Cert – 15, Run-time – 2 hours 7 minutes, Director – Maggie Gyllenhaal
Brought back to life, and possessed by the ghost of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), The Bride (Buckley) goes on the run with Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale) after a series of murders attract the attention of police and gang leaders.
The best scene in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is set to the surely intentional tune of Puttin’ On The Ritz. The titular Bride (Jessie Buckley) and Frankenstein’s Monster, otherwise named Frank (Christian Bale), are on the run from the police after a Bonnie And Clyde style murder and flee. Crashing a 1930s high society event they flirtatiously look at each other from across the room while stealing food and drink. Soon, they’ve burst into dance like in the movie musicals they see together (led by Jake Gyllenhaal’s Fred Astaire-like Ronnie Reed). The scene is chaotic, frivolous and a pure surge of electric joy.
It’s all the best moments of The Bride! packed into one sequence. Making the most of the pair enjoying being on the run as the police, and cronies sent by gang leaders, track them down. Gyllenhaal’s Bonnie And Clyde inspiration isn’t shied away from and is evident in a number of shots throughout, she has fun with presenting her two leads in such light, there’s an almost infectious nature to their glee. This criminal strand is where things truly find a spark and most often where they’re most confident.
Gyllenhaal’s screenplay, a very different set of affairs to her excellent drama The Lost Daughter, packs a lot in and not all of it settles. The opening scenes see Buckley’s Ida – as she’s known before resurrection by Frank and Dr Euphronious (Annette Bening), in order to give him a bride to stop his loneliness – possessed by the ghost of Mary Shelley (also Buckley), claiming to want to finish and properly tell her Frankenstein story, leading Buckley to flit between the pair’s voices and vocabulary in the first half before gradually dying down more as the narrative takes hold. It’s evident from this and much of what we see in the first ten minutes that we’re seeing a big-budget B-movie genre flick – the budget is said to have been around $80 million and a good deal of that appears to have successfully gone into the visual design.
There’s an undoubted boldness to The Bride! and for much of the run-time I admired the ambition, even if not everything clicked. We follow Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz as detectives on the tail of The Bride and Frank, yet don’t quite get enough of them to warrant the pay off and connection the film seems to want. It’s the case for a number of the supporting characters, and the themes and instances that relate to them most. Much like the protagonist there’s a wild nature to the film, but more to just how much it has going on and how it tonally shifts rather than attitude, of which there’s a dash.
The film wants to be wild but there’s a knowledge that it needs to be contained, particularly within a run-time that itself shifts in pacing. There’s a feeling that sometimes things need to let loose just a little bit more, feel the potential madness at hand and let the fun flow. Feel the frivolity of puttin’ on the Ritz. What’s present is still a likable monster caper held up by two effective central performances, especially Buckley’s dual (potentially even triple) performance which emits sparks of firecracker energy in the smirk often wiped on her face. But one that in its search for chaos can sometimes get that tangled in thematic elements which dampens the spark.
There’s an admirably ambitious film in the monster caper of The Bride that has enough occasional frivolity in its ideas and lead performances to see it through patches of jumbled themes and supporting characters with little connection.
Just A Little Bit Random 