Now, if you are queer, and a fan of any mainstream media property,
there are a few facts that practically run through your DNA: 1) You will
almost never see yourself represented in your fandom, 2) If you do, it
will be subtext only, and 3) On the off chance that a character is
canonically gay, he or she will likely be a) evil, b) crazy, or c)
killed off right after achieving happy coupledom. The latter seems to
happen most often to queer female characters. So much so that it has a
name “The Dead-Lesbian Trope.” Essentially, the message is, gay sex is
punishable by death, and queer couples can never be happy.
Sadly, all of us queer viewers are so happy to get any kind
of representation, we will watch anything with queer (or even
potentially queer) characters in it, even though we know we’re going to
see ourselves brutally killed onscreen sooner or later, and odds of our
character ever being happy are slim to none. But we watch anyway, hoping
that this time it will be different. This has a name too:
queerbaiting, a.k.a. luring a queer viewership to your show to make it seem
progressive, and hinting at a pairing that either never happens, or one
of the characters is killed.
However, The 100 was different. They had given us a queer
lead character in Clarke Griffin [played by Eliza Taylor] and did not appear to shy away from the
notoriety it got the show. Tiny snippets of footage from Season 3
appeared to confirm that because we saw Clarke in bed with someone
female, though apparently not Lexa as far as we could tell. Jason Rothenberg, the show runner, told us to trust him. He knew about the
Dead-Lesbian Trope and would not screw us over this time. Everything we
learned about Season 3 gave us hope. Excitement in the fandom grew to a
fever pitch, the more scenes that were released.
And the first episode was no disappointment. Clarke had a brief tryst
with Niylah [Jessica Harmon] while she was out wandering the woods trying to come to
terms with what she had to do to defeat Mt. Weather at the end of Season
2. Contrary to what some folks first believed would be the reaction, we
cheered her on even though it wasn’t Lexa. Here it was, our lead on a
mainstream series, fully, 100% confirmed to be decidedly,
unquestionably queer. This is it, we thought. Our day has come. Our
day has come when we get the lead relationship treatment reserved for a
hetero pairing 99.99% of the time. This is when everything changes.
And indeed, nothing indicated otherwise in the following episodes.
Clarke and Lexa have an explosive reunion, but we begin to see them work
their way back towards each other, both personally and politically. And
then came the Fealty Scene. Nothing had ever prepared us for the pure
romance that was that scene. Indeed, I think I even joked on this blog
that, “I have seen the entire L-Word series, and I have never seen anything that gay happen on television.” The writers GOT IT. There
was something pure in that scene, something that spoke of a complete
understanding of what it’s like to be in a female same-sex couple. I
personally identified with the level of devotion acted so perfectly by
[Alycia Debnam-Carey] as Lexa.
We rested easy after that. But we really shouldn’t have.
So here’s the nitty-gritty: The character
who died [on The 100], Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey), happened to be one of the few
well-developed and complex lesbians on TV, and it’s an unfortunate but
enduring TV cliche that lesbians rarely, if ever, live happily ever
after. In the March 3 [2016] episode, The 100, which had touted its
commitment to quality LGBTQ storytelling, invoked one of TV’s oldest gay
cliches by killing her off mere seconds after she consummated her
relationship with another woman, Clarke (Eliza Taylor).
Many fans, regardless of sexual orientation, were left shaking their heads in disbelief.
On a story and thematic level, Lexa’s
death (despite being well-performed by the actors) had little resonance
and almost no meaning. But all things considered, the blithe
manipulation LGBTQ fans and the show’s willingness to deploy harmful
cliches about gay characters remain the things that rankle most.
Was my list of “10 Favorite Films” too art-housey for you?Okay, to make up for it, here is a list of twelve movies whose carefully honed, audience-tested appeal has won a place in the sprocket holes of my heart, oldest to youngest:
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934)
With crackling dialogue and a sure-footed storyline, the film that defined the romantic comedy.
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935) The Marx Brothers rein in their explosive anarchy to appeal to a wider audience, but the results are still sublime.
CASABLANCA (1943)
Made in 1942 but officially released in January 1943, it won the latter year’s Oscar for Best Picture. Hollywood’s studio-era apotheosis.
SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)
Epic. Action-packed. Awesome.
THE APARTMENT (1960)
Silver-screen Hollywood craftsmanship at its heartwarming best. (Listen to the DVD’s commentary by Bruce Block to realize just how much thought and care went into this film.)
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965)
Shoot-’em-up excitement with an art-house edge.
THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
The Seven Samurai (or at least their cowboy counterparts) saunter south of the border.
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)
The funniest film I’ve ever seen. No joke.
MAD MAX 2 (a.k.a. The Road Warrior, 1981)
Casablanca with a case of road rage.
OUT OF SIGHT (1998) Steven Soderbergh rebounds from his mid-career doldrums to capture Elmore Leonard’s semi-cynical, semi-sentimental romantic roundelay between a U.S. marshal and an escaped con. Exhilarating and arresting.
SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)
Stop saying that Saving Private Ryan was robbed of its Oscar! Shakespeare in Love is a compelling, character-driven masterwork with lots of laughs and an air-tight story. Methinks its critics protest too much.
KING KONG (2005)
Peter Jackson’s Kong-sized do-over of the 1933 classic is going to give CGI-heavy remakes of pre-sold properties a good name. (However, the film’s brief portrayal of the Skull Island natives as barbaric savages is a big step backwards.)
I have a
female friend who’s a big Sean Connery fan.When we first met, she seemed to come up with an excuse to
bring up the movie star most associated with playing secret agent James Bond 007 in each of our conversations.Sean Connery this — Sean Connery that — Sean Connery the other
thing.She talks about him less
these days, but shortly after we first met, I’m sure the Scottish movie star’s
ears were ringing whenever my friend and I shot the breeze.One evening, she was hosting a James
Bond-themed event at a local restaurant.I ended up sitting at a table with my friend and some of her
companions.That night, one of my
friend’s friends asked me a question that my friend herself had never asked:
“Who’s your favorite Bond?”I
replied, “Timothy Dalton.”My
friend did a double take at the table: “Whuh?”She probably just assumed that Connery was everybody’s
favorite 007 and was thrown for a loop when I — her sounding board on all
things Connery — proved her assumption to be untrue.
At the
time, I was aware that my pro-Dalton opinion was in the distinct minority. I’m not the world’s biggest Bond fan,
but I did see most of the movies and follow the literature about the character
from time to time, so I know it wasn’t long after Dalton inherited the role
from Roger Moore in 1987’s The Living Daylights that many Bond aficionados
started grousing about the Welsh actor’s performance. Among ardent fans, the vituperation was especially venomous,
but it was never really clear to me exactly why these fans were so upset. I got the idea that these grumblers
merely thought that Dalton’s inadequacy in the role was self-evident and no
further explanation was needed.
Dalton made only one more film as Bond, Licence [sic] to Kill (1989), but the criticism
continued. As the years went by,
this opinion seemed to be set in stone: the fans liked Roger Moore; they liked
Pierce Brosnan; they loved Sean Connery, of course. You could even find a few to put in a good word for the
one-off George Lazenby. But they
hated Timothy Dalton. And I wasn’t given a straight answer as to why. It’s difficult to find any of the scathing anti-Dalton diatribes of the 1980s on the Web at the moment, but as one Internet poster puts it: “All I’ve ever heard from friends ... is that [The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill] are lesser Bond films and that Dalton sucks.”
With the
latest Bond adventure, Spectre, now in theatres, I was contemplating writing a defense
of Dalton-as-007 on this blog. But
as I read over some on-line articles in preparation, I learned that my
disquisition of Dalton was no longer necessary: Dalton-as-Bond now has quite a
few advocates on the Internet. It
appears that several fans have reconsidered Dalton’s two outings as Bond and
found more to championthan to criticize.
Timothy Dalton as James Bond 007 in ‘The Living Daylights’ (1987)
Looking for
an explanation of this reversal of popular opinion, I stumbled upon this
theory: Dalton inherited the role from Roger Moore, who played the secret agent
as a semi-comical figure. Moore’s
penchant for dryly raising an eyebrow each time he heard a double entendre became a signature of the film
series. The only Moore Bond that I
really liked — indeed, my favorite film in the series up to that time — was For Your Eyes Only
(1981), which had a more serious plot than usual and a more feral performance
by Moore than usual. But by the
time Moore retired from the role after A View to a Kill (1985), the Bond movies were
noted more for their camp than their cloak and dagger.
Behind
the scenes, it’s well known that Dalton was first offered the role of Bond in On
Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), but the actor, then in his twenties, felt himself
too young for the part and turned it down, whereupon it was later offered to
Lazenby. Also, after Moore’s
departure, the creators’ first choice as his replacement was Pierce Brosnan,
who by then had made a name for himself in the humorous detective TV series Remington
Steele (1982-87),
but at the last minute, the show activated an option on Brosnan’s contract,
making him unavailable to play Bond.
With Brosnan out of the picture, in both senses of the term, Dalton was
persuaded to accept the part he declined 18 years before.
Poster for ‘Licence to Kill’ (1989)
When
Dalton took over the role of Bond, he and the films’ creators wanted to return
to a more serious interpretation of the character:
[Dalton]
made two Bond films, both noteworthy more for his darker, brooding take on the
role than for the films themselves. Dalton sought to get away from Moore’s
jokey boulevardier and instead played Bond as a man with an edge, an
interpretation he felt was closer to how author Ian Fleming had depicted the
character in the books. Indeed, Dalton was often spotted on the sets of his 007
films paging through the original Fleming novels as a reference aid.
The
audience’s ill-preparedness for this darker view of James Bond, it’s been
hypothesized, alienated many Roger Moore-weaned fans from Dalton’s version of
the character. Only more recently,
with Daniel Craig’s similar approach to the part, has Dalton’s work been reappraised
and accepted by a large number of Bond fans. And many are now voicing the opinion that I have held for
quite some time: it’s unfortunate that Dalton — due to a legal dispute that
forced the series into a hiatus until his contract expired — didn’t do more than
two films as 007. As one writer says
of the fans’ new acceptance of Dalton as James Bond:
The
quiet, self-effacing actor … has always kept his private life away from the
tabloids, has always been loyal to the Bond franchise … without surrendering
himself to endless retrospective chat shows and conventions. And perhaps as a
result, people are finally beginning to appreciate his two Bond films for the
stylish, underrated thrillers they have always been.
Dalton
and the filmmakers didn’t only want to revise Bond’s character; they also
wanted to tweak other aspects of the franchise. The actor’s second entry, Licence to Kill, is a good case in point. Where most of James Bond’s previous
villains had been cartoonish characters with an eye toward world domination, Licence
to Kill put 007
up against a topical nemesis: a drug lord, Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi), who
already controls his own corner of the world and is bent on keeping it. This was a wise choice since the Cold
War was winding down in 1989, so Bond’s antagonists sympathetic to the Soviet
Union wouldn’t be as threatening as in years past. And in moving the milieu from a conflict losing its menace
to one ripped from the headlines, Licence to Kill made the story’s environment more
realistic and hardened the characters.
Robert Davi as drug lord Franz Sanchez in ‘Licence to Kill’
The film
diverged from the formula in other ways as well. Where Bond movies had previously tended to be set in at
least two different countries on two different continents, all of Licence to
Kill is set in
the same area: south Florida and northern Latin America. (In the movie’s biggest false note, it
gives its fictional Latin American banana republic the English name of
“Isthmus.”) Instead of Licence
to Kill having
Bond given his assignment by M, 007 goes rogue to avenge a friend, supplying
the agent with a more rebellious bite.
And instead of the villain’s palatial lair exploding in a massive
fireball at the story’s climax, what detonates is a gas tanker after a
high-speed chase.
But Licence
to Kill subverts
still more. As the most casual
observer of the film canon knows, an obligatory moment of each movie is when
007 announces himself to someone as “Bond — James Bond.” In the previous Bond
films, the scene consistently comes across as a moment of confident coolness,
an eagerly awaited announcement that our unflappable, invincible hero has
arrived. The moment in the series isn’t so much the character introducing
himself as it is a moment of dauntless self-declaration. (Do I really need to
say anything about how entrenched these three words of film dialogue have
become in our popular culture?)
But when Dalton says this ultra-important line in License to Kill, it’s during an anomalous moment:
when he extends his hand in introduction to Sanchez. In Licence to Kill, Bond isn't so much announcing the arrival of the hero to
the audience as he is merely making the bad guy’s acquaintance. And then,
Sanchez blows off Bond by refusing to shake his hand.
In the
other movies, “Bond — James Bond” are strong words of self-assertion. In Licence
to Kill, they’re
convivial words preceding a snub. I think that the Bond fans in 1989 were
looking forward to this line in the film, but they didn’t get the moment that
they had expected. These sorts of
small deviations from the previous Bond films may have put off the
contemporaneous fans even more from Dalton’s interpretation of the secret
agent.
But I’m
glad to hear that many Bond fans are now revising their harsh opinions of
Dalton’s work in the film series, so any further inarticulate advocacy from me
is unnecessary. Although Dalton
only appeared in two movies as James Bond, those offerings, The Living
Daylights and Licence
to Kill, remain
among the best in the series, despite the latter’s underperformance at the box
office. However, Daniel Craig’s
newer rendition of Bond has taken the venerated cinema cycle to a whole new
level. Craig’s films as Bond — Casino
Royale (2006), Quantum
of Solace (2008),
Skyfall
(2012), and now Spectre (2015) — have dazzlingly ratcheted up the action, the spectacle,
the humanity, and the overall impact of what is on the screen. Craig’s 007 efforts will be the new
measure for future films in the franchise. Still, we should spare a thought for the Bond actor who
tried to do what Daniel Craig is now doing, but who was at first pilloried by
the fans for it: Timothy Dalton.
Coda: When I first saw Licence to Kill, I couldn’t get past it as a First World-Third World allegory, Latin American politics in microcosm. The country of Isthmus seemed to be a struggling South American republic trying to find its own footing economically, leaving a vacuum for a drug baron like Sanchez to fill and to come into power. The teaming up of a group of white people — Bond, his thrown-together partner in stealth Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell, one of that film’s “Bond girls”), and gadget-master Q (Desmond Llewelyn) — to defeat a mostly Latin American organization played out as white imperial domination over people of color in a way that was hard for me to ignore. It took a couple more viewings for me to get past its racial politics and appreciate Licence to Kill as an action movie. I suppose that giving Sanchez the first name “Franz” was the film’s way of saying the character was partially white, so that the audience didn’t have to view the conflict as between a white man and an exclusively brown man (albeit while playing on Britain’s skepticism of Germany since World War II). As an actioner, Licence to Kill is thrilling and visceral in a way few pre-Craig Bond films are, but the movie never completely sheds a pungent air of Western superiority that one can imagine comforting to an adherent of white exceptionalism.
On a less serious note, I never really bought Carey Lowell’s performance as the street-smart, weapon-wielding Pam Bouvier. She comes across as a smooth-skinned resident of the suburbs plopped into a rough-and-tumble setting. It would have been more believable if Licence to Kill had cast a performer with more of a seen-it-all edge to her, someone you could believe knew how to handle a gun and how to get herself out of tight situations. And Wayne Newton’s appearance as a tacky TV preacher who helps Sanchez sell his narcotics burdens the story with an out-of-left-field campiness that doesn’t really fit with the rest of the film. Otherwise, Licence to Kill satisfies as a serious-minded, punch-packing action movie that seems worlds away from the jauntiness of Roger Moore’s 007.
As I’ve
said several times before, limiting my remarks to the mainstream U.S. entertainment industry: Due to a historical lack of opportunities for
minority thespians, characters of color ought to be portrayed by actors of
color, ideally actors who are the same race (although not necessarily the same ethnicity) as the roles they play.It’s unfortunate that some people
refuse to see this issue in a historical perspective and insist that
reserving non-white roles for non-white performers is unreasonable racial territorialism that goes against the make-believe at the heart of
storytelling.But they are wrong,
and making certain that minority characters are played by minority thespians —
at least for the time being — redresses past discrimination and past
invisibility in the entertainment industry.This is an issue that I feel very strongly about.
At the
same time, I wouldn’t set that standard in stone as a hard-and-fast “rule” that must never be contravened. Aside from such a “rule” probably being an unconstitutional infringement on free speech, there may be things to be gained
by casting a character of color (or one ostensibly so) with a Caucasian
performer. However, I believe that
exceptions to this rule would be few and far between.
For
example, in 1997 and again in 2013, English actor Patrick Stewart essayed
Othello in two U.S. touring productions of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. However, where previous white
interpreters of the Moor would use cosmetics to darken their features, Stewart
played the part without such maquillage, and the rest of the cast, playing
historically white characters, was all African American. In other words, Stewart’s productions of Othello flipped the racial composition of the play from a black man among whites to a white man among blacks, allowing the audience to view the racial dynamics of the work from a different perspective. That was a rare example of a Caucasian
actor taking a lead “minority” role in a production while still giving uncommon
opportunities to performers of color and making the issue of race a prominent
one in the project’s execution. There
aren’t very many other exceptions to reserving non-white roles for non-white actors that I would find agreeable, but I can think of one more.
If a
character of color in an adapted work from the past is so racially stereotyped
as to be offensive to modern-day audiences — and it would be logical in
the work for this character to be white — then rewriting such a dramatis
persona as
Caucasian and casting the role with a Caucasian actor would be acceptable to
me, at least in theory. However, it might then be suitable to relocate a non-offensive racial diversity elsewhere in the work.
This
brings us to Joe Wright’s recently released film Pan (2015), a prequel and origin story
to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, first performed as a play in 1904. While I haven’t seen Pan, a controversy has been brewing
for the past year because the film cast Euro-American actress Rooney Mara as
Tiger Lily, a character usually portrayed as Native American. This understandably provoked criticism from
Native Americans and their supporters that the character should be played by an
actress of authentically aboriginal American ancestry. I more than appreciate this stance: a rare high-profile opportunity for a Native American performer was once again taken
away.
But — as
is often asked in such circumstances — is that high-profile role worth
playing? After all, the
pidgin-speaking damsel in distress that is Peter Pan’s Tiger Lily is dismaying (at the
very least) to modern sensibilities and would clearly be regarded as an archaic
stereotype. In the original source
material, Tiger Lily and her “tribe” are never explicitly identified as Native
American, although most productions have portrayed them as such. As an article for Smithsonian magazine
says:
In the
play, Peter refers to the tribe as “piccaninny warriors,” and in Peter &
Wendy (Barrie's
book-long adaptation of the story, published in 1911), they are introduced as
the “Piccaninny tribe” — a blanket stand-in for “others” of all stripes, from
Aboriginal populations in Australia to descendants of slaves in the United
States. Barrie's tribespeople communicate in pidgin; the braves have lines like
“Ugh, ugh, wah!” Tiger Lily is
slightly more loquacious; she'll say things like “Peter Pan save me, me his
velly nice friend. Me no let pirates hurt him.” They call Peter “the great
white father” — the name that Barrie had originally chosen for the entire play.
A tom-tom pounded in victory is a key plot point.
So, an
adaptation of Peter Pan would certainly want to rewrite this character, who is integral to
the story, to be less of a stereotype.
But if you’re going to rewrite a racist caricature, why make her and the
tribe Native American in the first place? While Peter Pan is not something that I have ever over-analyzed, I have sometimes wondered why Tiger Lily and her people are in the story’s fictional realm at
all. Here’s how one Native
American website puts it:
While
casting a white actress as an Indian character [in Pan] is a familiar kind of
disappointing, some folks who are trying to read the tea leaves are seeing
something else — a revamped Tiger Lily who isn’t Native American at all. This
would be a departure from J.M. Barrie’s source material, but maybe not such a
radical one. Peter Pan’s Indians, after all, do not live [in North America]; they live in
“Neverland,” and there is no real reason why they are Indians. And in J.M.
Barrie's original play (but not the movie), they are said to be of the
“Pickaninny Tribe,” which adds an anti-African American slur to the anti-Native
“redskin” caricature. It’s a blurring that suggests Barrie didn't really care
whether he was writing about Indians, or Africans, or African Indians or Indian
Africans — he simply wanted a handy caricature and exotic other that might show
up in the dreams of white English kids circa 1904.
I hear
that Pan director Wright has crafted a character who is not a damsel in distress
but a butt-kicking feminist role model.
Furthermore, I understand that Wright has cast both Tiger Lily’s tribe
and the Lost Boys with a multi-racial ensemble, so performers of color aren’t
being entirely snubbed.
Given how
egregiously racist the portrayals of Tiger Lily and her tribe have been from
the get-go, I can certainly understand Wright’s going in the other direction
and creating a character who, in and of herself, could not be accused of being
a racial stereotype and could not be accused of promoting racism (with the
arguable exception of extradiegetically erasing a prominent character of color
by doing so). There’s no real
logic to the Indians being in the fictional realm of Neverland in the first place. If the story were actually set in North
America, I’d probably feel differently, but the setting is largely one drawn
entirely from Barrie’s imagination, so why not? This seems to be the reason why Pan reportedly does not make Tiger Lily and her people Native American. While it makes Tiger Lily ostensibly white, it makes her
people multi-racial.
The musical ‘The Nightingale,’ based on Hans Christian Andersen’s China-set story, was staged at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2012 with a self-proclaimed “color-blind” cast.
Many will
disagree with me, and I understand their perspectives. For instance, some view compromised
minority representation as preferable to no minority representation at all, so to them, casting the
role of Tiger Lily with a white actress especially stings. But given how stereotyped the role has
been in the past, I equally understand Wright’s apparent desire to make a 180º
turn, race-wise. (Some, no doubt,
will say that even if Tiger Lily in Pan had been played by a Native American actress, critics would still have
found fault with her portrayal.)
Others might see an inconsistency between my position here and my
preference for seeing the China-set musical The Nightingale (2012) with an all-Asian cast; instead, as its publicity said, the musical was cast “color-blind” (in the words of one critic, “white men and women of color”) because
its creators saw its Asian setting as more of a China as it existed in the 19th-century European imagination than the non-fictional China. But at least China is an actual place
inhabited by actual Chinese people, something that The Nightingale ought to have reflected. Peter Pan’s Neverland, by contrast, is not a
genuine geographical entity.
If I were
ever in charge of a production of Peter Pan (which I don’t plan to be anytime
soon), I would have gone further in the other direction by making Tiger Lily
and all her people a visibly European (Celtic?) tribe and made up for this
erasure of diversity by casting the Lost Boys as multi-racial. That way, there would be no accusations
of racially stereotyping Tiger Lily and her people, while I would still
maintain a racially pluralistic cast.
Oh,
well. Those are my thoughts on the
subject of the casting of Joe Wright’s Pan. What
are yours?
Kenneth Branagh as Dr. Frankenstein (left) and Robert De Niro as the Monster in ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’
Last
October, to help everyone get in the mood for the holiday, I wrote a Halloween-themed post about my favorite horror film, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961). This year, I thought that I would write another about — all
things considered — my least favorite horror film. Although I’m sure that I could find other would-be
chillers that are more wanting in subject matter and/or craftsmanship, the
film that I would like to write about is, given the talent and resources
lavished on it, perhaps the biggest missed opportunity in the history of
cinema. The name of this
monstrosity more horrifying in execution than intention? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), directed by Kenneth Branagh.
Director-star Kenneth Branagh as Dr. Victor Frankenstein
Adapting Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic as a
follow-up to Francis Ford Coppola’s very successful Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992 — which one critic dubbed
the most expensive high-school play in history), Branagh’s Frankenstein boasts a large budget and a very
talented cast, not the least of whom is Robert De Niro in the role of the
Monster. Since many adaptations of
the Shelley novel show no fidelity to its period or setting (at least two
productions transplanted the story to Britain), I was very pleased to see
Branagh’s film fixed firmly in the late 18th century (the period of
the Enlightenment) and Dr. Frankenstein’s status as an outsider by making him a
Swiss national (Shelley’s novel was famously written in Switzerland) studying
in nationalistic Ingolstadt, Germany. For buffs
of German literature, Friedrich Schiller even makes a cameo appearance
(although the real Schiller was probably nowhere near Ingolstadt at the
time).
With
sumptuous costumes evoking the late 18th century and a very
accomplished cast, Branagh’s film had a lot going for it. Unfortunately, he chooses to emphasize
the melodramatic aspects of the novel with breakneck pacing, shovel-on-the-head
dialogue, and a constantly swirling soundtrack that hardly ever lets up. In fact, Branagh’s Frankenstein is almost wall-to-wall music, as
though the filmmaker feared that any let-up in the orchestral score would put
the audience to sleep. (The first time I
first saw this Frankenstein at the Writers’ Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, when the
composer’s name, the otherwise distinguished Patrick Doyle, appeared on the
screen, the audience broke out into jeers — the only time I’ve ever known that
to happen to a composer.)
Robert De Niro as the Monster
Actor-director
Branagh himself plays Dr. Victor Frankenstein, which may have had something to
do with his not being able to view the project from a more comprehensive
distance. De Niro’s Monster looks
more like a badly scarred human rather than anything especially frightening, so
we’re less understanding of the townspeople’s horrific reactions to him. It would have been appreciated had
there been some other element to his appearance (such as his flat head in the
Boris Karloff movies for Universal Pictures) to make the Monster more … well … monstrous.
Branagh’s
Frankenstein
rushes from one plot point to the next in an apparent effort to cram all of its
material into the movie without running overtime. There’s little sense of the film pausing long enough to
allow the viewer (or even the characters) to absorb the proceedings. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of those rare films that
might have actually been better had it been longer (and less melodramatic) and given more time for its
narrative to unfold.
Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth, Dr. Frankenstein’s betrothed (apparently, someone got tired of the film’s bombastic dialogue)
And to
top it all off, the script — by Steph Lady and The Shawshank Redemption’s Frank Darabont — wallops the
viewer with spell-it-out-for-you dialogue that leaves no doubt about the
characters’ actions and incitements.
Here, Victor Frankenstein is given a mother who dies in childbirth to
spur his experiments to prolong life indefinitely. One scene
has Victor laying flowers on his mother’s grave, saying, “Oh, Mother, you should
never have died. No one need ever
die. I will stop this. I will stop
this. I promise” — lest we have any doubt what his driving
force is. The scene might as well have had a sign light up in the background saying
“CHARACTER’S MOTIVATION.”
To watch
Branagh’s Frankenstein is also to wonder how such a richly pedigreed film got so much
wrong. Rather than playing up the
melodrama, I wish that the movie had gone in the other direction and observed
its goings-on with a Kubrickian sense of detail and understatement. The scene of Victor at his mother’s
grave needed no dialogue, and I think that the scene could have been more
rewarding by allowing the viewers to put Victor’s (rather obvious) motivation together for
themselves.
John Cleese as Dr. Robert Waldman
The only
real reason to watch Branagh’s Frankenstein — other than to luxuriate in the
production values and wish they were expended on a better movie — is to witness
Monty Python alum John Cleese in a rare dramatic turn, in this case in the role of Dr.
Robert Waldman, the titular scientist’s mentor. But even here, as good as it is to catch Cleese in anything, I would still like to have seen
an important supporting part like Dr. Waldman go to Christopher Lee as a
tribute to his role as the Monster in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), one of the first of
Hammer Films’s horror series from the 1950s through ’70s.
At the start, I called Branagh’s Frankenstein my least favorite horror film.
Where other misfires of the genre can sometimes make me laugh at their
inept attempts to frighten the viewer or at least make me appreciate the movie as an artifact of its time, Branagh’s film only makes me sad. As I watch such
lavishly costumed characters spouting hyperbolic dialogue written by scribes who have
proven their worth on other projects, I’m filled with a sense of sorrow for what
might have been.
