The Bride!: A Review - Dead on Arrival
/****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This monster mishap is DOA.
The Bride!, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is a re-imagining of the story of The Bride of Frankenstein set in 1936 Chicago and starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale.
The Bride! hit theatres on March 6th with a resounding thud, bombing at the box office and attracting harsh reviews from critics. The film is now available to stream on Max, which is where I just watched it.
As I’ve written before, I love Frankenstein. I love the book (in both its 1818 and 1831 versions), love the original film, and even love some of the later films. For some reason I’m not quite capable of articulating, I just really dig the character and its deeper meaning.
That said, I don’t love all things Frankenstein…a perfect example being my disenchantment with Guillermo del Toro’s version of the story released last year. I got a lot of pushback for my review of that movie…but I stick by my criticism of it.
As for The Bride!, it has some things going for it…namely it stars two fantastic talents in its lead roles, Academy Award winner Jessie Buckley and Academy Award winner Christian Bale.
Unfortunately, even the talents of Buckley and Bale cannot save this uncinematic monstrosity as it is a monumental, colossal disaster area of a movie.
The film is so poorly and amateurishly written it feels like it was pasted together from magazine clippings by a freshman Feminist Studies major having a fever dream after consuming copious amounts of alcohol, mushrooms and righteousness pills.
For some unknown reason the film uses Buckley in two roles, one is Ida – a Chicago moll running with a bad crowd, and the other is the spirit of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) who periodically narrates from the afterlife and occasionally inhabits Ida’s soul. This decision is baffling as it unnecessarily confuses an already overly confused plot.
Buckley does her best with the dual roles…but the script is a leaden albatross around her delicate neck, and it ultimately asphyxiates her despite her noble attempts to keep breathing.
Christian Bale plays Frank – who is Frankenstein’s monster still alive after the good doctor made him a century earlier, and he struggles mightily to find a thread of coherence in his character as the script gives him absolutely none.
It takes an extraordinary director to fumble the talents of Buckley and Bale in such remarkable ways…but Maggie Gyllenhaal is up to the task.
Gyllenhaal is a putrid filmmaker blinded by her pedestrian and puerile personal politics that encompass little more than her defiantly shouting at the top of her lungs that she is the ultimate victim because she has a vagina. Yawn.
Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut was 2021’s The Lost Daughter, which starred Buckley and Olivia Colman. It was well-received mostly because it pandered to the most regressive progressives in the film industry. I found the film to be a muddled mess of a movie that revealed Gyllenhaal to be ham-handed at best. The Bride! is such an incoherent and myopic mess it makes The Lost Daughter look like Citizen Kane.
To be clear, I understand what Gyllenhaal was trying to do, and I even respect and admire the idea…she was trying to literally make a Frankenstein monster of a movie…cobbled together with disparate parts to make an outwardly ugly but beautifully misfit feminist monster.
Combine that idea with the stylistic flair of setting it in 1930s Chicago and all of the distinct flair that era had, and The Bride! has, in theory, a lot with which to work.
The problem though is that Gyllenhaal is not capable enough of a director to pull off such an ambitious and audacious project, and therefore The Bride!, which has musical numbers, fantasy sequences, and homages to film noir, gangster and detective movies, and Hollywood in the 1930s, is a scattered mess of a monstrous movie that befuddles and befouls.
Besides squandering the talent of Buckley and Bale, Gyllenhaal fumbles two other terrific actors, Peter Sarsgaard (Gyllenhaal’s husband) and Penelope Cruz.
Sarsgaard and Cruz play Jake and Myrna, a pseudo-detective duo on the trail of the disfigured Bonnie and Clyde that are Frank and Ida…except Myrna isn’t a detective because she has a vagina – so she’s just Jake’s secretary despite being astronomically smarter than he is. Ugh.
Cruz is so wooden and dead-eyed in this role, and so horrifically miscast, it is stunning to behold. Sarsgaard too feels like he just woke up and wandered onto the wrong set.
Another abominable performance comes from Annette Bening, who plays Dr. Euphronious – a modern-day feminist Dr. Frankenstein…or I guess Nurse Frankenstein since women obviously can never be doctors. Bening does her usual thing but does it without the least of of inner life or intensity.
The second half of the film goes completely off the rails as the story tries to become a revolutionary cry (literally) for women of all stripes to come together to tear off the burden the patriarchy places upon them, but it ends up just making women seem extraordinarily foolish, silly and unserious in every way…Ms. Gyllenhaal most of all.
The one good thing I would say about the film is that I thought the make up for Christian Bale’s Frank was very well done and grotesque in a cool sort of way. In contrast, Buckley’s make up was cool in a grotesque sort of way.
Beyond that, The Bride! is reminiscent of Jeb Bush’s ill-fated 2016 run for the presidency. Remember good old Jeb, whose campaign slogan was Jeb! – sharing the exclamation point with The Bride! That exclamation for Jeb! was so that people could feel the unbridled excitement of wet turd Jeb Bush, the dullest nepo baby of all political nepo babies.
One of the funniest moments of the rather hysterical 2016 campaign was when Jeb! was giving a speech at a town hall in some godforsaken Republican douchetown and he finished the speech with his signature flaccid flair and was greeted with dead silence. Then Jeb! meekly, desperately, humiliatingly, begged the crowd…”please clap”….and they reluctantly did.
That impotent, flack-written, flailing and failing stump speech given by Jeb!, was the political equivalent of The Bride! And ironically, both Jeb! and The Bride! were met with either outright disdain or aggressive disinterest. Tough break for the nepo babies Jeb and Maggie.
Ultimately, The Bride! is a total waste of time and energy. It maybe not should have, but definitely could have, been an interesting movie, but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s incompetence as a director and writer made sure that this movie was never going to come together in any coherent, interest, or insightful way.
The bottom line is this…I watched The Bride! so don’t have to…and trust me…you really don’t have to.
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