Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second directorial project, “Bride!” was no exception to the poor streak that the romance genre has been on in recent years. Here is someone with a semblance of an idea that would otherwise never have left the bottom of a large stack of scripts had the writer not already possessed lots of industry presence. Especially considering that the project includes such a wide breadth of A-listers (Christian Bale, Jessie Buckley and, of course, Jake Gyllenhaal), it seems like this film is essentially the cashing out of many aggregated Hollywood favors. In terms of creation, this method does not necessarily point to a bad movie; sometimes buying into the proverbial Hollywood red tape can work in favor of the director’s vision.
However, Gyllenhaal’s “Bride!” ends up as a project that seems to have too much creative control. The film follows Frankenstein’s 100-year-old monster (played by Christian Bale) and the woman he resurrects (Jessie Buckley) to be his bride after many years of loneliness. The idea might have been to emulate something like Sam Peckinpah’s “The Getaway” or Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” where the couple goes on a cross-country rampage, tapping into the rebellious aspect of romance that often seems so integral to it. This idea, however, comes to fruition in all too convoluted a way.
The visuals of the film are boring but passable, the acting is decent due to the stars involved and the sets are quite good. This movie’s true problem is the script. It feels very amateur and even nonsensical at times, with every aspect of it written by some college sophomore who just discovered Linkin Park. Beginning with a conceptual critique, one of the most prominent plot points is that the Bride is possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley (the author of the original Frankenstein novel). Outside of the nonsensical nature of that addition to the script, it affects little to nothing in terms of the actual story, save for some quirky dialogue. On the topic of the script’s dialogue, it is strangely verbose in a way that passes the border of realism and feels inauthentic. The result is that many of the characters’ conversations seem like those of middle school students who just learned how to swear for the first time, something which is especially strange for characters who are supposed to be living in early 20th century America.
The lack of effective dialogue also feeds into the problem of what feels like an unintentional ambiguity about the two lovers’ relationship. The script appears to both want a tumultuous pairing between Frankenstein and his bride, yet also desires to unconditionally bond them – introducing the cliche refusal of the call troupe – but the result is that viewers are unable to pin down, at any point in the film, how the lovers actually feel about each other. At times, the two of them seem inseparable and willing to die for one another, and, in the next, indulge in squabbles that describe them as only together out of necessity. I understand the excitement behind a complex romance, but once again, it only leaves viewers confused. The constant emotional gear shifting stands in place of what should be an easy-to-follow, yet complex and enthralling, romantic arc.
There is also a strange feminist aspect and a mafia subplot that ends up not affecting the main narrative at all or contributing to anything significant, making the overall story completely incoherent. “Bride!” ends up being a story with a nonsensical narrative that does showcase a lot of production quality, but it is buttressed by a script that probably should never have left the Warner Brothers’ office.
