She Said…
By Hazem Fahmy
The Bride!
Dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal, U.S., Warner Bros.
Walking into Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!—the director’s reimagining of Frankenstein’s monster and his bride as Bonnie-and-Clyde-esque outlaws in the American 1930s—I assumed the film’s most obvious contemporary interlocutor would be last year’s adaptation of Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro. Instead, that dubious honor goes to Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights. Both projects are master classes in the failure of adaptation, stifling their ideas beneath a misguided and contemptuous interpretation that is not merely unfaithful to the source material and its author but also actively insulting. Just as Wuthering Heights’ most compelling imagery amounted to little more than visual fodder for trailers and TikTok fancams, so too is the style of The Bride! a flimsy shell barely holding a poorly conceived and executed narrative.
The story’s basic setup is certainly compelling. Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale), who now goes by Frank, has been roaming the earth for more than a century. As he had once demanded of his creator, he is still seeking a companion, a fellow undead who will accept him as he is. His search leads him to Chicago, where Annette Bening’s Dr. Cornelia Euphronius has been researching reinvigoration and revitalization. Out of sympathy for Frank’s plight, and in pursuit of scientific glory, Dr. Euphronius agrees to help him and the two dig up the body of a recently deceased poor woman. Played by Jessie Buckley, Ida was a sex worker spying on mobsters for the Chicago police who had been dumped in an unmarked grave by the goons among whom she had been embedded. She loses her memory in the revival process, and Frank takes advantage of the situation to deceive her into believing that they were already betrothed before her “accident.”
Their tranquil courting is cut very short by an altercation in which Frank is forced to kill two men to protect Ida from violation. Fleeing Chicago, they set out on a cross-country tour and visit iconic sites from the Fred Astaire-like films with which Frank is obsessed. Their exploits become news sensations and inspire women across the country to mimic Ida’s iconic hairdo and smeared lips and take up arms—though it is not particularly clear against what or whom. Hot on the couple’s tail is Penelope Cruz’s Myrna Malloy, a plucky undercover Chicago detective posing as a secretary. When the mobster on whom Ida had been spying gets word that she is alive, he sends Clyde (John Magaro), one of the goons who buried her, to finish the job. He follows Detective Malloy to the couple and fatally shoots Frank, prompting Ida to lug his corpse back to the Windy City and plead with Dr. Euphronius to revive him. Before she can, however, police arrive at the scene and shoot Ida. Pitying their fate, Detective Malloy uses her authority to dismiss the cops, giving the doctor the chance to revive the couple. As the lab surges with electricity, the film ends with a close-up of the couple’s hands reanimating and embracing one another.
In outline, these events may have been adequately dramatized, buoyed by Gyllenhaal’s intended maximalist gothic style and darkly comedic tone. But the film’s potential is immediately squandered by an obscene choice of a framing device: the literal specter of Mary Shelley, who opens the film by saying, “Knock, knock. Who’s there? It’s me, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.” Also played by Buckley, Shelley seems to be trapped in a purgatory of her own grief and dissatisfaction. Facing the camera in monochrome, she monologues about how the book “wasn’t the half of it,” and that she had always desired a sequel. She ostensibly authors this sequel by taking possession of Ida. It is specifically that possession which gets Ida killed, as Shelley immediately begins exposing the mobster in public the second she takes over. The film’s irresolvable contradictions are laid bare; Shelley is presented as a symbol of all wronged and silenced women, but intentionally silences a woman and gets her killed. Once Ida is revived, Shelley is cruelly disinterested in helping her recover her memory when she is the only person who could actually do so. “What’s my name?” Ida keeps asking, and Shelley never answers, but nonetheless regularly takes over her body to deliver vague diatribes against an ephemeral patriarchy. It is a “critique” of gender relations that is divorced not only from any historical framework of class or race but also from the very lives of its fictional characters—to say nothing of the real woman whose name and spirit the film cheaply parades.
The film’s investment in Shelley’s legacy is incurious and egregiously cynical, interested only in her recognizable name and not the least in her actual life. By flattening her bitterness and vengeful desire into an ahistorical and essentialized “feminine” disposition, Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of Shelley at once diminishes the author’s stature in literary history and fails to address any of the documented ways in which she has been wronged—like the ostracization she faced for her political beliefs—whether in life or in scholarship. Shelley is reduced to the unpleasant trope of the maniacal woman, cackling to herself at no discernible joke. When she takes over Ida, a possession Buckley represents by suddenly responding to random words with an exhaustive and alliterative list of their synonyms in overemphasized Queen’s English, she ironically has nothing to say—at least as it pertains to her own experience. Her grievances are not those of a historical figure about whose life and times we certainly know a decent bit, but of a wronged woman who is psychically connected to all women’s pain, and therefore speaks for none.
This is not the only instance in which the film’s desperate yearning for feminist credentials backfires and reproduces misogynistic tropes. When Ida is harassed and almost assaulted by two random men, Frank’s decision to resort to violence to save her is foregrounded over her experience. When we finally learn her backstory and courageous infiltration of the mafia, it is not Ida who gets to tell her own tale but Detective Malloy’s malepartner, a sad attempt at comedic relief and pathos played as well as could be by Peter Sarsgaard. Ida is the protagonist of a supposedly feminist reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein who does not even get to drive her own story, though she does drive Frank around everywhere. The setting’s lack of social texture ironically dates the film itself as the product of a mid-2010s bourgeois feminist discourse that has no real purchase today, even among the liberal American intelligentsia. In a hokey scene in which Shelley possesses Ida in a room full of rich people and lists off the abuses of the powerful men present, the monologue devolves into her literally screaming “me too! me too!”
Like Fennell’s work, the film’s thematic and political incoherence is exacerbated by its referentiality. The obvious problem with Gyllenhaal drawing so much from Bonnie and Clyde is that her film invites—insists upon—a comparison that torpedoes the heft and coherence of her own narrative. We are led to think of Ida as an undead Bonnie, but then we might wonder: why would Ida’s violence stir up a revolution when the historical Bonnie’s did not? But more importantly, who are these women and what are they fighting for? Why set an ambitiously political adaptation in the 1930s if you are apathetic to the contours of life in the Great Depression? Besides the generic marginalization of professional women—and it is telling that she specifically focuses on a scientist and a cop—The Bride! is uninterested in the specific struggles or debates of the time, even those which intersect neatly with its own plot: for example, the setbacks to the Suffragette Movement during the Depression or women’s increased and exploitative participation in the growing entertainment and telecommunication industries.
What is lazily shown in montage as a national women’s revolt therefore degrades women’s historic role in sociopolitical resistance, including armed and militant ones. Moreover, the fixation on professional mobility, and especially that of a cop, is brazenly at odds with a contemporary American society that is happy to let women lead and participate in institutional violence, whether it’s running the Department of Homeland Security and the New York Police Department at home, or flying bomber jets that carpet bomb civilians abroad. In a decade of never-ending crises, there is no time to humor upper-middle-class aspiration masquerading as women’s liberation. We do not need a Bride whose climactic achievement is severing her groom's name from her own. We need one who knows where to aim her gun.