Story Over Thought

It really sucks to say, but The Bride! is far less than the sum of its parts. Too many good ideas can be just as bad as too few. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sophomore directorial effort is 126 minutes of her throwing everything at the wall to see what will stick, which inexplicably includes forcing Jessie Buckley to play both the ghost of Mary Shelley and a reincarnated 1930s Chicago woman in the same breath.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult in movies like this, since rarely does a single element make a film “bad.” Feminism, Frankenstein, Bonnie and Clyde, musicals, Joker: Folie à Deux, #MeToo, the “male loneliness epidemic,” the mob, and cinema itself are all topics the film either uses as influence or references/comments on directly. (“Me too! ME TOO!” Buckley shouts. I can’t remember the context.) Folie à Deux wasn’t nearly as artful, but it did have a strong sense of identity.

I’ve completely forgotten to provide a plot synopsis, so let me briefly backtrack. Jessie Buckley plays Ida, the young woman killed by a crime boss at the beginning of the film, but she also plays the ghost of Mary Shelley, the real-life author of Frankenstein, who possesses her. After her unholy recreation, Frank and Ida kill a group of bullies who piss them off and go on the run, chased by a couple of annoying detectives who need to learn a thing or two about girl power. There’s quite a bit of plot involving both the detectives and the aforementioned mob boss, but the throughline is Frank and Ida/Penelope/The Bride falling in love before falling out once Ida/Penelope/The Bride realizes she’s a corpse who was “reinvigorated,” as it’s referred to, to cure Frank’s loneliness.

I normally like anything meta, but this particular idea is so overwritten and message-forward that it became grating. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Buckley gives a bad performance (I’m not sure anyone could do better with the material), but she is outshone by Christian Bale’s Frank(enstein), whose puppy-dog loneliness and love for the theatrical proves far more charming. Which is probably bad in a movie where he reanimates a corpse with which to conjugate.

I did say that The Bride! has good ideas. It unequivocally does. While much of the feminism of Gyllenhaal’s story is ham-fisted and slogan-y (there are multiple scenes of Buckley holding people at gunpoint while she bellyaches Barbie-style; the main antagonist collects the tongues of his female victims because he wants to silence them), there is something interesting about a man bringing a woman back to life only in the interest of romancing her. To the film’s credit, Frank is neither an outright villain nor purely a butt for jokes, but a complex character who eventually proves to be the biggest fan of The Bride of all.

Another aspect, parallel to this, is how this film views stories. Frank spends all his time watching old movies and dreaming of meeting his heroes, but when he does, he’s brushed off. Furthermore, brash and free-wheeling Ida isn’t quite up to snuff in comparison to the idealistic, graceful goddess he has in mind. Ida is brought back to life for a sequel to someone’s book, both figuratively and literally.

The primary focus here is the Mary Shelley angle. The 1935 film also includes a prologue featuring the “real” Shelley, who explains that she never finished her Frankenstein spin-off. The idea of incorporating an author into the text of a sequel is still incredible: not only is Ida a puppet for Frank, but she is also one for Shelley, who turns her into an (unwilling) vehicle for righteous feminist rioting. Which makes it all the more unsatisfying that her inclusion is the most annoying part of the film. Shelley comes across as uncharacteristically obscene and excruciatingly irritating, presumably unintentionally, as she regularly interrupts Ida to say something rather obvious about how badly women have it. I get that The Bride! is punk rock to the core, but even punk has taste. Well, not really, but it’d be nice if it did.

To be fair, there is a half-hearted attempt to have The Bride truly become her own woman, but she cannot fully rebel against Shelley either, since the film is sort of sheepishly still aware that it’s playing with a real historical figure. And so, Ida largely remains a talking head in her own movie, one ultimately about women reinvigorating and resurrecting one another, a reversal of the 1935 film and of how creation is akin to destruction.

Which would be fine if the film picked a lane; there are simply too many threads and too much dead weight for The Bride! to find any thrills in the thrill ride it promises, and so all of the overt feminist anger falls flat. If it seems like I’m not giving Gyllenhaal a fair shake, I find it telling that the Shelley scenes were added during reshoots. I did, however, like the final shot and the implicit question of what can survive the act of resurrection, and what memories might be lost.

As mentioned, this film has drawn many comparisons to Joker: Folie à Deux, many of which are valid. This is also a sort of contrast to that film, where, instead of building up a mythic identity that can’t be sustained by the lowly man beneath, it’s someone else who creates the Bride’s persona. Also comparable is the brief musical section and prolonged Bonnie and Clyde riff, which the second Joker became infamous for not delivering on. Apparently, both share many of the same crew members. The Joker lives, and through Christian Bale, no less!

The Bride! takes a big, big swing that is extremely admirable. I have no issue with the sentiment here, but sentiment alone isn’t enough. Without craft, the message lands like a pamphlet about punk rock. Buckley and Bale do have a charmingly strange dynamic, and occasionally the sheer imagination behind this crazy thing shines through, but this isn’t really a love story for very long, or anything, actually. There is simply too much fluff stuffed into this monster, and the ideas that do surface aren’t enough to give it any brains. This concept will need further reinvigoration. 3-12-26