Mary Shelley
MARY SHELLEY, biopic, rated PG-13, Jean Cocteau Cinema, 3 chiles
Director Haifaa al-Mansour follows her award-winning Wadjda, the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, with a new biography charting the life of Mary Shelley, the 19th-century feminist author of Frankenstein. Several earlier movies have touched upon Shelley’s story, but al-Mansour’s work, starring Elle Fanning as the author, simultaneously strikes more in-depth and superficial chords than its predecessors.
Yes, that’s contradictory — so here’s an explanation. The earlier movies all focused on the summer of 1816, when Mary Shelley began writing the novel she called Frankenstein ,or The Modern Prometheus. That was some summer. She and her lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, had traveled to Switzerland, to the Lake Geneva estate of the pompous Lord Byron. They envisioned spending their days soaking up the sun. But a massive volcanic eruption in the East Indies in 1815 is said to have cast a cloud over the entire planet, with nonstop gloom and rain as far away as Europe.
Forced inside, Lord Byron devised a suitable parlor game. He invited his houseguests to draft the perfect ghost story. Mary Shelley responded with Frankenstein, a work of chilling gothic horror, infused with scientific talk of “galvanism,” involving the injection of electricity to reanimate the dead. The physician John Polidori, another visitor, penned “The Vampyre” — one of the first published tales of vampirism.
This gathering of literary heavyweights inspired no fewer than three films in the 1980s — Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), the Hugh GrantElizabeth Hurley romp Rowing with the Wind (1988), and the very good
Haunted Summer (1988), by the Czech director Ivan Passer. (That movie deserves lasting attention, although Passer blew his chances with his bizarre casting of Hollywood studs as these British legends, with Eric Stoltz as Percy Shelley and Alex Winter, from Bill and Ted’s Excellent
Adventure, as Polidori.) Here, al-Mansour effectively uses the Lake Geneva summer as her third act, while the film opens with early episodes from Mary Shelley’s life, notably her clash with her stepmother and banishment to Scotland, where she meets Shelley (Douglas Booth). He is a pretentious dandy, advocating “free love” while dallying on the side with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont (Bel Powley). Through these clashes, we come to understand her angst — a kind of elemental terror central to Frankenstein that has been reduced to a parlor game in past flicks.
But the script by Emma Jensen, with additional writing by al-Mansour, tends toward the staid and strident — it is not as “galvanizing,” shall we say, as we might expect with Frankenstein looming in the shadows. Too many filmmakers these days stick with the tried-and-true, when the best movies are those that dare to be different.
Still, this is certainly the right year to return to Mary Shelley, seeing as how Frankenstein appeared in print exactly 200 years ago. Fanning is, as always, a revelation, and there are many exceptional supporting players to watch — among them, Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones as Mary’s dear friend Isabel Baxter. — Jon Bowman