I did not like the book of Frankenstein but I thoroughly enjoyed Guillermo del Toro's film. As for the Bride, I'll get to that.
The thing I want to examine first is how I could enjoy what is celebrated as the closest adaptation yet of a book I think is bunk.
More or less everything I dislike about the book is encapsulated in its narrator, the sea captain, a man who has no knowledge of navigation at sea, nor arctic exploration, nor the leadership of men. It is almost impressive how little effort Mary Shelley put into imagining him as a believable character, and the disdain she clearly holds for any practical skill whatsoever. Instead Shelley's sea captain has the only two virtues she seems to give a damn about: a poetic sense of romantic, and money.
The same sensibilities continue as Shelley comes to draw the young Victor, who to the despair of his father, and later his professors, has very little time for the humdrum realities of modern science, preferring instead the grander dreams of long debunked medieval alchemists.
That this must echo Shelley's own opinions become obvious when she reaches the great crux of the novel, Victor giving life to his creation, about which she tells us, astonishingly, absolutely nothing. Does Victor ignite the vital spark with lightning as he does in the films? It seems unlikely, he is, after all, living in rented rooms in Ingolstadt not some lonely castle - the electricity is surely just an invention of filmmakers. No, Victor had his eureka moment while studying chemistry, which invites us to imagine he produced a formula of some kind? But is it solid, gas, or liquid? How much is required? Was it difficult to create? Does everything from the abattoir and graveyard need to be treated or is it sufficient to dose one part and let the affect spread? Should it be taken orally? Or intravenously? Or by suppository? Shelley tells us exactly bupkiss. For all we know Victor is reciting incantations from the Necronomicon.
Supposedly her husband was fascinated with galvanism and the occult, and she was writing at about the time that morphine was isolated, just a couple of decades after the discovery of nitrous oxide as an anesthetic and the invention of the smallpox vaccine, allusions to which might have lent colour to Victor's adventures. For someone who is sometimes supposed to have invented science fiction, there is no evidence in the actual text that science interested Mary Shelley one jot.
But enough ranting, why do I think the adaptation works.
Much of what is cut from the book is simple expediency. It would be surprising if any scriptwriter kept the weird pointless romantic subplot with the cottagers, and no shock at all the Victor's childhood is truncated to a few short flashbacks, or that his friend, Henry Clerval, who only seems to exist in order to be murdered by the creature, is written out altogether, and instead characters are added who are more involved with Victor's work and with whom exposition can be delivered. That Victor's university is relocated to Edinburgh not only draws parallels with the great nineteenth century discoveries in anatomy and their darker, body snatching, side, but also allows the film to legitimately begin in English. Del Toro could perfectly reasonably claim to love Shelley's poetic dreamer of a sea captain, but to have replaced him with a more recognisable (gruff, competent) archetype in order to remove an early stumbling block for the audience.
Other alterations, the use of lightning among them, are perhaps only in order to tell a story visually, but in contrast with Shelley, Del Toro's love of science is manifest: he loves not only the look and feel of it, the chrome instruments, the arcane machines humming with potency, the dissected specimens splayed out like treasure maps (and a lost, fifth, Evelyn table); but also the actual application of it, the trial and error, the infuriating failures, the tunnel vision as the scientist is consumed by the problem, the bleakness of a dead end and the excitement when a new revelation suggests alternative paths.More interestingly Del Toro changes Victor's childhood dramatically in order to make the story about the legacy of bad fathers. Victor's father ruins Victor. Victor ruins the creature. The creature stops the cycle by killing Victor. This all works because it is something about which Del Toro has something to say.
But perhaps most interesting is the change to Elizabeth. In the book she is Victor's love interest and has no inner life beyond that. She exists only to be murdered by the creature on her wedding night. In the film she is Victor's brother's wife, allowing her to chastise and refuse him, and chose the creature over him. She becomes the champion of the creature, which allows her not only to be the audience's, and Del Toro's, voice in the movie, but to reveal more starkly the crippling loneliness of the creature that is such a feature of the book.
The crippling loneliness of the creature is where The Bride begins. 'Frank' turns up in Chicago begging a brilliant scientist to make him a companion, and wouldn't you know it Jesse Buckley had recently been possessed by the ghost of Mary Shelley and pushed down the stairs for her trouble. This is a straight continuation from the book, where the creature demands of Victor "a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself," and so far so much fun. They both look fantastic, and Jesse Buckley and Christian Bale are superb, and pretty soon they are on the run and you think it's going to be Boney and Clyde but with real monsters.
But somehow the momentum just dies away. Everything that happens on screen is fun and looks great (I love the dance scene!), but it never seemed to take off, I was not actually excited.
The reason is that it does not have a second act. The characters do not want anything. With Frank this is fine, he's got the companion he wanted, and now he mopes after her, happy as a Labrador with a tennis ball. The film does, after all, set itself up as a feminist movie (she even screams "me too" repeatedly at the end) so who cares what Frank wants, what does The Bride want?
What does The Bride want? We never find out. Some vague desire to punish bad men perhaps, except that's more the ghost of Mary Shelley than her, and she never does much about it either way. Her relationship with Frank is founded on a deception that never seems to come to much. Her past life is laid out by the police detective but has no baring on the plot whatsoever.
This failure to provide a motivation comes into sharp relief at the second attempted rape scene.
The first attempted rape comes when The Bride is newly reanimated on a night out with Frank. Two thugs from a nightclub who have been getting handsy on the dancefloor, thinking Franks entirely ineffectual, try to have their way with her, and Frank looses his temper and kills them both. This is good, Frank has been a bit ineffectual and diffident so far so it's great to see him stomp some people and demonstrate his feelings for The Bride, and more importantly it's the inciting incident that forces the pair together and sends them on the run.
The second attempted rape comes much later when the pair are stopped by a creepy traffic cop. Ahha! The audience thinks, he's gonna get it - he doesn't know she's a real monster. But instead she submits to his groping (the dead Mary Shelley even berates her for being so passive in the worst Signal From Fred I think I've ever seen) until eventually Frank steps in and shoots the cop.
It is exactly the same scene nearly an hour later in the film. The Bride, as a character, has gone precisely nowhere.
Frankenstein the book, I think, does not work because Mary Shelley cannot write a realistic character for toffee. Her prose style is great (there is a description of glacier that I adore) but her heroes are whiny fops, the people around them hollow shells, and only the creature appears to have an actual motivation and journey.
Frankenstein the movie, I think, works because Del Toro has a clear story he wants to tell and adapts freely in service of that story. That he excises so much of the book I disliked is because there was so little there to begin with. He can change Victor's motivations without ruining anything because Victor's motivations in the book are so damn ridiculous. He can give Elizabeth new desires and interests because she had none in the book whatsoever.
The Bride, I think, does not work because nobody bothered to come up with a story at all. It is just a polemic hung on some fun ideas. Many of the individual scenes are great, but they are in service of nothing.
