First things first: with her second directorial feature, The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal achieves what she supposedly set out to do.
In the current state of affairs, when almost everything moderately afflicts someone and almost nothing truly excites anyone, she managed to come out with a movie that seems to be destined to elicit some genuinely strong reaction and actually ruffle some feathers.
Exactly as advertised by trailers, interviews, and other press materials, The Bride! is a feminist re-imagining of Mary Shelley's classic novel, the sequel to the said novel’s most iconic adaptation, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and a great Hollywood myth of star-crossed lovers and doomed romance. Yes, all at once. We are forewarned that pastiche is the primary modus of aesthetic operandi here, when the film opens with a black-and-white version of Jessie Buckley playing Mary Shelley, stuck in some sort of purgatory space (or in the middle of a writing block) and looking for a human vessel to, using her own words, possess.
She finds such a vessel in Ida, also played by Jessie Buckley, a woman stuck in her own version of purgatory in the form of 1930s Chicago. In a fun twist of meta-irony, the popular author’s interference in Ida’s life immediately leads to her untimely death and into a pauper’s grave. She is dug out of the latter and brought back to life by Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening) at the request of Frank (Christian Bale), the tragic creation of another adventurous scientist, the late Dr. Frankenstein.
Now, Frank has been existing in this world since the early 1800s; he is understandably lonely and desperate for a companion. Despite initially being lied to about her past, the resurrected Ida, The Bride, does fall in love with Frank, but the world which they attempt to take by storm doesn’t become less cruel just because there is deux of them in this folie.
The spiritual and aesthetic connection to the Joker duology, especially to its second film (yes, there are musical numbers here), is also something that is bound to haunt the discussion around Gyllenhaal’s film, with the favor in this inevitable comparison landing squarely in subjective territory. (Gyllenhaal did it better). It’s not just that The Bride! borrows director of photography Lawrence Sher and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, thus creating a familiar audio-visual sensibility. Much like Todd Phillips' duet, it also indulges in somewhat exuberant aesthetic choices and includes a myriad of classic movie references.
The overabundance of form might actually be the film’s weakest spot, as it makes The Bride! an easy target for any viewers willing to condemn it for something Guillermo del Toro’s recent retelling of Frankenstein was actually guilty of – a case of style over substance. Unlike so many films that are voluptuous in size, this one actually doesn’t end up being flat. For all its stylistic flourishes, it is also brimming with genuine energy (even if it is the energy of chaos), and the cultural homages, woven into its fabric, actually have significance for once.
Setting the story around the time when Bride of Frankenstein came out, the script (also written by Gyllenhaal) resurrects the ghosts of the cinematic past of classic Hollywood of the 30s and 40s, while at the same time, dissecting and deconstructing it. In its core, though, Gyllenhaal’s film, with its Bonnie and Clyde references and endless drive for freedom that is forever just out of reach, invokes the spirit of a different era, New Hollywood. On top of it, it adds modern sensibilities and some post-meta ideas about the troubles of realizing one's agency: Frank appropriates the name of his creator, but doesn’t become one himself, while Ida grapples with all the terrible men surrounding her, as well as with the insistent guiding voice of the female author in her head.
While some of the elements here are intricately concocted and executed, others decidedly lack nuance, which doesn’t necessarily have to put the film at a disadvantage. Every artistic choice here (including the acting, which can be at times referred to as over the top) seems to work in the service of creating an aesthetic structure that would mirror the movie's heroine. In a way, it is a retelling of a tragically familiar female experience of being someone loud and unapologetic, who, even today, almost a century later, would be quite consistently labeled as “difficult”.
Which seems to be precisely the point with The Bride!, since it comes off as the film that knows it is not universally likable and wants to make sure you also know it is absolutely okay with that. It is also a film that relies a lot on screaming, both on the screen and off it, as yet another sad part of the universal experience of being a woman – having to resort to yelling at nothing and no one in particular as a way to be somehow heard at all.
The film opens Friday, March 6, only in movie theaters, via Warner Bros. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.