Director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is both a pedal-to-the-metal spectacle and an intellectual exercise, but mot a great movie for the ages. But it is most certainly a showcase for the unique and awesome talents of Jessie Buckley.
The Bride! is set in the America of the early 1930s, that time of speakeasies, flappers, gangsters, hobos hopping trains and popular fascination with Talking Pictures. Having been re-animated 100 years before in Europe, the very sensitive Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) longs for female companionship, and gets it when a Chicago mad scientist (Annette Bening) reanimates the corpse of a gangland escort (Jessie Buckley).
She doesn’t remember who she is or any specific experiences in her previous life. But, unlike the traditional Frankenstein’s monster, she immediately behaves like a fully formed woman, who is already acquainted with 1930s America, and speaks English with an impressive vocabulary. And she already knows how some men mistreat women, and, boy, is she pissed off.
The original male monster in The Bride! is named Frankenstein, unlike in Guillermo Del Toro’s and other Frankenstein movies, where the mad scientist is Viktor Frankenstein and the monster is “the Creature”.
The two take to each other, but Frankenstein has been comfortable living on the down low, and his bride has the ability and compulsion to ignite every social situation into an uproar and to escalate every commotion into a volcanic riot. They must flee Chicago and embark on a road trip to Manhattan, Niagara Falls and back to Chicago, leaving carnage in their wake.
Let’s talk about what The Bride! is NOT. It’s not anything like Guillermo Del Toro’s operatic Frankenstein epic. It’s not anything like the campy 1935 Bride of Frankenstein starring Elsa Lanchester. And, although there’s violence, it is not a gore fest like many contemporary horror movies.
The movie that The Bride! most resembles – and it’s intentional – is Bonnie and Clyde (and there’s at least one identical shot, where Buckley mirrors Faye Dunaway). There’s plenty of subversive humor in Bonnie and Clyde, but The Bride! is much more generally funny.
Whether happy or angry, the Bride herself is absolutely explosive, and Jessie Buckley, with untethered physicality, makes her into a human detonator. Whether she enters a speakeasy or a cinema or a fancy hotel ballroom, there’s gonna be a riot very soon.
Christian Bale’s monster character is the most textured in The Bride! – in turns yearning, lovelorn, socially fearful, pathetic, disciplined, and joyous. Bale is really, really good in the role.
The Bride!’s cast is very rich; besides Bening, there’s Penelope Cruz, Peter Sarsgard and John Magaro. They’re all good, although all of the complexity is in Buckley’s and Bale’s roles. Jeannie Berlin, Oscar-nominated for 1973’s The Heartbreak Kid, is very good as the mad scientist’s grotesque assistant. I always sit up and take notice of Louis Cancelmi (Billions) when he shows up in a supporting role, and he’s just as good here as in The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Killers of the Flower Moon. The director’s brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, is very good as a song-and-dance movie star revered by Frankenstein.
The Bride’s volatility stems from her rage against misogyny, and that is the most persistent theme within The Bride!. I found myself more often thinking about the message and the cinematic references in The Bride! than being emotionally involved in it. Since Jessie Buckley is the most soulful actor in today’s cinema, I was expecting more soulfulness in the movie, and I think that’s a miss. Nevertheless, The Bride! is smart, funny and entertaining.