Not-So-Young Frankenstein

I’m afraid the Frankenstein story doesn’t really resonate with me. Circa 1990, when I worked for Roger Corman  at Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, a successful Hollywood producer named Thom Mount approached Roger with an offer he couldn’t refuse. Mount had been a Corman underling years before, and felt that his mentor should set aside his production company  obligations and return to directing. So he came to Roger with a deal: a cool million dollars to write and direct a film based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, about a scientist who creates and animates a monstrous creature, only to live to regret his own folly.

 As Roger’s story editor, I was charged with overseeing the film’s script, which would ultimately be based on Frankenstein Unbound, a Brian Aldiss novel with a time-travel element: a man from our own era finds himself back in the early nineteenth century, interacting with Dr. Frankenstein, a sensuous Mary Shelley, and of course the monster. Naturally I read both the Aldiss novel and Mary Shelley’s original—and I can barely remember either one. But a few oddball things remain in my memory banks from the completed film. One is Roger’s decision to cast his fourteen-year-old daughter Catherine as a servant girl wrongly accused of murder. Young Catherine Corman played the role credibly, but it’s not every day that a film director hangs his own child on camera. (Today, Catherine, none the worse for wear, is a writer, photographer, and indie filmmaker.)

 I have two other memories of a film that most critics and most audiences have scorned. One is an awkward sex scene between Mary Shelley (played by the very young Bridget Fonda) and John Hurt as a very middle-aged visitor from the 20^th century. The other is the moment when the Frankenstein monster finally finds a mate—and the two inexplicably lapse into a romantic pas de deux. This was in the version of the movie I saw at an advance screening, but apparently the audience reaction was so negative that the moment was cut from the released film. 

 Of course there are other cinematic versions of Mary Shelley’s work. Most of us know the classic 1931 James Whale film, featuring Boris Karloff as an ungainly but oddly likable monster who accidentally drowns a little girl because he doesn’t fully understand the game they’re playing. Karloff’s monster has become iconic, inspiring generations of Halloween costumes and a delicious Mel Brooks spoof. But Spanish director Guillermo del Toro had long wanted to try his hand at creating an intelligent, sympathetic Frankenstein monster. His new approach (with Oscar Isaac as the scientist and the very tall Jacob Elordi as the monster)  is visually exciting, But it also seems endless and, frankly, more than a bit sappy, leaning heavily on ultimate recognition by man and monster that they’re in many ways father and son . . . and that it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

 There’s much philosophical meat in the Frankenstein story, and we in the 21^st century are well advised to be aware of the dangers of taking science too far. But I don’t think del Toro, for all his good intentions, has made a movie that’s philosophically worth our attention. Curiously, it was just two years ago that Yorgos Lanthimos directed a film that—while in no way based specifically on Shelley’s novel—approaches some of that book’s intellectual concerns. I’m talking about Poor Things, in which a female “monster” reminds us of the dangers of science, and what it might take to move beyond them. 

 

 

A Stroll Down Nightmare Alley: The Deceiver Deceived

Director Guillermo del Toro is in love with the fantastic and the macabre. Sometimes his grotesque figures turn out to be benign, even heroic, as is the case with his sexy aqua-man in the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water. In the magnificent Pan’s Labyrinth, a girl in retreat from the brutality of everyday life finds solace in the make-believe world of magical creatures. In his new Nightmare Alley (based on a 1946 novel that was previously filmed in 1947 with Tyrone Power in the central role), del Toro turns to film noir stylistics to explore the surreal lives of carnival folk. One big difference from his previous work: in this film the magical tricks and stunts all are given logical explanations. Though they seem eerily supernatural, they’re in fact 100% bogus.  Each is cleverly designed to fake out the credulous, all the better for unscrupulous men (and women) to exploit their “marks.”

 The setting for most of Nightmare Alley (probably too much, given the film’s excessive length), is a seedy traveling carnival, circa 1940. It’s the depths of winter: snow, slush, and torrential rain are constant reminders that the natural world can be harsh indeed. Into a tumble-down tent stumbles Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a man who’s clearly seen better days. He’s desperate for work and a sense of belonging. Soon he’s part of a team led by the carnival’s owner, played by the always sinister Willem Dafoe. Among Stan’s new comrades are midgets, fortune-tellers, a pretty young woman who conducts electricity through her body, assorted freaks, and (literally) geeks. (If you don’t know the grotesque original meaning of that currently popular term, you’ll certainly learn it here.)

 Though the season remains winter, matters considerably heat up when Stan falls for Molly, the electric girl (Rooney Mara), and takes the tricks he’s learned as a carny into the wider world. Quickly he evolves into “The Great Stanton,” charming uptown folks with a flashy mentalist act in which he divulges secrets and facilitates conversations with the dead. The point seems to be that credulity knows no boundaries of class or economic status. Wealthy, powerful men approach Stan, desperate to initiate contact with lost loved ones. Stan is, of course, more than happy to oblige, though the results are not quite what he anticipates. I will not go into the role played here by the protean Cate Blanchett (so very different from the flashy TV host she plays in the current Don’t Look Up.), except to say that it reinforces the movie’s overall theme: that no one can really be trusted. It should not surprise us that when the film’s ending finally rolls around, Stan’s essentially back to where he started, with one grim difference. At least he’s wised up enough to know where he stands in the carny hierarchy . . . and in the universe.

 Nightmare Alley is effective, if you know in advance you’re in for a long sit. In addition to Bradley Cooper (who dynamically conveys his character’s weaknesses as well as his strengths), the carnival folk include such reliable presences as Toni Collette (as Zeena the Seer), David Strathairn (as her hapless husband Pete), and Ron Perlman (as Molly’s hulking guardian figure). The world of the rich is inhabited by Mary Steenburgen (in a poignant and ultimately shocking small role) and an almost-unrecognizable Richard Jenkins, a del Toro favorite. Visually, the seedy carnival world, juxtaposed with the art deco elegance of Cate Blanchett’s office, is not easily forgotten. It’s the stuff that can haunt your dreams. 

 

At the Heart of “The Shape of Water”

The Los Angeles Times review of The Shape of Water compared this mesmerizing new film to Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast as well as an important childhood influence for writer-director Guillermo del Toro, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Del Toro, best known for the equally phantasmagoric Pan’s Labyrinth, is an expert on finding the reality in a fantasy world. Perhaps his comfort in combining the grotesque with the mystical comes from his Mexican Catholic upbringing: his native land is a place where the Day of the Dead is celebrated and skeletons romp through the fine arts in all their manifestations. 

Curiously, The Shape of Water made me think of an equally watery but far sunnier film, Ron Howard’s Splash. This 1984 romantic comedy, which made a star out of Tom Hanks, introduces a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who comes ashore in Manhattan in search of a special young man who’s terrified of water. After various escapades, some of them involving a mad scientist, the movie builds to an undersea conclusion that’s charming and optimistic. In The Shape of Water, though, sunlit New York City is replaced by a grim and dreary Baltimore, where scientists and military types are conspiring in a  retro-futuristic lab to study a captive being cryptically called “the asset.”     

The era, crucial to The Shape of Water, is the late 1950s, a time when Americans were panicky about the success of the Soviet space program. The Cold War tensions underlying the film provide its external drama: there are creepy government operatives (Michael Shannon is the chief one) calling the shots, and equally creepy Russki spies lurking about. But del Toro, whose eye for picturesque visuals is uncanny, also gives us the flip-side (what a terrifically retro word!) of the late 1950s. Shannon’s character lives in a cheery suburban home with wife and kiddies straight out of Dick and Jane. Late in the film he treats himself to a glossy “teal” Cadillac with tail fins out to there. TV sets are ubiquitous, featuring scenes from Dobie Gillis and ads for JELL-O. Percy Faith’s lush rendition of “Theme from A Summer Place” is a highlight of the soundtrack.

Against all this candy-colored domesticity, del Toro sets the lives of several 1950s misfits. There’s Zelda (Octavia Spencer), one of a fleet of cleaning ladies who clean up the muck and the pee of their betters. As a black woman, she’s used to being rendered invisible. There’s Giles (a highly sympathetic Richard Jenkins), an artist who feels himself being shoved aside for reasons both professional and personal. And, crucially, there’s Elisa, who is Zelda’s co-worker and Giles’ neighbor in a strange and beautiful old building above a dying movie palace. As unforgettably played by Sally Hawkins, Elisa’s an orphan who’s been rendered mute by some mysterious childhood mishap. Though she can’t speak, she can hear and understand all that goes on around her. Precise and self-contained, she’s also at base a dreamy and creative soul. She and Giles bond over old romantic movies, tap-dancing, and pie. Her personal soundtrack is dominated by Alice Faye soulfully warbling “You’ll never know how much I love you.” When her heart is captured, she gives herself completely.

Finally there’s “the asset,” the supernatural creature whose presence propels all the action. Between him and Elisa there’s instant communion, with no need for speech. He’s strange, disturbing, and gorgeous, just right for a mysterious fairy tale in which all the participants seem totally real.