‘The Bride!’ Reanimates An Old Tale | At The Movies With Kasey
I almost went to the theaters to see Scream 7. I love the franchise, but I also feel so tired of reboots and endless sequels. Instead, I checked out The Bride!, which may be a new spin on an old story, but takes more creative risks than most movies I have seen recently.
In The Bride!, Frankenstein’s Monster, we’ll call him Frank (Christian Bale), has been wandering around unbearably lonely for over a century. He pays a visit to Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) in 1930’s Chicago, asking her to make him a bride. Once he persuades her to do so (“I thought you were a mad scientist?”), they reanimate the body of a young woman who was murdered by mobsters. When The Bride/Penelope (Jessie Buckley) awakens, she remembers nothing, but pieces of her past (and possession by the spirit of Mary Shelley) come out in bursts of emotion and violence. Soon, the pair is on the lam, pursued by detectives Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz). Jake Gyllenhaal also appears as Ronnie Reed, a movie star with whom Frank is obsessed.
When I wrote about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, my main critique was that it removed much of Mary Shelley’s feminine perspective from the story. In her screenplay for The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal brings that energy back with gusto. The film opens with Mary Shelley (also played by Jessie Buckley) delivering a soliloquy from beyond the grave, then possessing the young woman who will become The Bride. This inventive framing of the story does not fully make sense through the rest of the film, but having Shelley’s angry, poetic voice burst out from time to time adds a quirky punch to Buckley’s wild performance.
The makeup by Roberto Baez and Jason Collins brings Frank and Penelope’s monstrous features to life in details that are a captivating mixture of beautiful and grotesque, but the performances take everything up beyond parody. Christian Bale draws out the vulnerability and tenderness Frank feels, which makes the moments of violence hit harder. The smart, anxious, lonely monster is much closer to Shelley’s original creature than many prior films. In contrast to Frank’s bulky form, the physicality of Buckley’s performance is entrancingly energetic.
As much as the screenplay reveres Shelley, The Bride! also pays homage to old films and previous versions of Frankenstein. The 1930’s setting and the elements focused on the mob and detectives add a hard-boiled vibe that draws together the various threads about violence against women.
The Bride! is The Bride of Frankenstein meets Bonnie and Clyde with a bit of feminist revolt thrown in. Kind of like Frank himself, the screenplay stitches together many ideas, and the whole is not quite as cohesive. And still, watching the performances, the ode to cinema, and the robust refusal of Ida/Penelope/The Bride to behave (as she says, “I’d rather not.”) was immensely fun. I would rather watch creative risks not fully work out than tired franchises any day.
The Bride was written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It runs 126 minutes and is rated R.
Now streaming on Hulu or available to rent on other services, The Secret Agent follows Armando (Wagner Moura), a Brazilian technology expert in hiding in 1977. He tries to find refuge in his hometown, Recife, but soon the powerful, corrupt men he fled turn up in surprising ways. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best International Feature, Best Picture, and Best Actor.
The Secret Agent is a sprawling film, filled with slices of life and bizarre moments provided in part by Carnival energy and in part by just everyday weirdness. There’s a human leg found inside a shark that, in a dreamy sequence inspired by B-movies, hops around and attacks people. The slow pace and the need to read subtitles (unless you speak Portuguese) made watching this film an undertaking at its nearly three-hour runtime.
Wagner Moura delivers an understated performance, showing Armondo’s conflicting feelings and the sadness that infuses his interactions, keeping people at a distance in the wake of grief and displacement. The film lacks the suspense needed to truly feel like a thriller, but it provides a thought-provoking portrait of the reverberations of destruction left in the wake of dictatorship and corruption.
The screenplay builds in a framing narrative of a university researcher in the present transcribing taped testimonies Armando gave. This final twist on the story helped it all come together, providing a long view of history and the sense that it was not just hit men who had their eyes on Armando, but history as well.
The Secret Agent was written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. It runs 161 minutes and is rated R.
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