Day 1: Which Mary Shelley? | Waywords Studio

13 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN

Day 1:
Which Mary Shelley?

19 October 2024

Watching Kenneth Branagh impose himself upon Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) as director, co-producer and main star actually addresses one of my concerns about the production of film: that the team performance of the work creates inexplicable compromises to the artistic (re: storytelling, horror effect, thematic) merit.

Too often we have seen too much money yield more explosions than depth (Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead) and too little (World War Z,Gods of Egypt, Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, Welles’s Othello) deprive the audience of story (only a film like Monty Python and the Holy Grail brilliantly saves itself from its own budget woes). Teams of writers, or an endless succession of writers and rewriters to screenplays, are too often unwilling to compromise to anything but the dullest and safest creative solutions; and directors and actors can have disagreements on character interpretations. And then there’s the editing itself . . .

But here, with Branagh, all the heavy-hitting to the film is in his own lap, though he somewhat ironically names it “Mary Shelley’s.” It’s true, of course, that to date his film version falls closest to the plot elements that Shelley creates in her 1818 version. In this sense—or, in contrast to the long slew of Boris Karloff Universal film productions of Frankenstein and its pulp imitators over at Hammer Films and elsewhere—Branagh’s film doesn’t have to work so hard to succeed.

So why does it fail so miserably?

Foreshadowing an answer.

Screenwriters to Prosers, At Their Worst

Certainly the film is a visual delight, working the audience hard with color and contraption, lush bourgeois lives and savage village peasants. Patrick Doyle’s musical score chugs along with wanton bombast, Branagh bares his oiled chest to the naked monster, and every other line of the screenplay likely has two or three exclamation marks.

This is it, then. Branagh may believe he is channeling Shelley, but his own dithyrambic ego prevents us from seeing her.

What do we lose? And how might it have been translated to film? For me, it is the moral philosophy which dominates the relationship between creator and created. Shelley’s horror is not in the creature itself (which outside of its surgical scars and size is called attractive), but in Frankenstein’s abandonment of his responsibility to it (1818) or the very act of creating it against the laws of nature (1831). Even Shelley across her lifetime shifted her politics and vision.

“Branagh may believe he is channeling Shelley, but his own dithyrambic ego prevents us from seeing her.”

Different Muscles

But for all that, Branagh gives some brief lines to the creature (Robert De Niro), enough for it to blame him, to call him out for his responsibility to compassion. The creature accurately claims it can become a thing of love or of rage–indeed, Branagh’s writers pull sections of dialogue straight from the novel, though often without the larger context.

More, though, Shelley’s dialogue where it occurs is only part of a theatrical storm of music and color, make-up effects and gore (and, yes, bare and oiled chests). No sooner is a line delivered worthy of thoughtful debate than a roof caves in or another victim is strangled. I barely know where to turn my attention: to the roller coaster ride of Branagh/Frankenstein’s weeping and screamed lines, the cliched play of light and shadow across the monster’s face, or the human heart it now holds in its hands. When all the music is fortissimo, the art defeats itself.

Very, very loud

Filmic Flexing

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein works overhard for our emotional attention. I wasn’t half-way through the film before I began laughing at Doyle’s musical score, the comically begging child. Branagh uses Shelley’s lines, but he does not trust them to deliver what they already have for 200 years. And instead of selecting filmic techniques which might complement or support or even fill in the gaps of Frankenstein’s internal struggles, he chooses ones which clash, clamoring across the screen for . . . mere spectacle.

Experiments in Translation

	Book	Film
Where is the horror?	In abandoning responsibility to others (1818); in defying nature/God (1821)	That, but also the gore, and also the anguish, and also…
Some signature techniques	Nested storytelling, correspondence, internal dialogue, extended discourse	External dialogue, explosive music, explosive light & color, explosive gore, explosives