del Toro has one of the most impressive filmographies of any director currently working in Hollywood, and few other filmmakers in history have made so many lasting contributions to the sci fi, horror, and fantasy genres: Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, The Shape of Water, I can go on.
Frankenstein has long been a dream project of del Toro's. I remember when it was announced in 2007 with plans to star del Toro regular and go-to man in the creature suit Doug Jones. del Toro's films demonstrate a keen understanding of monsters, tragedy, the evil of men, and both the beauty and horror of the Gothic that del Toro and Frankenstein, on paper, is a match made in Heaven.
I won't go as far as to say the new movie is a letdown. It's gorgeous to look at, so intricately and loving designed from the sets and costumes to the makeup and special effects. The actors give strong, committed performances, especially Jacob Elordi as the Creature, who makes me forget my disappointment that Doug Jones did not play the part. And the film has a vitality, a spark of life if you will, as it balances horror, action, drama, sci fi, and romance.
But maybe because it comes from del Toro, I expected something stronger. The plot is mostly faithful to Mary Shelley's original novel (with some references to other adaptations), but with the changes he does make, del Toro sets up some pretty out-there, unexpected directions he could have taken the story, angles that would have pushed the movie into its own category and really helped it stand out from other versions of this classic tale.
But del Toro seems conflicted, torn between fidelity to the source material and his own ideas about what he can do with it. Ultimately, he ends up delivering the kind of narrative one expects from a Frankenstein movie. From another filmmaker, this effort would suffice, but from someone with del Toro's talent and passion, one can't help but feel this is a missed opportunity.
In the Arctic, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) relates to a sea captain how he was driven to create life and conquer death. Stitching together body parts collected from corpses, he constructs a Creature (Elordi) that ultimately fails to live up to his expectations, and Victor rejects him. But the Creature does not stay gone long. It returns with knowledge of its creation in its brain and vengeance in its heart, spelling doom for Victor, his family, and Elizabeth (Mia Goth), the woman he loves.
del Toro throws in a few new elements. For starters, Elizabeth in the novel and elsewhere is Victor's betrothed. Here, she's engaged to his brother William (Felix Kammerer), himself a child in the novel (and the creature's first victim on the page) but now a grown man, living a successful life in finance.
We also get Christoph Waltz as Henrich Harlander, a weapons manufacturer (and Elizabeth's uncle) who bankrolls Victor's experiments for initially hidden reasons. He also, at a critical moment, informs Victor of an upcoming battle, leading to a scene where Victor and his assistants harvest body parts from the fallen soldiers. Waltz's role is relatively small but critical, and he provides a plausible explanation for how Victor gets the resources and money he needs to raise the dead.
As expected, del Toro gives us the gruesome and makes it, in its own elegant way, beautiful. The period details and costumes and lush. Victor's experiments are hideous and bloody, but they're so intricately designed and staged, it's hard to look away and not admire the craftsmanship. Some of Victor's early experiments involving split-open corpses and the like are repulsive but have the exquisite care and touch of a painting.
It's a good thing del Toro gives us these experiments as well as a flashback structure that allows the movie to open with a monster rampage in the frozen tundra because the narrative takes a long time to get to the creature's creation. We spend a good amount of time in Victor's childhood, where he adores his mother (Mia Goth, again) who dies in childbirth and fears and resents his physician father (Charles Dance).
The older Frankenstein is a cold and demanding patriarch, lecturing young Victor about his duties and whipping his face when he doesn't know the correct answer. Later, we see Victor treat his own creation in a similarly callous, demanding, and heartless manner. Ultimately, Victor falls in love with a woman played by the same actress as his mother and overtly recreates the same abuse and trauma he experienced from his father. William also tells Victor to his face that he is the monster in case anyone thought this movie was subtle.
The creature experiences kindness elsewhere. As in other versions, he encounters a blind man in the wilderness who treats him as a friend and teaches him about the world before tragedy strikes. The other person to treat the creature kindly is Elizabeth. She approaches the creature, chained in the bowels of the laboratory, out of curiosity and is appalled at Victor's treatment of his creation.
This new Frankenstein feels overstuffed. So much backstory and psychological motivation to explore that the relationship between the doctor and his creation feels shortchanged. After Victor rejects the creature, they don't have much interaction again until the end; their conflict does not feel like the epic or titanic struggle between longtime enemies that the early Arctic scenes suggest it should be. Their relationship feels truncated, squeezed in the end, to make room for all the other stuff.
Is the new Frankenstein worth seeing? Sure. There's a lot to like and admire about the movie. But with del Toro at the helm, I want to love it.
No comments:
Post a Comment