A feminist 'Bride' for Frankenstein

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A couple of weeks ago, a friend joked that with all the chaos in the world, we haven’t had time to discuss how insane it is that a “Frankenstein” movie is up for Best Picture at the Oscars. Even crazier is that this is like the eighth-best “Frankenstein” movie, if you’re feeling generous. But director Guillermo del Toro has always had a powerful sway with the Academy, having previously won the big prize for his soggy reworking of “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Del Toro operates from such a sincere place of film fandom, it’s confounding to me that I can’t ever quite connect with his monster movies, which — for all their lavishly produced stateliness — are emotionally simplistic and strangely inert. I always end up feeling guilty that I don’t enjoy them more than I do.

Conversely, I enjoyed “The Bride!” more than I probably should have. Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s gonzo revisionist take on James Whale’s 1935 “Bride of Frankenstein” is a hellzapoppin’ cacophony of silly ideas and mad movie love, overhauling the queer-coded camp classic into a funhouse feminist manifesto. The exclamation point in the title is emblematic of Gyllenhaal’s try-hard, loud and proud approach, which doesn’t always land on the right side of cringe and could easily be exhausting if you’re in the wrong mood. I was in the right mood.

Set in Prohibition era Chicago, the film stars Jessie Buckley as a mouthy gangster’s moll tossed down a flight of stairs to her death after displeasing the boss. She’s dug up from a potter’s field and “reinvigorated” by Annette Bening’s mad scientist to serve as a companion for Christian Bale’s courtly Frankenstein monster, who is nearing 120 years old and would very much like to lose his virginity. Bale is terrific as the creature, fumbling and overly formal in a constant struggle to keep his brutish instincts at bay. Spending most of his days hiding out at the movies, Frank’s got a man-crush on a famous soft-shoe song and dance man (Jake Gyllenhaal) and it’s touching to watch the big lug try and emulate his Hollywood hero.

Her face stained with a Rorschach streak of black laboratory fluid and hair flared out in an electric frizz, Buckley’s amnesiac Bride wobbles around on broken legs trying to figure out why she can’t remember this galoot who claims to be her husband. In one of the movie’s more excessively nonsensical flourishes, the Bride happens to have been possessed by the spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (also played by Buckley, in a nod to the 1935 film’s framing device). This sends the actress spitting out uncontrollable tics of authorial commentary in a broad English accent, angrily insisting that all these oppressed women in the film should follow the credo of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and simply say to their men, “I would prefer not to.”

Buckley is this year’s presumptive Oscar winner for her turn as a tears-and-snot fountain in “Hamnet,” a feat of grief so athletic she deserved an Olympic gold medal for caterwauling. The Irish actress gave a performance of quiet delicacy and grace in Gyllenhaal’s 2021 directorial debut, “The Lost Daughter,” but both are operating in an entirely different register with “The Bride!,” which is more like the movie equivalent of an all-caps text. This makes Buckley either the best or worst person for the job, depending on how loud you like things. Credit where due, she’s the first co-star since Melissa Leo in “The Fighter” to make Christian Bale look like he’s underplaying.

Frank and the Bride become fugitives on the lam, capturing America’s imagination like the Universal Monsters versions of Bonnie and Clyde. Gyllenhaal loads the movie with nods to female Hollywood pioneers, giving characters names like “Myrna,” “Ida” and “Lupino.” The filmmaker’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard, shows up dressed like Orson Welles in “Touch of Evil,” playing a crummy cop who stuffs his face while his super-competent secretary (Penelope Cruz) solves his cases for him. Frank has fantasies of himself and the Bride taking part in elaborate, 1930s-style musical numbers, which suggest what that terrible 2024 “Joker” sequel might have been like if it hadn’t hated the audience. One of these song-and-dance sequences deploys an in-joke music cue for “Frankenstein” movie aficionados that’s so perfect it obliterated whatever resistance I had left to this ungainly picture.

I can’t help falling for foolhardy efforts like this. As was the case with last month’s wacky “Wuthering Heights,” “The Bride!” is a big, exuberant mess of a movie full of endearingly dopey ideas and pieces that don’t always fit together. Gyllenhaal is so bombastic in the messaging and runs so amok with anachronisms it’s sometimes hard to tell if she’s kidding, like when Sarsgaard’s character makes a winking reference to female astronauts in 1935. If anyone’s still wondering what the movie is supposed to be about, there’s a bit near the end when Buckley answers a question by screaming the words “ME TOO! ME TOO!” over and over again. Subtlety is for cowards.

There are a lot of things in “The Bride!” one could conceivably complain about, but I would prefer not to.

“The Bride!” is now in theaters.