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After taking a few days off from serious work and the day job I am back posting on my blog and I will return with a review of a film I had been anxiously awaiting The Bride!
With trailers making the movie appear to be a mashup of 30s gangster flicks and the classic Frankenstein tale the very oddness of it compelled me to see this unique vision in the theater. After pushing back my attendance by a week so I could see Blood on the Moon, where I was warned that the 40s noir western was superior to The Bride! yesterday after a nice lunch my sweetie-wife and I caught an early afternoon screening.
Warner Brothers Studios
There is a triumvirate of positions that greatly affect the look, feel, and tone of a motion picture, The Producer, The Director, and The Writer, and when all three posts are occupied by the same person, as with Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Bride! it comes as close as possible for a major studio release to fulfill the concept of the auteur theory and the final product for good or bad rests on that person.
I wish I could say I loved The Bride! but that is not the case. The film feels terribly unfocused and scattershot, with each sequence interesting and executed with tremendous vision but never coalescing into a coherent whole. I can see what Gyllenhaal was trying to achieve and I can see the thesis of her work, she was shooting for something proudly feminist and while she for the most part avoided pulling out a soapbox from which to lecture her audience the final product, in my opinion, never scaled the summit she set out for herself. The script feels like something that was written by the seat of the author’s pants and never revised afterwards. Major story elements are introduced late, earlier plotlines are wrapped with a sensation that feel forced and pressured as though someone had suddenly discovered that they were running out of pages, and references to other films proved distracting. I think, outside of comedy, it is a very risky proposition to refer to other films in your movie as you rarely come off as anything other than inferior. If I am watching your adaptation of Frankenstein you rarely want me to be thinking of Whale’s version or worse yet Young Frankenstein.
The film had far too little of the 30s gangster and I felt it did not deliver as promised on either the mad scientist or organized crime elements.
The cast is uniformly good and the production design and cinematography are striking, everything that doesn’t work in this film comes from the script and vision behind it and as such if you love or hate this movie the person responsible is Maggie Gyllenhaal.
