The Bride! Wore Black

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second film is a wild, erratic and rambunctious ride.

For a character that was destroyed before she was given life by one Victor Frankenstein (and its actual creator Mary Shelley), the creature we now know as The Bride sure has had a long life in pop culture thanks, in great part, to The Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale’s 1935 sequel to his Frankenstein, and Elsa Lanchester’s lighting-streaked hairdo. Jane Seymour, Jennifer Beals and Helena Bonham-Carter (not to mention Madeline Kahn as the living human bride of the Creature in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein) followed Lanchester’s footsteps in playing the character in films that have absolutely nothing to do with Mary Shelley’s novel outside of some characters and the notion that life can be created out of death with disastrous results. Not to mention The Bride’s appearances in dozens of cartoons (including Jonny Bravo and, of course, Scooby Doo) and the Showtime series Penny Dreadful where she was played by former Doctor Who companion Billie Piper.

Now here comes The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s uniquely whack-a-doodle, exhilarating, violent, disturbing and sometimes frustrating take on the character and the source material. It’s so meta that at times it comes close to metastasizing. Yet, I loved seeing Gyllenhaal take so many big swings in her sophomore film, raising her middle finger to all propriety and convention and even literary canon. Like its Warner Brothers-financed predecessors Sinners and One Battle After Another, The Bride! belongs to a species in danger of extinction now that the studio has been acquired by Paramount.

Whale begins his tale with Shelley promising Lord Byron and husband Percy Bysshe Shelley that there’s more to the Frankenstein story than what is about to be published and proceeds to tell it. Not only does Gyllenhaal revisit that prologue and the idea of using the same actress to play both Shelley and The Bride (Jessie Buckley), but makes Shelley an agent provocateur by turning her into a wandering, angry spirit in search of a body to possess and bring to life the story that she wanted to put pen and paper to.

Shelley (who’s shot in tight black and white close-ups, isolating her in some sort of liminal space) finds her vessel in 1930s Chicago: a happy-go-lucky brave young thing named Ida who this particular evening is having the time of her life in a club owned by a notorious gangster who loves to keep his victims’ tongues in formaldehyde-filled receptacles. She starts behaving, well, like a woman possessed, yelling accusations about violence against women in a British accent and pointing her finger at the aforementioned gangster. As a result, Ida ends up at the end of a stairwell, Gyllenhaal lingering on every single bone and skull-cracking detail of the fall.

Throwing even more caution to the wind, who should appear immediately but Shelley’s own fictional creation, the Creature (Christian Bale) who has adopted his creator’s last name but prefers to go by Frankie. He arrives in Chicago in search of Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) whose scientific tracts he has read voraciously and whom he expects will help cure him of that illness that has made his life unbearable for these many years: loneliness. It doesn’t take much to convince her to bring a dead woman to life and off they go, digging up Ida’s body (how and why they chose her is one of the many questions in the film Gyllenhaal doesn’t bother to respond).

Once resuscitated, the woman who now calls herself The Bride realizes that she has no memory of who she was before. She takes a little while to warm up to Frankie. Once she does, they go for a night out on the town, ending up in a rather anachronistic looking and sound underground night club where they attract the attention of two droogies. It doesn’t end too well for them: Frankie bashes their heads in after they try to have their way with The Bride. Given Frankie’s record, they both bolt and head for New York where they spend their evenings going to the movies to watch Frankie’s favorite musical star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), picking up pennies from the fountains and crashing soirees. They are also the subject of a manhunt with police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgard) and his savvier and far more intelligent assistant Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz) taking the lead. These fugitives on the run become folk heroes of a sort, the new Bonnie and Clyde, with The Bride seen as a feminist symbol with dozens of women imitating her makeup and dress style in a rallying cry against the patriarchy.

If that sounds like there is a lot going on, hold onto your garters for I have not yet come to the good stuff. Just like Leo Caraix had Denis Lavant pull out an accordion and with other musicians play “Let My Baby Ride” as an entre’acte in Holy Motors (2012), Gyllenhaal has both Frankie and The Bride perform not one but two extravagant and exhilarating dance numbers (the best since, well, The Testament of Ann Lee). Not to mention those moments when Frankie imagines himself as a character inside one of Reed’s films. Oh, yeah, and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” gets a call out. And that’s not the only film or cultural artifact Gyllenhaal makes reference to or even pokes fun at. She calls out punk band Violent Femmes and the riot grrrl feminist underground punk movement. She has a character yell out “Me, too!” in a groan inducing moment. The Bride never stops quoting from Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”. Even The Rocky Horror Picture Show gets a nod in the form of Euphronius’ exaggeratedly made up maid. And Frankenstein looks more like Walter B. Gibson’s The Shadow under that hat and handkerchief covering half his face during most of the film. With so much going on, it would have not been surprising if Gyllenhaal had forgotten about Mary Shelley but her mischievous, angry spirit makes her presence felt over and over, bringing more chaos to the proceedings.

Yet we never lose sight of the two hearts in the middle of this whirlwind. Christian Bale’s take on Frankenstein is unlike any who’ve performed the role before him, including Jacob Elordi’s recent performance. Bale’s Frankenstein is world-weary, soft-spoken, a kid who finds joy inside of a dark movie theater and who shyly approaches his big screen idol to tell him how much Reed means to him. Which makes those moments when he unleashes his more violent self that more brutal. The yang to Buckley’s wild, unpredictable ying. Her Bride feels like a distillation of Buckley’s past bravura performances. You can sense that Gyllenhaal gave her the freedom and space to take The Brida/Ida to unimaginable places. Buckley has been tasked with delivering multiple ideas at once, to finding the rhythm to dialogue that at times feels verbose, the product of a writer trying to pack too much because she may be running out of time and may never be able to say the things she wants to say. To watch Buckley here is like watching a pyromaniac setting a whole building on fire and then dancing as the flames roar around her.

Yes, Gyllenhaal may be wielding a blunt instrument in this critique of women being denied their own agency and the violence men wield against them. Some things don’t quite stick to the landing and the pacing lags a bit on some scenes. But given the times we live in, subtlety may no longer be a virtue we can afford.