Maggie Gyllenhaal's "The Bride!" wasn't a critical nor a commercial success and come awards time it's not likely to figure yet it just might be the best American film of the year. It's "The Bride of Frankenstein" updated to 1930's America, played mostly 'straight' and displaying more imagination and chutzpah than a dozen other movies put together.
It's a ghastly comedy, a horror movie, a musical, a feminist tract and a love story rolled into one and as 'the monster' and his bride it has two of the best actors working today and giving of their best. Frank, as he's known here, is Christian Bale and as his no-nonsense bride we have Jessie Buckley giving easily her best performance to date while Annette Bening as her creator hasn't been this good in years. This is the movie the real Mary Shelley might have written had she been born 100 years later and working in Hollywood, (there's lots of references to movies of the period as well as contemporary 'in-jokes' and with Maggie's brother Jake as a Fred Astaire/Dick Powell kind of movie star), and it's visually extraordinary.
Of course, it's also very easy to see why it failed. Anyone expecting to see a conventional reworking of the Frankenstein myth or just an old-fashioned horror movie will be sorely disappointed. Nor is it the Bonnie and Clyde like gangster picture some people might have been expecting. This is a one-off, a true original that takes bits of Shelley's original "Frankenstein" and sews them together in the same kind of higgledy-piggledy fashion that the good doctor made his monster with Buckley popping up every now and then as Shelley to guide her creations through the story. In fact, this is cinema as bold and as ballsy as cinema can get. Yes, it is 'too much' but can you get too much of a good thing?
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