The title of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! shows up on screen in marquee bulbs, complete with an exclamation point, as if we’re about to settle in for a splashy Broadway musical spectacular. It reimagines Frankenstein through the prism of various retro entertainments — Astaire and Rogers movies, film noir, gangster pictures, New Hollywood dramas, early 2000s music videos — but it’s plodding and tiresome in ways that those things rarely were. The movie is constantly trying to spark itself to life with frenzies of song, dance, gore and sexual danger, and yet it’s oddly cold.
The Bride herself is a tornado of multiple personalities, prone to all sorts of outbursts. She starts out as a Depression-era Chicago moll who’s killed by her mobster boyfriend. Right before her death, she is, for some reason, possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley, still angry that her great feminist text was compromised and twisted. And so when she’s later reanimated to be the mate of a certain lonely, undead monster, the Bride’s got a number of feuding identities inside her fighting to get out.
Jessie Buckley plays the Bride and Christian Bale the Monster (or, as he prefers to be called, Frank), and they’re giving wily, out-on-a-limb performances that aren’t so much daring as foolhardy. Buckley lurches, contorts, screams, changes her voice and accent. As she modulates between approximations of Mae West, Holly Golightly and Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence, it’s like watching a bunch of actresses trapped in a revolving door.
These tragic figures do fall in love, and because they make a habit of violently dispatching predatory men, they’re on the run. You needn’t have seen Bonnie and Clyde to think they look an awful lot like Bonnie and Clyde, and women everywhere start to dress like the righteously angry, liberated Bride, with black lace veils and Rorschach ink blots spattered across their faces.
Like its protagonists, The Bride! has one foot in the gutter and the other in the stars. Frank idolizes a grinning matinee idol played by Jake Gyllenhaal and daydreams of dancing in top and tails (this inspires an unfortunate call-out to Young Frankenstein’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” number), while the Bride is forever quoting Shelley, Byron and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener.
The film I was most thinking about while watching this? Joker: Folie a Dieu, another bad movie that’s gutsy enough to blend unlikely genres — gritty crime epic and Hollywood musical — but has no flair for either one. And like Wuthering Heights, another recent literary reimagining with ironic punctuation in its title, The Bride! is overcrowded with thin ideas about gendered violence, bodily autonomy, contemporary feminism and society’s fear of unruly women.
This is Gyllenhaal’s second feature as writer-director, following the terrific psychological drama The Lost Daughter. What happened here? It’s a classic example of a misguided blank-check movie, one that wants to be as outrageous and liberated as the fractious, uncontrollable Bride. But it’s really got more in common with the poor, lonely monster: a lumbering creation that’s stitched together from other sources and ultimately runs away from its creator.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on here SPR News.