The Bride!
THE BRIDE! Conceptually, this seems very much like something I could get on board with: a mid-1930s Chicago-set, Mafia-tinged feminist update on the Frankenstein story, embellished with punk-rock attitude and curb-stomping? Yes, of course, who wouldn’t want that? And in the early going, it seemed like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s return to the director’s chair would deliver that and more, beginning as it does with a dramatically lit Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), photographed in moody black and white, contextualizing the story and, even more daringly, literally inserting herself into it. That’s expressionist post-modernism in a Gothic vein with a fourth-wall breach and a genuinely exciting way to open a movie. And then — and then! — Christian Bale as the doctor’s creation, having traveled across time and oceans, seeking the aid of Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) to re-invigorate him a companion and finally end his torturous solitude. Promising stuff.
Absent any cast details or plot spoilers, a new feature from Gyllenhaal-as-director has been something to look forward to, purely on its own merits. She previously adapted Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter (2021) to unsettling, satisfying effect and, as actors turned directors often do, assembled a superlative cast, all seemingly committed to the service of her vision for the piece. Everyone’s efforts came together harmoniously, yielding a work of tremendous, granular emotional detail, nestled venomously inside a sun-drenched summer holiday.
Here again, Gyllenhaal has gathered a troupe of stalwarts, including Buckley in the lead/dual role, Penelope Cruz as a detective bucking convention and Peter Sarsgaard as one, well, mostly submitting to it. Again, she’s adapting here, although Shelley’s novel is more jumping-off point than framework, which may be where things start to get shaky.
While using Shelley as both silver-tongued narrator and instigator of action is a clever, inventive device (and an outstanding perspective from which to build a metaphor about the war for women’s agency), it’s a big, unwieldy thing to deploy among any number of big, unwieldy things. Which is to say that a period-set, split-personality monster road-movie about social justice is maybe more difficult to execute successfully than one might think, and this one doesn’t quite pull it off.
To circle back to inciting incidents and establishment, Buckley plays Ida, a clearly troubled young woman of indeterminate origin who seems to keep bad company, not entirely by her own volition. At a booze-up in a crowded restaurant, she begins to loudly decry the actions of some sort of heavy seated nearby, while simultaneously becoming possessed by the ghost (for lack of a better word) of Shelley. As it’s in the trailer, I don’t mind saying Ida winds up dead and then revivified by Euphronious and “Frank” (Bale), who renames her Penelope and manufactures a new history for him/them. Unwilling to be restrained and studied, Ida/Mary/Penelope hits the seedy Chicago streets with Frank in tow, leading to some widely publicized mayhem, rambles around the Midwest and Northeast, and the fomenting of a powerful social movement.
Trouble is — at least for us, the audience — much of that action takes place elliptically over the course of second and third acts that, after a jolting, delightfully brash opening, just drag and drag and drag, I am deeply sorry to report. Whether this is a symptom of too much or not enough, it’s hard to say, being left with only the document at hand. But that document, at least in its weirdly paced and punctuated back half, feels both elided and overstuffed, laboring over dialogue scenes that not even Buckley and Bale can fully salvage. This is made more frustrating for the fact that the good intentions, both of writer and cast, are so clear: The themes are hanging there and we can watch everyone reach for them without … ever … quite … getting there.
It needs be said that Buckley, unsurprisingly, is absolutely on fire here, body stained by some sort of corpse-reviver juice, neurons blasting through centuries of stifled identity to lead her on a journey of, well, ostensibly of frustrated self-discovery, but I’m not sure the material ever really lets her get there. Regardless, the performance is electric — comic and tragic and endlessly compelling. It just needs a reorganization of the movie around it to be properly platformed.
There is too much good in The Bride! to call it a “bad movie” (which is a specious, demeaning term most of the time, anyway). Nor would I ever accuse it of trying to take on too much, but its tonality, its uneasy transition from action to quiet, doesn’t effectively serve the numerous and noteworthy themes (and plot points) of which it is constructed. Particularly when looking back at The Lost Daughter, a quiet little masterclass in emotional nuance and pregnant ellipses, The Bride! feels like the work of a different creator. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but in this case, it suggests more than the completed work delivers. R. 126M. BROADWAY.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes, visit catheaters.com and minortheatre.com.
This article appears in Granny Rage on Women’s Day.