Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a riot grrrl manifesto comedy.
Actress and wannabe cineaste Maggie Gyllenhaal confuses her feminist motivation with artistic creativity. In her script and direction of the horror-comedy The Bride!, she rips off Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s original Frankenstein, from 1818, and reduces it into a trivial, Gen-Z girl-power/riot grrrl manifesto.
Gyllenhaal’s illogical conceit introduces Wollstonecraft Shelley (played by Jessie Buckley) as a boozed-up, teary-eyed slattern regretting her novel written “on a dare,” then bequeathing its vengeful content to all angry, misunderstood women of the future. Cut to 20th-century harpy Ida (also played by Buckley) vomiting out her bisexual frustrations to a group of 1930s Chicago carousers, focusing her rage on a suspicious male gyno-gangsta (possibly the cause of her unspecified medical grievance). A henchman whacks the noisy broad down a staircase, killing her. This is prelude to the arrival of the undead monster Frankie (Christian Bale), who stalks the city for Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), a mad scientist specializing in reanimation who answers the monster’s request to pimp him a mate. (“I want an intercourse,” Bale pleads.) She exhumes Ida’s broken body, the ultimate victim of misogyny, and reinvigorates its anger.
The shock-to-comic tone of The Bride! shows Gyllenhaal’s pseudo-literary, pseudo-cinematic mash-up of Wollstonecraft Shelley with James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1931) and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974). It’s a calamitous mix of radical feminist studies, misandry, pop trash, and modish psychobabble. Crossing gothic mystery with horror-flick and film noir crime elements suggests Camille Paglia’s worst nightmare.
Instead of defining sexual personae or the antipodes of female and male private and social behavior, Buckley’s undead ragdoll Ida and Bale’s gruesomely stitched, stapled, and misshapen beast make for shrill stereotypes, unconvincing souls. (Although Bale’s thrall for black-and-white movies hints at an emotional delicacy that rivals Jacob Elordi’s version of the monster. More on Buckley’s monstrous performance below.)
Apparently, no one at Warner Bros. dared correct Gyllenhaal’s ludicrous ideas for fear of personally insulting her or stifling her perverse Barbie creativity, no matter how ludicrous. Despite the stylistic rampage indicated by the title’s exclamation point, The Bride! is just a petulant feminist’s rant. Gyllenhaal’s grand guignol posturing is that of an exploitation hack unaware that her sexual and violent extremes cheapen the history of female artists who weren’t lucky enough to live in the Me Too era.
It’s obvious that Gyllenhaal envied Emma Stone’s sex-toy portrayal in Poor Things, the Yorgos Lanthimos gyno-obscenity. She also must have seen both Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux and admired that franchise’s stupid audacity (a “daring” to match Wollstonecraft Shelley’s regret). While Gyllenhaal’s killers on the lam reject traditional society, she throws in several ribald set pieces — the couple commit their first murder (of two macho thugs) after communing with sexual deviants in a red-light district, then crash a movie star’s glitzy party (Jake Gyllenhaal made ghoulish) for an elaborately choreographed musical number — Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Were Gyllenhaal truly provocative, she would have used Morrissey’s “Kick the Bride Down the Aisle” for its bitter, stinging gender-role rebuke: “She just wants a slave / To break his back in pursuit of a living wage.”
The inconsistency of these two outré figures exposes the innate vanity of Gyllenhaal the actress. She encourages Buckley’s overacting, which takes Wollstonecraft Shelley/Ida from malicious to mindless. It’s a German Expressionist caricature that stretches into ugly absurdity (as are the attempts at Mel Brooksian farce by Bening and Jeannie Berlin, who plays servant Greta/Igor, and Penelope Cruz as an incomprehensible Latina).
Buckley’s corpse-pale face and black bee-stung lips that part to reveal a snaky, KISS-style black tongue match the unexplained ink-blot stain on her right cheek. Putting a Bauhaus and Weimar poster in an alley is a cheat, while invoking Marlene Dietrich and the song “Falling in Love Again,” from The Blue Angel , is an insult. (As a blonde, Buckley is more like Gwyneth Paltrow.) Her histrionics pay tribute to the current feminist idolization of Gena Rowland’s gyrations as a schizophrenic in A Woman Under the Influence (the naïve Millennial actress’s idea of “truth”).
The point of The Bride! is to justify the kind of feminist aggression that Hollywood libtards worship in anti-ICE activists. (This is not a stretch: The Bride! contains several gleeful cop killings.) Gyllenhaal perverts Ida/Wollstonecraft Shelley into an anachronism — a Millennial cadaver impersonating ’90s Madonna, but without performance rights to “Like a Prayer.”
Because Gyllenhaal’s notion of feminist freedom seems based solely on carnality, her milieu mixes in blacks and gay lowlifes. Her idea of sexual liberation demonstrates its opposite: Ida and Frankie trapped in crime and self-annihilation. And Ida’s climactic speech promising “insurrection, outbreak, coup” reveals a superficial topicality — celebrating social decline, not progress. The Halloween novelty song “Monster Mash” heard over the end credits while Antifa-like transgender feminists amass for murder rituals suggests the coda of Sinners. That’s the new decadent Warner Bros. formula. So much absurdity occurs in The Bride! that Gyllenhaal might as well have included bloopers. But then the entire film is a feminist blooper.
