Job one, aka all Maggie Gyllenhaal had to do in her ambitious, inventive take on “The Bride!” of Frankenstein, was not stink up the screen so much that she blows Jessie Buckley’s best shot at an Oscar.
Not for this movie, mind you. Buckley’s up for “Hamnet” and might even be the favorite. Or rather “was.”
Because while edgy actress-turned-writer-director Gyllenhaal doesn’t do a full “Norbit” on her star, she damned sure doesn’t do her any Awards Season favors.
Buckley plays “the mad scene” pretty much from the first moment to the last in this chaotic, cacaphonous screech into the abyss. She rattles off strings of semi-related words and phrases like an early effort at AI trying to form a coherent thought out of randomly collected blurts in English.
“Shipmate, shipMENT…consummate CHECKmate,” her title character prattle-shouts, among her scores of ranted word-salads, all of them entailing constant shifts of accent — American flapper, British aristocrat, street-walker, novelist, all of them personalities trapped in her brought-back-from-the-dead mind.
She plays the part to the hilt, which doesn’t help the character or the utter hash of a movie around her make a lick of sense. Whatever random “madness” envelopes The Bride’s mind, Gyllenaal gives us a jumbled peek at her stream of consciousness, too.
A character mentions a movie and Marlene Dietrich’s name comes up and that unleashes a vamp of “Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It),” complete with accent.
You can almost taste the indulged, self-destructive, gun-metal-in-your-mouth fatalism in this two hour stomp and stumble through the Great Depression, 1930s movie fandom, monster movies and monster “reinvigorations” of the dead. Gyllenhaal references #MeToo “Barbie” empowerment and every “Frankenstein” story ever told including “Young Frankenstein.”
Characters reprise “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from that Mel Brooks classic with a society ball that turns into a literal “Monster Mash” dance-off.
What’s worse, Gyllenhall slaps that ’60s pop kitsch on the closing credits. As if we didn’t get it. Or all the dopey film stars of the ’30s and ’40s references in character names — “Myrna Malloy (Myrna Loy), “Ida” and “Lupino” and so on — and newspaper headlines capturing feminine fury in recent pop music “movements” and bands — “Rrrrriot Girrrls!” and “Violent Femmes.”
No, that doesn’t make her movie “smart.” But nobody plays contemptuous and patronizing on the screen like Maggie G., so it’s no surprise that spills over into her directing.
Still, she got her brother Jake Gyllenhaal to play an early talkies matinee idol, showcasing his dancing and singing talents in clips from the films of Ronnie Reed — “The Dubious Detective,” and so on.
And Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard plays a hardboiled Chicago cop on the trail of the “monsters” who catch official attention for being hideous as well as leaving a trail of bodies from Chicago to New York and back.
The movie may be an unfocused mess, but it’s got two Oscar winners, lavish production design and more fog than a century of cinema set in London towne.
The story — “Frank,” aka Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale) has been wandering the Earth for over a century, a solitary and miserable figure reanimated from pieces of more than one corpse.
He hopes a Chicago scientist and theorist, Dr. Euphonious (Annette Bening) can help.
“Intercoursing” may be on both their minds. But “This is about loneliness,” Frank insists.
As we’ve met the mouthy sex-worker Ida (Buckley) breaking into mad rants in a public bar where her mob boss/trafficker hears his “Lupino” name dropped, we know she’s not long for this world. Her “accident” becomes the grave Frank and the not-quite-mad doctor dig up. And aside from multiple personality issues and tattoo-like stains she gets all over herself when she spits up the formula/elixer that brings her to life, their recreation of the late Dr. Frankenstein’s “work” works.
But Ida, the woman Frank eventually names Penolope Rogers — not Ginger — isn’t sure she’s down for this renewed life business. Where’s her choice, her free will, her agency as a female character?
She is “too beautiful,” Frank insists. She not only looks like Jean Harlowe, she’s got a sassy, foul mouth on her. And even as she warms to Frank’s company, that mouth gets her and them into trouble as Frank sneaks her out of the lab and into society, where mayhem and self-defense labeled “murder” by trigger happy cops puts them on the lam, skipping from city to town, hitting any cinema showing a Ronnie Reed (Gyllenhaal) film or location where a Ronnie Reed movie was set.
The cop and his secretary with sleuthing skills (Sarsgaard and Cruz) are hot on their trail. So’s a mob killer (John Magaro). We know the climax will be tragic. It’s just a question of what cinematic riff will inspire where it’ll take place — Kong climbing the Empire State building? A tumble over Niagara Falls? Or a parade of torch wielding villagers hunting them down?
The film comes to life in its New York sequence, where a 3D movie screening is interrupted by “real” monsters and a glorious riot ensues. That’s where the “Monster Mash” dance-off happens, too.
Other sequences summon up “Bonnie & Clyde” headstrong criminals on-the-road references and the like, our writer-director’s way of showing us she’s seen a lot more movies than the ones she’s been in.
Maggie G. has Buckley’s confused and furious character rage, rage at the dying of the light, at the patriarchy, at a corrupt system that features cops as deadly as gangster, at a woman’s limited options in those times and ours.
Buckley-in-character narrates the film as a combination of Ida the sex worker, “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley and others — fuming, fulminating, intoning, rhyming, over-enunciating, announcing and denouncing.
Frankly, the picture’s a lovely mess, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that Netflix got a gander at it and refused to raise its offer for Warner Bros. A studio recently famed for “taking care of talent” has had plenty of examples of “over-indulging” talent in its vaults.
And if Buckley doesn’t win the Oscar for her luminous turn as Shakespeare’s grief-stricken wife in “Hamnet,” Gyllenhaal’s second feature film as director — Remember “The Lost Daughter?” — just might be to blame.
Rating: R, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annete Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal,
Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard and John Magaro .
Credits: Scripted and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. A Warner Bros. release.
Running time: 2:06