In Review: ‘The Bride!,’ ‘Hoppers’

The Bride!
Dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal
126 min.

In its first moments, The Bride!, writer and director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s riff on The Bride of Frankenstein and all things Frankenstein-related, establishes an ill-advised but undeniably audacious conceit. Speaking from what appears to be limbo, Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) rants about a story she cannot let go, a follow-up to Frankenstein that would allow her to say what she really wanted to say, not the compromised novel she wrote within the restrictions of her time. This, it would seem, is The Bride!, the very film we are watching. Forget that musty old Frankenstein, with its stale tale of what happens when humanity attempts to usurp the role of God. It’s time, at last, for some uncut Mary Shelley.

Within the world of the film, The Bride! is also the narrative Shelley wills into the world by invading the brain of Ida (also Buckley), a gangland moll in 1936 Chicago who becomes a woman possessed by Shelley’s spirit, switching between her own voice and Shelley’s (which sounds distractingly similar to Martin Short’s impression of Katharine Hepburn) as she rants about, among other matters, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” before being killed by goons in the employ of a vicious mob capo. But, hey, that’s OK. Frankenstein’s monster (a winningly gentle Christian Bale) has just rolled into town to seek the help of Dr. ​​Euphronious (Annette Bening), a scientist who has attempted to build on Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments in bringing the dead back to life, to seek help finding a bride. One late-night grave-digging session later and Ida’s back on her feet, albeit unable to remember her name or anything about her past.

Then, well, a lot happens. “Frank” cautiously starts to woo his high-spirited, seemingly untameable bride he comes to call “Penelope” and, unlike Boris Karloff’s creature in The Bride of Frankenstein, finds she might be receptive to his advances. After Frank kills a pair of would-be assailants outside an underground nightclub, they find themselves on the lam, pursued by Chicago police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Jake’s assistant Myrna (Penelope Cruz), the real brains behind his investigations. Their best clue: Frank’s fixated on a Fred Astaire-like performer named Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal) and may have traveled to New York in hopes of meeting him (or at least seeing more Ronnie Reed movies).

Shortly after her return from the dead, The Bride/Ida/Penelope spews some black goop, leaving a stain on her face that looks like a detail from a Jackson Pollock painting. The Bride! is a lot like that stain: It’s bold and dynamic but ultimately only bold and dynamic. The film’s visually striking, from the costumes to the recreations of the era. Buckley plays her dual (triple?) role with so much full-bodied gusto that it takes about half the film’s running time to realize that we know virtually about the internal life of The Bride, her life and her desires. (The same can be said of Mary Shelley.) This might be part of the point, were The Bride on some kind of clear journey of discovery, but any character development gets lost amidst a sea of references that include everything from Bonnie and Clyde to Young Frankenstein. The movie may be named after her (with an exclamation point to drive the point home), but it’s not ultimately about her.

Which isn’t to suggest that Gyllenhaal isn’t trying to say something by revisiting Shelley’s classic novel and the world of 1930s Hollywood movies. She’s trying to say a lot. The Bride becomes a kind of proto-punk (think Nancy Spungen, but healthier despite being dead) and feminist pioneer, inspiring even Det. Wiles to consider the limited opportunities available to women. Gyllenhaal is also clearly determined to make the most of the big canvas she’s been given, throwing in everything from dance sequences to shootouts as the couple make their way from one scenic location to the next. Drunk on its own ambitions and the permission to go as big as possible, The Bride! is seldom cohesive (and occasionally incoherent) but it’s also rarely boring, the sort of noble failure that’s more compelling to watch and discuss than a lesser success. It’s rare that a filmmaker gets to make their Megalopolis with just their second film. Let that be a warning or an enticement. —Keith Phipps

The Bride! sparks to life nationwide in theaters tonight.

Hoppers
Dir. Daniel Chong
105 min.

There’s a moment early in the latest Pixar disappointment, Hoppers, where young Mabel, a little girl in trouble for liberating all the caged animals in her elementary school, get dropped off at her grandma’s house in the country to cool off. Her grandma takes her hand, guides her to the top of a rock overlooking a pond, and advises her to stay quiet and listen to the glen around her. Between the gentle rustling of the breeze and the chirps and chitters of the animals in and around the pond, this has a calming effect on Mabel that stays with her. From that moment on, especially after her grandma passes, she resolves to protect spaces like this from harm, which isn’t a goal that’s ultimately shared by the city government. Nature mustn’t stand in the way of progress. 

Mabel craves a return to that precious feeling of tranquility and so might we, given how many of Pixar’s finest moments, like the wordless opening stretch of WALL-E or the montage that recalls the arc of an entire relationship in Up, allow for a more delicate tone to defy the hectic pace of a typical computer-animated Hollywood film. But that era for Pixar is looking more distant in the rearview mirror, and Hoppers is yet another case of an original title that hasn’t been rigorously thought-through—not as flat and uninspired as Elemental or Elio, but somehow more disappointing, because the potential for something much better is plain. The quality control panel that seems to have served Pixar during its peak years seems to be permanently on the fritz. 

Directed by Daniel Chong, who also conceived the story, Hoppers gets off to a promising start, introducing Mabel (Piper Curda) as a righteous young rebel who grows into an animal activist in college and decides to take on the system. Her city’s wildly popular mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) has plenty of support for a plan to build a piece of highway to ease local commutes, but he’s had to wriggle around environmental laws about displacing wildlife. After the mayor succeeds through nefarious means to clear the habitat, Mabel futilely attempts to repopulate it by luring a beaver, a “keystone species,” to rebuild the ecosystem. Her plan gets an unexpected technological boost when she discovers her biology professor (Kathy Najimy) is experimenting in melding human consciousness with robotic animal avatars. And so, well, Mabel becomes a beaver. 

That’s a complicated sequence of events and it introduces a busyness and freneticism that mostly works against Hoppers. A promising early scene where the Mabel beaver tries to ingratiate herself with a handful of pond animals, including the sweet beaver monarch King George (Bobby Moynihan), gives a taste of what the film might have been if it were more modest and character-driven. While the relationship between Mabel and George grows into a touching and meaningful interspecies bond, Hoppers pushes forward with excessive world-building, bringing in an entire counsel representatives from the animal kingdom, all in preparation for a battle royale against Jerry and his developers. Chong seems to intend for an escalating series of comic events that get more giddily absurd as it approaches the climax, but the film loses its soul in the process. Hoppers longs for the quiet beatitude of nature, but it’s just another noisemaker. —Scott Tobias

Hoppers scurries into theaters tonight.

Also in theaters:

Crime 101
Dreams
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
How to Make a Killing
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
Pillion
Scream 7
"Wuthering Heights"