‘Mary Shelley’ falls short of monster hit
Like many films about artists and writers, “Mary Shelley,” based on a first screenplay by Australian Emma Jensen and directed by Saudi Arabian filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour (of the charming 2012 coming-of-age-tale “Wajdja”), is more interested in the turbulent private lives of its subjects than the more enduring mystery of the creations that made them famous.
In Mary’s case, it is her groundbreaking and still wildly influential 1818 novel, “Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus,” which the film would have us believe she cobbled together from a few handwritten pages.
We meet the film’s Mary (Elle Fanning) when she is a well-educated adolescent living with her father, the political philosopher, author and London bookshop owner William Godwin (Stephen Dillane), a widower who has remarried a woman with whom Mary does not get along, although she loves her winsome stepsister Claire Clairmont (Bel Powley, “Diary of a Teenage Girl”). Mary’s mother, who died shortly after giving birth to her, was the pioneering women’s rights advocate and author Mary Wollstonecraft.
In one of the film’s first scenes we see young Mary ruminating aptly in a cemetery. She then meets the young Percy Bysshe Shelley (a quite good Douglas Boothe), a dashing Godwin fan, who was sent down from Oxford after espousing radical political views, and the sparks fly between them, to coin a phrase, if not to set a scene from “Frankenstein.” Percy has an interest in chemistry denoted by the many bottles, vials, tubes, mortars and pestles he keeps around.
It is a perfect meeting of young radical minds and beautiful youthful bodies, and the two, actually three counting Claire, elope to France and embark upon a torrid love affair and relationship that includes in its stellar circle none other than the (pan?) sexually voracious Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), who promptly beds an eager and soon pregnant Claire.
It’s too bad Shelley is already married to Harriet Westbrook (Ciara Charteris) and a father. He, Mary and Claire live in genteel poverty back in England, after Shelley’s nobleman father cuts him off. Shelley, Mary and Claire occasionally stomp across the moors and flee from creditors. Further romantic and marital complications ensue.
Like Ken Russell’s superior and similar 1986 effort “Gothic,” with Natasha Richardson as Mary, “Mary Shelley” eventually gets us to Lake Geneva, where Shelley, Byron, Dr. Polidori (Ben Hardy) and Mary engage in a contest to see who can write the most frightening story, a genre for which Mary has a passion. She, of course, beats the stuffing out of the men with her “Frankenstein,” and the film comes to an end with a bit of a whimper.
“Mary Shelley” is not a failure. But it underuses Maisie Williams in a nothing role, and it’s a Gothic/ Romantic soap opera that fails to get deeply under the skin of its Romantic monsters or their immortal works of art.