The Bride! Grade - B
by K G Kline
"Bonnie and Frankenstein"
Maggie Gyllenhaal's new period gangster horror drama The Bride! is a disaster of feminist cinema. Never grounded for a moment, the story flies around like a balloon caught in a storm. Unintentionally closer to Young Frankenstein than the classic tragedies, it thinks it's embracing its feminist take on love, and horror becomes more of a distraction than a direction. Maddingly unfocused and ill-paced, it never delivers on any of its promises.
Gyllenhaal falls into the trap that catches many feminist storytellers - Her female characters are empowered and well-developed while her male characters are either two-dimensional villains with an unexplained blood-lust for women (because they're men?), or whimpering man-children.
For this story to work Frankenstein (Christian Bale) needed to be the Bride's equal, not a sniveling boy-man. Gyllenhaal was writing her Romeo and Juliet but couldn't bring herself to write a real Romeo. Instead, we get a male Ophelia with scars on the outside as well as within.
Compare Bale to David Tenent's powerful take on Frankenstein that ran at the National Theater and you will see a character that Gyllenhaal has neutered to the point that his very foundation and purpose has been ripped away.
Instead of definitely walking across the arctic wastes with his creator crawling desperately after him, Gyllenhaal's monster is pathetically crawling after Gyllenhaal's ideal for life - the pursuit of a smart, beautiful woman.