MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN

MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (Directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, with Robert de Niro, Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Hulce, John Cleese, Ian Holm, Aidan Quinn)

Kenneth Branagh has created a monster. The poster campaign says Be Warned, but it doesn’t specify exactly what you are being warned off. So let me put you straight: its Branaghstein, a lumbering beast of a movie, assembled from bits and pieces of other films by a man driven half mad by thoughts of a knighthood. It is a hulking, over-inflated deformity that should have been strangled at birth, a love story between one man and his ego, a horror film in which the most terrifying element is the thought of all that wasted money, the kind of enormous, grotesque creation that could destroy the British film industry forever.

I can remember when schlocky horror films used to be marketed with creative disclaimers, suggesting patrons with weak hearts might be scared to death. Well, here’s one that could quite possibly bore you to death. This film took two hours out of my life, two hours that no one can give back to me. But if I can spare you the same awful waste of time, perhaps it will have been a sacrifice worth making.

This is cinema on a grand scale, produced by one of America’s greatest living film-makers, Francis Ford Coppola. Intended as a follow up to his own mesmerisingly inventive reworking of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, no expense has been spared in creating a historically accurate vision of the early 19th century. Yet the man Coppola has chosen to hand the reins to manages to make $35 million worth of extravagant sets and notable thespian talent look like so much straight to video shit.

Somebody ought to take away Kenneth Branagh’s steadicam. He can’t stop rushing about the set, accelerating up towards gothic mansions like he was shooting a segment for the Big Breakfast. You keep half-expecting Keith Chegwin to jump out and go, “And now we’re at the home of Victor and Elizabeth Frankenstein, let’s ring the bell and see if they’re in...”

As the bad doctor, Branagh gives us the screen’s most athletic Frankenstein yet, spending much of the film stripped to his waist and dashing about his laboratory as if surgery were an olympic event. He leaps from set to set and location to location as if in attempt to exhaust his audience into submission. The momentum never lets up, Branagh’s preferred way for opening a scene being to have somebody run on, calling out a name – “Victor!” “Elizabeth!” “Mother!” – have a short exchange and rush off again. Before long, he has the entire cast racing about through scene after scene, yelling and screaming at one another in hysterical tones.

Let me give you one short sequence that lasts, oh, about five minutes (including an extended conversation): Ken Frankenstein and entourage rush back from a hanging in the city, yelling, baying and weeping. Cut to: the Creature appearing in his garden and telling Ken to meet him on the ice. Cut to: Ken leaping onto a horse and galloping off on his mission, with his fiance and entourage screaming at him. Cut to: Ken, clambering along rocky snow covered ground. Cut to: a shot, straight out of Cliffhanger, of Ken (without the aid of climbing equipment) clambering up a rocky cliff face as the camera pulls out to show us, gasp, he is a tiny figure climbing an enormous mountain. Cut to: Ken, pausing briefly on top of mountain, whereupon the Creature leaps up in slow motion behind him. Cut to: Ken hurtling down a snow and ice tunnel, like a 19th century Indiana Jones. Cut to: Ken, sitting in ice cavern, having a philosophical chat about existance with the Creature. Cut to: Ken galloping back up to his house, whereupon his fiance and entourage all rush out to greet him, yelling and screaming.

The effect might be described as over-animated melodrama, except there is virtually no drama. Things just happen in this film, with no build up, no sense of pacing. One minute you are watching Doctor Frankenstein gathering all the bits he needs to create his Creature, the next he is running about his lab, pulling chains and, one can only assume, generating electricity from a dynamo stuffed up his arse and then, hey presto! its alive, and the movie dashes on to the next scene. You don’t even have to time to get interested, let alone excited, or frightened.

Not that there is anything to be frightened of. The story is too laughable for that. For all the song and dance about Coppola’s Dracula returning to Bram Stoker’s original novel, it added a spurious historical coda, turned the whole thing into a romance and drew heavily on Dracula’s filmic history, with particular references to Murnau’s Nosferatu and a visual style developed from the internal camera trickery of silent movies. Branagh’s Frankenstein really does return to the source novel, and in doing so amply demonstrates how well James Whale condensed and reinvented the narrative for his classic 1931 film version, with Boris Karloff as a still unequalled monster. While the Faustian tale of creating a life had genuine gothic creepiness in print, in big, bold cinematic colour having a monster who appears to have read all the classics and wants to discuss the nature of man is frankly a bit of a bore.The narrative covers too much ground, and depends on too many shaky plot points.

The Creature, rejected by his creator, learns to read by hiding in a barn and peeking through a hole in the wall at a child’s lessons. This is a Sesame Street Frankenstein, with a 19th century peasant family straight out of a Dick and Jane book. When they reject him, the Creature decides on revenge. We know this, because he stands in front of the camera and says “Revenge!” Having read Frankenstein’s journals, he knows where to find his creator. We know this because he stands in front of the camera and says “Geneva!” At this point, I was wondering how he was going to get there. I thought perhaps he would look at the sky and say “Helicopter” but instead we cut to shots of him trudging across the alps, arriving, with an unnerring sense of direction, at Frankenstein’s mansion.

For a seven foot deformed monster, he demonstrates a real talent for getting around without attracting attention. At the end of numerous scenes, he simply appears in the corner of a room, or at the back of a shot peeking through a window. One can only conclude that Doctor Frankenstein must have used the legs of a ballet dancer in creating this twinkle-toed brute.

Even the Creature’s make-up is a disappointment, amounting to little more than a bald head and a few ugly scars, much like Christopher Lee’s in the Sixties Hammer version. And while we’re on the subject, I have to take issue with the stitching. We are meant to believe that Frankenstein is a doctor so skilled he can patch together and re-animate a corpse, yet his needle work is so poor you wouldn’t even trust him to sow a button on your pyjamas.

Now, I know it’s knit-picking to complain about the standard of the sowing in a film about the creation of life, but in order to suspend disbelief a film-maker must make you believe in the essential credibility of the characters within the story, no matter how ridiculous the story. Branagh conspicuously fails, and he does so with as fine a selection of acting talent as has ever been assembled. Richard Brier is ridiculous as the blind man, Tom Hulce wasted as Frankenstein’s friend, Helena Bonham Carter driven to the heights of hysterical overacting, Ian Holm simply pathetic, all of them saddled with some of the most purely banal dialogue I have ever heard. And De Niro? The greatest living actor seems a natural to play the monster, but his Creature is neither as sympathetic or as scary as a Travis Bickle or Max Cady, and he’s a lot sillier than Rupert Pupkin. It may well be the worst performance of his career.

But I’m going to let him off the hook here, as he seems to be wading through an impossible role in an inept film. Somebody talked him into it, and from there on I guess he had to get it over with. I blame Kenneth Branagh. Let’s take a brief look at Ken’s career. He exploded onto the cinema world with Henry V, a Shakespearean adaptation and therefore relatively safe ground: no one really went to see it, but it’s culture isn’t it? His second film, Dead Again, was a big hit, although this Hitchcockian thriller was so ludicrous that audiences treated it as a comedy which I suspect was not the director’s intention. Peter’s Friends was just a flat little jumped up TV drama, starring a bunch of Ken’s thespian friends. And now this. A big budget, a big crew, and a big fucking mess.

Now, I see a lot of movies, and a lot of them I don’t like. But I can usually find some redeeming aspect to them, something to engage my consciousness and make it a worthwhile experience. I know a lot of time and money and effort has been spent creating this celluloid experience, and it is easy just to sneer. All I learned from this was how not to make a movie. Come in, Ken, your time is up.