Movie Review: The Bride!

As they did when they ran MGM pre-Amazon acquisition, Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca's tenure as the heads of Warner Brothers' film division has largely been defined by taking on projects that other executives wouldn't dare touch. One of their specialties is handing out hefty budgets to fund auteur passion projects and that very risky strategy has brought them huge commercial failures such as Horizon: An American Saga and Mickey 17 as well as legacy-defining triumphs like Sinners and One Battle After Another. The latest big swing that Abdy and De Luca backed at WB is Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!-a project that came their way after Netflix dropped it over Gyllenhaal's budget requests-doesn't just fall into the former category, it's the new leader in the clubhouse to be the first film mentioned when any film nerd brings up the adventurous executive duo's biggest creative whiffs. 

Several reports that were at least partially confirmed by Gyllenhaal herself during the press tour have cited that The Bride! tested horribly and that WB brass requested changes to tone down the depictions of graphic violence and (attempted) sexual assault that are a key part of this bold reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein. As a viewer, we don't ultimately know how the notes from the studio impacted Gyllenhaal's edit of The Bride! What I can say is that I don't believe that studio interference is the primary culprit of what went wrong with The Bride! Instead, I think this mainly a classic case of filmmaker being betrayed by their own ambition. 

The way The Bride! is assembled feels like Gyllenhaal had an outline of plot points and genres she wanted to tackle and reverse engineered the movie from there with zero plan on how they tied together or could be fleshed out further. The first act where Frankenstein's monster (Christian Bale) shows up in 1930's Chicago and relevantly convinces a scientist (Annette Bening) who specializes in the theory of reanimation to help bring an end to the loneliness he's been plagued by for 100 years+ by reviving a dead woman to be his wife and that deceased woman extracted from her grave at a nearby cemetery being a mob prostitute named Ida (Jessie Buckley) who was killed for snitching on her boss (Zlatko Buric) in public to serve in this role alone would be enough for Gyllenhaal to build a movie around. There are all sorts of possibilities for a story about bodily autonomy, consent and what really defines love from a female perspective using this purposefully streamlined explanation of where The Bride! starts from. But instead, Gyllenhaal proceeds to veer off into a million different directions once Ida is revived and this untamed beast of a movie proceeds to trample her from there. 

A few murders carried out in self-defense turn the monster pairing into outlaws who travel the country in stolen cars seeking to find refuge in various movie houses as they're being pursued by a motormouthed gumshoe (Peter Sarsgaard)-who is consumed by the guilt of his past corruption and his "secretary" partner (Penelope Cruz) who does most of the real detective work. There's also some interludes involving an encounter with Frankenstein's favorite actor (Jake Gyllenhaal-whose casting as a song-and-dance man proves just how much his sister loves him) at a New York party that transformers into an extended Vaudeville dance number and an allusion to the Bride starting a revolution of women bearing her signature makeup look that you can see on the above poster which was brought on by the whole being brought back from the dead thing standing up to the men who abused or harassed them. While all of the turns it takes solidifies its uniqueness, The Bride! never commits to any of its plot threads or genre influences for long enough to sell them as anything other than kooky, unrealized ideas. Ambition doesn't really matter all that much if those ideas add up to make something that is overstuffed and underdeveloped. All of the negative attention Gyllenhaal is getting right now as a result of The Bride! faceplanting on all moviegoing fronts (box office, critical reviews, audience reception) provides her with a great opportunity to reflect on what wrong went here and hopefully, she'll come out on the other side with a more cohesive plan to bring her unique ideas to life on screen.

Grade: C-