I was very excited to see where Maggie Gyllenhaal was going to go after The Lost Daughter. Movie IP wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a follow up. Even though The Bride! isn’t the sensation Gyllenhaal’s first feature was, it still is a sensation, and leaves me with pure excitement at what the future holds for Maggie as a filmmaker…when she gets full artistic control of her future projects.
As narrated by Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), the “bride” (also Buckley) goes by Ida in 1930s Chicago. After mouthing off with a mob boss (Zlato Buric) present, Ida gets pushed down a flight of stairs, and dies from impact. Living nearby is Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Benning), who specializes in animating, um, previously inanimate things…and people. Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) has been living for a hundred years or so now, alone, and desperate for companionship. He finds the doctor, and convinces her to dig up a dead female he can live out his eternity with.
Chicago, monsters, and the mob? Did someone say Bonnie & Clyde? That’s an ingenious choice from Maggie Gyllenhaal, one of many. Criminals on the run is a great choice for a plot, keeping the action moving and constantly exciting. For aesthetics, Gyllenhaal goes back to Frankenstein’s roots: in cinema. He and the other monsters were the OG IP for the studios, so having “Frank” and The Bride! going in and out of theaters a la John Dillinger would make sense, seeing maybe themselves or the fantasy life they want to lead up on screen. What follows is a journey through a Tod Browning monster movie, just modernized. The dance sequences here are electric with grotesque life, exquisitely lit and shot to convey carnal desire mixed with 1930s Fred Astaire. It’s a wild choice, but TOTALLY works, as The Bride! figuratively comes alive when that’s going on, mixed with the violent standoffs. Throw in a little modern superhero: Joker homage with the look (hopefully destined to be this year’s Halloween special), and Gyllenhaal whips together this potent mixture of stuff that feels familiar and wholly different, a rare feat only great directors pull off.
But the ideas don’t stop there. They overflow, the fatal flaw of The Bride! In the middle of the crime spree and tragic love story Gyllenhaal crams into Jessie Buckley’s head a dual personality, of Ida and Mary Shelley herself at war with who she was and who she is going to be. It forces a crazy, fascinating performance out of Buckley, but ends up muddying the waters instead of saying something more interesting. There’s an undercurrent here of female sexual power and agency in a male dominated world, that the movie was forced to pull back from, but because of that, neuters some of the impact Gyllenhaal wants to generate with the bride’s tragic tale. There’s also the sweet gesture of Maggie giving her husband Peter Sarsgard Penelope Cruz to do a little Thin Man side plot, but that never tonally was going to integrate into the main narrative, making the movie go from tragiromance to slapstick comedy, to erotic thriller, to monster movie, and back again, making me break my own neck trying to keep up. The Bride! makes sense as a 2nd feature for Maggie Gyllenhaal, where she learns the important lesson of learning how to dial back the themes in favor of a more coherent story in her next feature.
And if that feature is as electric as The Bride!’s highs are, we’re in for something special. This is a misfire, but the best version of a movie misfire we could have, really going higher than high and lower than low. The movie equivalent of a recent night out I had where dinner was a disaster, but in ways that lead to a great story instead of anger at lost time. Word of advice to the restauranteurs: don’t throw in a first time server on a Saturday night dinner service during Restaurant Week. Recipe for disaster for that poor person.