always intended to write a sequel to Frankenstein that was even scarier. And if that weren’t enough, Shelley then possesses the body of 1930s Chicago gangster’s moll Ida (also Buckley), who floridly tells off a table of mafiosi before tumbling down a flight of stairs and dying.

Lucky for Ida, then, that Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) has arrived in town with the hopes that mad scientist Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) might make him a bride. They dig up Ida in a potter’s field, re-route some electricity from a streetlight, and The Bride is born. She has no memory of her past, but unlike Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein, the revived Ida finds herself warming up to her potential mate.

There’s a great deal of plot here: the two lovers becoming fugitives, with a pair of Chicago detectives (Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz) in hot pursuit; the monster’s obsession with big-screen song-and-dance man Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal); and Ida’s distinctive look (black lips and tongue, with a bloody inkblot on her cheek) inspiring imitators — think adult women behaving like the teen-girl pop cults of Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains or The Legend of Billie Jean — who rise up against their male oppressors. Maggie Gyllenhaal takes every advantage to emulate 1930s cinema (monster movies, gangster pictures, RKO musicals) and pilfer from a plethora of screen Frankensteins, from James Whale’s to Mel Brooks’. (The motto for this Bride is “something borrowed, something borrowed, something borrowed, something borrowed.”)

As a piece of filmmaking craft, The Bride! is often thrilling, with cinematographer Lawrence Sher (Joker: Folie à Deux) capturing multiple vintage film styles while legendary costumer Sandy Powell and production designer Karen Murphy (Elvis) play fast and loose with the looks of the decade. (Did a New York theater in 1936 screen White Zombie in anaglyph 3D? Probably not, but the sight of a packed audience wearing those red-and-blue glasses makes for an indelible visual.)

If only director Gyllenhaal had demanded more from screenwriter Gyllenhaal. The Mary Shelley framing device feels fairly absurd — imagine if One Battle After Another opened with Leonardo DiCaprio as Thomas Pynchon, telling you that what you were about to see is even better than anything else he’d ever written — and having Shelley burst in and out of Ida’s speech patterns never pays off in any real way. Ida spends much of the film unable to remember who she is, and when she suddenly starts naming her fallen comrades and calling out the mobsters who killed them, it happens in the middle of a musical number (no, really), and thus gets lost in the cacophony. (Credit to Gyllenhaal for paying tribute to a legendary female forebear in the director’s chair by naming the main Chicago gangster “Lupino.”)

Jessie Buckley gives a performance that can’t be called “good” by any traditional yardstick, but it’s in perfect keeping with the rest of the movie; her work here is big and boisterous and frantic and unrestrained, and clearly what Gyllenhaal wanted. Bale wisely underplays, resulting in a quietly witty and occasionally heartbreaking monster. Bening’s having a ball, with Jeannie Berlin as her hilariously deadpan sidekick; should they return to play the Abbott and Costello to Bale’s Frankenstein’s monster, that would be a sequel worth making. Cruz can barely keep a straight face for her super-detective character, but she does carry off the era’s Joan Crawford bangs and eyebrows with grace.

It’s difficult not to link The Bride! to another recent Warner Bros. release, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, since both feature prominent female auteurs extravagantly deconstructing the work of legendary women novelists. But while 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein is a puckishly perfect skewering of the Genesis myth — man is created to exist, while woman is created merely to keep the man from being lonely — The Bride! veers off in so many exhausting directions that it ultimately amounts to little more than sound and fury. She’s alive, alive, but she can’t maintain this pace.

Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Screenwriter: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz
Executive producers: Carla Raij, David Webb, Courtney Kivowitz
Producers: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Talia Kleinhendler, Osnat Handelsman Keren
Director of photography: Lawrence Sher
Production design: Karen Murphy
Editing: Dylan Tichenor
Music: Hildur Gudnadóttir
Sound design: Damian Volpe, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, First Love Films, In the Current Company
In English
126 minutes