The Bride! Is an Intellectual Joyride Without the Joy
From our 21st-century perch, most contemporary women have no trouble believing that the great women writers of the 19th century got a raw deal. The first four of Jane Austen’s novels were originally published anonymously—writing was no job for a lady. The Brontë sisters published under masculine names, knowing it was the only way they would be taken seriously. And though Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley virtually invented modern science-fiction with her 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein—completed when she was 19—some scholars have sought to downplay that achievement, claiming that her lover-turned-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley made so many revisions to her manuscript he should be considered a collaborator. These women have at last been vindicated, but it took forever. What if, circa 1936, one of them—from beyond the grave, and wearing some very bad blackberry-hued lipstick—were to become so angry and frustrated with her lot she decided to flip the script by taking possession of a modern woman?
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]That’s the premise of writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, and you get the idea before the opening credits even roll; you may as well be reading an academic essay that begins, “In this essay, I will….” It’s possible to identify with women’s collective anger and still find its expression in a movie wanting, and that’s how it is with The Bride!, a movie that offers jolt after jolt of orthodoxy, only to leave you feeling limp and spent rather than energized. Ten minutes in, you’ll be able to outline the picture’s themes, SparkNotes-style. After 40 minutes, you’ll be struggling to stay awake through the lecture. That annoyingly emphatic exclamation mark in the title isn’t just there for looks; it’s emblematic of the movie’s overkill.
Jessie Buckley plays two roles here. As the movie opens, we see her in black-and-white, dressed up in early 19th century garb—including a bit of droopy lace stuck to her hair—as she angrily decries her fate as a woman and an artist. She explains emphatically that she has yet another story to tell, and to get it out there, she’s going to seize control of a 20th-century woman—she calls this act “a possession,” a melding of two minds. Cut to 1930s-era Ida, also played by Buckley, who sits at a rowdy Chicago nightclub table in a shiny but clearly cheap salmon-orange satin dress, entertaining a couple of numbnuts low-level gangster types (they’re played by John Magaro and Matthew Maher, both underused, if not ill-used) who appear to be interested in everything about her except her mind. She plays along with them, but she’s always on the verge of snapping. Suddenly, she starts spouting nonsense invective in a rolling, quasi-historical English accent. That’s Mary Shelley, turning Ida into her own personal Charlie McCarthy. Shortly thereafter, Ida will meet a bad end and experience an even badder rebirth.
Meanwhile, a lonely hulk of a man—Christian Bale with some staples stuck through his forehead—wends his way through the Chicago streets, in search of the one scientist who may be able to help him. He believes this doctor to be a man; he’s shocked to discover that the Dr. Euphronius he seeks is in fact a woman, played by Annette Bening. This version of Frankenstein’s monster—who shall henceforth be called Frank, the name Dr. Euphronius bestows on him—is terrifically lonely. Can she use her fancy electrical laboratory to make him a mate? Dr. Euphronius is at first reluctant to dig up a body, which she knows would mess too much with the natural order of things. But she relents, and it’s Ida’s recently buried corpse that ends up on the laboratory slab. When Ida has been electrified back to life—a chemical used in the revivication process leaks from her mouth and stains her skin, like a feisty birthmark—she carries no memory of who or what she once was. Unfortunately, though, she’s still possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley, whose voice seizes her body with tiresome frequency. And she’s no longer Ida; she’s now the Bride, a name brimming with irony, given that she belongs to no one but herself, and she’s intent on breaking all the rules.
The Bride takes one look at Frank and it isn’t love at first sight; that will come later. First, she has to prove to herself, and to us, that she’s her own woman. This takes an alarmingly long time. Meanwhile, an assortment of subplots compete for our flagging attention. Before the Bride elbows her way into his life, Frank, ever so lonely, retreats into the world of movies. His favorite star is a dancer-singer-heartthrob named Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), and as Frank basks in the glow cast by his idol, he dreams himself onto the screen: Done up in top hat and tails, shuffling along clumsily but blissfully, he conjures the image of Peter Boyle in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, though the reference is too glaringly self-aware to be witty or fun.
Gradually, the tough-talking, Shelley-possessed Bride warms up to Frank; first they become accidental criminals, then lovers on the lam, Bonnie & Clyde-style. (The Bride even inspires, as the real-life Bonnie Parker did, legions of women followers who admire her bravado—here, they paint ink splots on their faces in homage.) Rumpled detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard), and his sharp-suited secretary, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), are hot on the trail of the two misunderstood outlaws; it’s made clear, over and over again, that Mallow is the true brains of the operation. As the plot becomes increasingly cluttered, The Bride! toggles between cartoonish jokiness and ’90s-style women’s studies speechifying, with lavish handfuls of Hollywood glamour tossed in. You can tell this movie cost a mint to make (the costumes, by Sandy Powell, ring with 1930s authenticity, through they’re also suitably fanciful), but it sags beneath its ambitions instead of taking wing.
Gyllenhaal’s debut picture, 2021’s Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter—with Olivia Colman as a prickly academic on holiday, played, in her younger incarnation, by Buckley—was similarly ambitious, but its urgent, freewheeling sense of discovery worked in its favor. The Bride! is a more confident work, but also a more inert one. Its jumble of movie references, witting or otherwise, include Pennies from Heaven, Metropolis, and Dick Tracy, as well as the James Whale classics Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein—this movie barely has the chance to become its own creature.
Bale does make a reasonably winsome Frankenstein’s monster. (At one point he even utters that old seducer’s chestnut, “It’s your mind that I love!” It’s unclear if it’s supposed to be a joke, though it ought to be.) But Buckley chomps down so hard on her performance that she practically mashes it to bits. She’s so busy playing a bad-gal role model that she fails to come across as a human being, even one brought back from the dead. At one point, the Bride expresses her persistent rage as the words “Me too! Me too!” tumble from her lips—no actor can survive that kind of signpost language. Meanwhile, puppeteer Mary Shelley, with her black-and-white dead lady’s visage, surveys her creation from the far reaches of history, addressing the Bride directly as she throws her head back and cackles. In a voice that sounds as if it’s trying, but failing, to channel the scorched, winged fury of “Why’d Ya Do It?”-era Marianne Faithfull, she proclaims, “Yes, darling, you’re my monstah!” The point, lest you miss it, is that The Bride! isn’t just a movie, but a vehicle for ideas. It’s an intellectual joyride without the joy.