Sounds like "Creature Features" with a touch of class? In a sense, that's precisely what "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" is.
Whatever mistakes it may make, this new "Frankenstein" -- director Kenneth Branagh's overblown but occasionally inspired take on the old tale of monster and man -- must be granted this: It has a strong stomach, and it does not flinch from some baroquely gory imaginings.
In particular, moviegoers will find much to chew on in the film's portrait of Victor Frankenstein as both a scientist usurping God's power to draw boundaries around life -- and a man appropriating woman's power to give birth.
The prime directive behind "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" seems to have been: stick close to Shelley's original tale and stay as far away as possible from the classic, Boris Karloff-inhabited original movies, the 1931 "Frankenstein" and its superior sequel, "The Bride of Frankenstein."
The result may often wobble between costume drama and psychodrama, cautionary tale and demented love story. But at least it's a horror film with a brain -- albeit one that sometimes seems to be pickled in a jar.
Branagh, the Shakespearean actor-director who turned "Henry V" into a pageant of desperation and "Much Ado About Nothing" into a jolly mess, manages to keep his wits about him, at least most of the way through the film, even though he's both directing and playing the story's obsessive protagonist. Branagh has a clear vision of what's at stake in Shelley's Gothic tale, with its Miltonic overtones and its premonition of the ravages of technology unbound.
Branagh's Dr. Frankenstein is an ardent man of science -- his devotion to medieval alchemy notwithstanding -- who forsakes his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), to master the secrets of artificial life. Without resort to blatant anachronisms, the movie draws your attention to the parallels between Frankenstein's enterprise and those of present-day gene-splicers.
Where Shelley explained Frankenstein's obsession as a simple matter of intellectual devotion, screenwriters Steph Lady and Frank Darabont give him a more personal rationale: After his mother dies giving birth to his little brother, he cries to the heavens, "No one need die! I will stop this!"
Hubris, anyone?
This Frankenstein is a man out to conquer death, and he wants results faster than medical science can provide. With the aid of a professorial mentor (an atypically glum John Cleese), he begins to study electricity and eastern medicine. He builds a grand lab that proves to be production designer Tim Harvey's burnished masterpiece. It's dominated by pendulous leathery sacs hanging from the ceiling -- like a mammoth scrotum. (I know that sounds far-fetched, but wait till you see it.)
The process of "creating life" unfolds in a whirlwind of frenetic activity that comes across as a combination of acupuncture, zymurgy and butchery. When it's all over, the monster (Robert De Niro) rises from its primal soup -- and promptly slips on the floor, slick from the juices of its birthing. Branagh's Frankenstein tries to help the monster to its feet, and the two wind up performing a weird duet that's part sexual embrace, part vaudeville act and part mud-wrestling.
It's a hard scene to top, and in fact "Frankenstein" begins to decline from here on. De Niro's makeup job is remarkable: he may lack neck bolts, but he makes up for it with enough pits and clefts and sutures to keep the entire Beverly Hills plastic-surgery community employed into the next century.,p> Still, you never really forget it's De Niro you're watching; he starts off looking pretty much the way he did at the end of "Taxi Driver" and decays from there.
"Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" wants us to feel for its monster, and so its monster must have feelings. The movie hews to Shelley's story in presenting the creature as more of a philosopher than the brute familiar from the Karloff films. But then it goes a step further and turns him into a sort of wounded child who's got to work out his bad relationship with daddy. Even in the alpine wilderness of "Frankenstein," Hollywood can't escape its nuclear-family tunnel vision.
Branagh loses control of the film in its final section, during which a character's heart is ripped out and held up, beating, in the light. (Has the director been playing Mortal Kombat?) And the climax, which you won't find in Shelley, involves a battle for Elizabeth's soul (and body parts) between Frankenstein and his monster. If it's not family therapy, it's the romantic triangle cliche.
Such disappointments are magnified by the occasional awful supporting performances -- like Aidan Quinn, who's woefully stiff as the ill-fated sea captain to whom Dr. Frankenstein tells his tale. In this the film resembles "Bram Stoker's Dracula," the last film directed by "Frankenstein" producer Francis Ford Coppola.
"Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" has its loopy appeal, and anyone with a taste for gore or Gothic will get at least one or two galvanic kicks out of it. But there's a deep psychological void at the film's center. It wants us to see Frankenstein as a father-figure who unjustly spurns his offspring -- but it fails to clarify that act of rejection or crystallize it in a scene. Instead, we're left to wonder why it is that the good doctor disowns his creation.
It seems to be simply because the poor thing is ugly. And everyone
knows
that, no matter how grotesque an infant might actually be, a parent is
always
going to find it cute.
"Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" opens Friday, Nov. 4, at the Kabuki and
Alexandria theaters in San Francisco and other theaters around the Bay
Area.p>
Copyright 1994 The Free Press
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