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Synopsis:
The ship of Arctic explorer Robert Walton (Aidan Quinn) becomes
trapped in ice, and his men threaten mutiny unless he agrees to turn
back. Suddenly, the crew hears an unearthly howl, and watches stunned
as a man, half-dead with exhaustion, staggers across the ice. Taken on
board, the man identifies himself as Victor Frankenstein (Kenneth
Branagh), and tells Walton an incredible tale…. As a boy in
Switzerland, Victor passes a happy childhood with his adopted sister,
Elizabeth, and their companion, Justine Moritz. This idyll lasts until
Victor is a young man, and his mother (Cherie Lunghi) dies tragically
giving birth to his younger brother, William. Developing a taste for
scientific research, Victor prepares to depart for the university at
Ingolstadt, where he will study to be a doctor like his father (Ian
Holm). Before he leaves home, however, Victor asks Elizabeth – whom
he no longer regards as his “sister” – to be his wife. At
Ingolstadt, Victor makes friends with a fellow student, Henry Clerval
(Tom Hulce), clashes with the hidebound Professor Krempe (Robert
Hardy), and finds himself fascinated by the secretive Professor
Waldman (John Cleese) who, he learns, once fell foul of the
authorities for conducting illegal experiments. Setting up a
laboratory in a hired attic, Victor sets about achieving the ultimate
aim of his research: cheating death…. After another public argument
with Krempe, Victor is almost kidnapped by Waldman, who shows the
student his rooms – and his secret laboratory. Waldman explains to
Victor the Chinese practice of acupuncture, and how it might affect
the electrical energy of the body. Victor expounds his own theories on
the overcoming of death. His words have a dramatic effect on Waldman,
who reveals that he once came close – too close – to the
artificial creation of life…. During an enforced vaccination of the
people of Ingolstadt, carried out by the staff and students of the
university, a man (Robert De Niro) objects hysterically to the
treatment, and in his panic stabs Waldman to death. He is hanged for
his pains. The devastated Victor breaks into Waldman’s laboratory,
securing the scientist’s notebooks before anyone else can see them.
Upon reading them, he discovers just how close Waldman did come to
creating life…. Inspired, and in defiance of Henry’s warnings,
Victor prepares to go one step further than his mentor. By rough and
ready means, he acquires his “materials”, including the body of
Waldman’s murderer and Waldman’s own brain, and sets about
creating an artificial man. Applying his knowledge of electricity,
Victor sends a massive charge through the inanimate body that he has
put together. Climbing up onto the metal tank in which his creation is
housed, Victor cries out for it to live;
and for a brief moment its eyes flicker open – only to close again.
Victor turns away in despair – until a knocking sound comes from
within the tank….
Comments:
Well – it’s not a bad Frankenstein, but it sure ain’t Mary Shelley’s! The adaptation
of a novel for the screen is always a delicate business. Literature
and film might both be art forms, but they are not interchangeable;
and with rare exceptions – within the world of the genre film,
Polanski’s amazingly faithful adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s
Baby comes to mind – changes to the original story will, even must, be made when it is transferred to the screen. The important
issue is – what changes,
and why? Is the adaptation faithful to the spirit of the novel, if not
to the letter? With respect to the myriad of screen adaptations of
Mary Shelley’s novel, the answer is a resounding NO! And from one
perspective, this is understandable. Shelley’s novel is, after all,
less a story than a philosophical rumination upon human nature,
man’s place in the universe, and his relationship with God;
countless pages pass with both Victor Frankenstein and his Creature
expatiating tirelessly upon these issues. It is, perhaps, not
surprising that a century’s worth of screenwriters have largely
ignored this facet of the novel; yet in so doing, they have also
overlooked other aspects of the novel that would lend themselves very
well to cinematic dramatisation. When Kenneth Branagh’s version of
the story arrived on the screen in 1994, it did so accompanied by a
rather defensive explanation that the film had been given its title at
least in part because (as indeed was the case with Bram
Stoker’s Dracula) its producers wanted to avoid a legal wrangle
with Universal Studios, which incredibly enough claims that it owns
the rights to the simple titles “Frankenstein”
and “Dracula”. Be that
as it may, when screenwriters choose to put the name of the author
that they are adapting into the title of their film – which instead
could, and perhaps should, have been called “Victor
Frankenstein” – they are making a promise of sorts to their
audience. And as it happens, Branagh’s version, while not exactly
“faithful”, is one of the more faithful cinematic translations of Shelley’s story – up to
a point. This film goes badly off the rails during its final quarter
– which, significantly, is comprised of events with little or
nothing to do with the novel – but until then, probably shows
Shelley’s work more respect than almost any other adaptation of her
story.
For
the most part, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein follows the structure of the novel, and includes many
aspects of the story usually overlooked by film-makers, including the
book-ending Arctic scenes. (That said, the blood-and-thunder,
damn-the-torpedoes Robert Walton of the film has little to do with his
model.) Most critically, the film gives us a thinking, feeling,
speaking Creature – here called the “Reanimant”. Eyebrows were
raised when Robert De Niro was cast as a mere “monster”, but it
isn’t hard to see what attracted him to this particular role: for
once, a telling of “Frankenstein” allows its artificial man to
undergo the full process of education, as it learns to speak, to
reason, to suffer – and finally, to commit acts of vengeance. It
even manages to salvage that section of the novel which is perhaps its
greatest weakness. The Creature learning to speak and read and
understand human society because it just
happens to be in the vicinity when an impoverished Parisian
noblemen is giving lessons to his runaway Arabian bride is not, to put
it mildly, the most credible part of Shelley’s story. The film
dodges this bullet rather neatly by changing the occupants of the
cottage where the Reanimant takes shelter into a young couple with
children who are being educated by their mother. In time, the
Reanimant is able to read “The Journal of Victor Frankenstein of
Geneva”, which it finds in the coat that it took when fleeing
Victor’s laboratory, and thus learns its own history. Suffering
rejection yet again, this time by the inhabitants of the cottage for
whose benefit it has been doing favours – and who, until they
actually lay eyes on it, think of the Reanimant as “the good spirit
of the forest” – the Reanimant sets out for Geneva, finally
cornering the horrified Victor and insisting upon a showdown. The two
face off in an icy cave in the mountains; a tricky scene which, all
credit to it, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein pulls off very well. The language of the novel has
been substantially toned done, but the essentials are there; and the
Reanimant gets to ask the big questions: who
is it? – and what is it? – and has it a soul? Victor has no answers, of course.
The Reanimant then makes its offer: if Victor will make it “a
friend, a companion – a female”,
then they will go together and live where no people will ever see
them. “I have love in me, the likes of which you
can scarcely imagine,” the Reanimant tells its creator, and it’s
quite right; Victor is far too much the egotist for that. “And rage,
the likes of which you cannot believe. And if I cannot satisfy one, I
will indulge the other.” The remarkable thing about this scene is
that although the threat is evident, the Reanimant’s offer to Victor
comes across as reasonable, even generous; rather more than Victor
deserves, in fact. In terms of natural appeal, Robert De Niro is no
Boris Karloff, but he nevertheless succeeds in giving us a Creature
for which we can feel. The pain in the Reanimant’s eyes at it
experiences rejection after rejection; the struggling emotion of its
language (De Niro worked with stroke victims prior to filming, to
master the Reanimant’s hesitant speech patterns); its simple yet
passionate yearning for sympathy
all work together to win over the viewer. Undoubtedly, De Niro’s
committed performance is one of this film’s virtues.
However,
in another sense the Reanimant is one of the film’s major
weaknesses. Rather too obviously, having pulled off the coup of
casting Robert De Niro in this vital role, the film-makers became
intent on making the audience aware throughout that it was
indeed De Niro under the make-up. Consequently, the Reanimant is
simply not grotesque enough. It is a critical part of Shelley’s
story that Victor’s handiwork be physically repulsive enough to
terrify; time and again, the Creature is rejected, abused, attacked on
sight, without committing any act to justify the treatment. Once, it
saves the life of a child, only to be assumed to be her assailant and
shot for its efforts. (Of course, it is inferred that, hideous as the
Creature is, something deeper is at work here: these people are
reacting instinctively to the presence of something unnatural.)
Shelley wisely left her readers room for imagination, not getting too
specific in her description of the Creature. Victor himself speaks of
its “yellow skin”, “watery eyes”, “shrivelled complexion”
and “straight black lips”; the Creature, movingly, calls itself
“an abortion”. The film’s Reanimant is a disappointment, being
inflicted with nothing worse than post-operative scarring – which,
by the way, heals over the course of the story. Consequently, the
hysteria that his presence provokes is rather hard to believe –
would a population battling plague and cholera and smallpox on a daily
basis really be so freaked
out by a few scars? Another significant lapse is the screenplay’s
uncertainty over the effects of the Reanimant’s origins. Shelley’s
Creature is a tabula rasa;
it knows only what it learns. Branagh’s Reanimant, on the other
hand, is frankly a bit of a cheat. In order, no doubt, to cut to the
chase, the screenplay gives it “memories”; and while it cannot
initially speak or read, it somehow manages to understand
what the residents of the cottage are saying to one another. It also
has residual talents, such as musical ability. The Reanimant questions
Victor over these phenomena, but of course he has no explanation. That
isn’t a problem; but that the screenwriters were, obviously, equally
mystified is. The brain
inside the Reanimant’s head is Waldman’s; why are its memories, if
it has memories, not
specifically his? Why should the other body parts have more of an
influence than the brain? Almost in spite of themselves, the writers
of this film seem to have shied away from Shelley’s made
“monster”, in favour of Universal’s born
one: the body of the Reanimant is, primarily, that of the man who
murdered Waldman, while during the post-birth struggle in which the
Reanimant is supposedly killed, it suffers a heavy blow across the
back of the head. Ah, that “abnormal brain” – the uncertain
screenwriter’s eternal friend….
You
do have to admire the courage – or the ego – that led Kenneth
Branagh to cast himself opposite a heavyweight like De Niro. Their
respective characterisations make a fascinating contrast. De Niro’s
Reanimant is grounded, logical, and remorseless; capable of savage
violence if provoked, but able, willing, to live in peace. Branagh’s
Victor, in contrast, is a firecracker – emotional to the point of
hysteria, selfish, arrogant and vain. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is, undoubtedly, an over-the-top piece
of cinema. It is melodramatic – almost operatic
– and so is Branagh’s performance. I know a lot of people are
unable to swallow this film’s extremities, but I rather like them.
As always, I would much rather that a film (or a film-maker) took
itself too seriously than
not seriously enough – the latter being, of course, something of
which Kenneth Branagh is not frequently guilty. (That said, I could
definitely have done without the endlessly swirling camera – which
is enough to induce mal de mer
in the susceptible – and with about a dozen less slow-motion “NOOOOOO!!!!”-s.)
However, for all its passion for its material, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein is a severely compromised work, and for
reasons that can be laid squarely at the feet of its
writer-director-star. The film as a whole is badly weakened by
Branagh’s conception of Victor Frankenstein – that is, of himself
– not as the story’s villain, but as its hero.
This is a mistake that few, if any, other versions of the story have
fallen into. Even the first sound version, in which director James
Whale’s empathy with the scientist is patent, does not hesitate to
deal with the underlying fact of Frankenstein’s ultimate
responsibility for all that happens. Branagh, however, chose to film
the story not as outright horror, or science fiction, but as Gothic
romance; and a romance, of course, requires a hero, no matter how
doomed he might be. Thus, the screenplay of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein does everything it can to mitigate the
question of Victor’s guilt. First up, and to my immeasurable
disgust, Victor is led into his line of research not merely by his
passion for science and his desire to ask “the big questions”, but
because of personal trauma: his beloved mother dies in horrendous,
bloody childbirth, during a caesarean performed by her doctor-husband,
sans anaesthetic. (In the
novel, she succumbs quietly to scarlet fever after nursing the young
Elizabeth through her own illness.) I’ve complained about this kind
of thing before, of course. Is it, I wonder, that film-makers don’t
think they can convey a purely intellectual passion, or is it that they don’t
think that an intellectual passion alone will evoke a sufficiently
emotional response in the viewer? Either way, this mis-step is doubly
annoying here, because there is a sequence in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein that actually does a wonderful job of
demonstrating Victor’s intellectual fascination with the mysteries
of the universe, when he drags Elizabeth and Justine out into a
violent lightning storm to demonstrate his own mastery over
electricity. The slightly manic, “Hey, wanna see something cool?”
attitude that Victor evinces in this brief scene is a far more
convincing depiction of the scientific temperament than any amount of
the playing God and laboratory-bound hysteria that follows.
As
soon as Victor departs for Ingolstadt, the screenplay’s
“1984”-like re-writing of his motives begins in earnest. In the
novel, Victor proves a first-class student of science. His desire to
understand “the principle of life” leads him to study anatomy and
physiology, and in the course of his investigations into “the change
from life to death, and death to life”, a “sudden light” breaks
upon him. Victor has not set out to create artificial life, but when
the implications of his extraordinary discovery dawn upon him, he
cannot resist following the path laid down before him to its very end.
Importantly, no-one but Victor himself knows what he is up to. He cuts
off communication with his home, his friends, and his professors.
Victor, and Victor alone, therefore, is responsible for all that
happens. Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, though, would have it otherwise. Here, it is
Victor’s university mentor, Professor Waldman (an effectively
underplaying John Cleese), who has made most of the critical
discoveries. Where Waldman drew back, however, Victor will press on
– out of “courage”. His acquisition of the “materials” he
needs proves a far simpler, far less gruesome, and far less morally
dubious activity than it is in the novel. No grave-robbing here; no
“days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses” for our Victor; with Ingolstadt in the grip of a cholera epidemic, he
simply goes down to the morgue and helps himself – like a kid in a
candy-store. The film’s staggering “birth-scene” – about which
I will have rather more to say later – follows; it ends with the
naked, panicking Reanimant becoming entangled in a series of ropes and
pulleys and being dragged to the roof of the laboratory, struck upon
the head, and apparently killed. Although Victor is as horrified by
what he has wrought as his literary counterpart, he does not reject
his creation outright; rather, he believes it to be dead. When he
realises that the Reanimant still lives, he takes action to kill it,
but it escapes him. Exhaustion and illness claim Victor at this point,
and his friend, Henry Clerval, must nurse him through a lengthy fever.
By the time he recovers – and begins to comfort himself with the
belief that his handiwork has almost certainly succumbed to cholera
– the Reanimant is long gone. Thus, there is
no actual abandonment of the Reanimant by its creator. At a stroke,
the screenplay obliterates the entire moral crux of Mary Shelley’s
story.
The
film’s whitewashing of Victor does not stop there, however. The most
harrowing section of Shelley’s novel involves the murder of
Victor’s young brother, William, by the Creature, and the subsequent
condemnation and execution of Victor and Elizabeth’s childhood
companion, Justine Moritz, for the crime. One thing that the
screenplay does handle much better than the novel is the insertion of
Justine into the story. In the original, Justine is suddenly thrust
upon us via a horribly laboured letter from Elizabeth to Victor, one
full of sentences starting, “You will remember, Victor, that---”
(Yes, he will; so why are you telling
him?) In the film, Justine is simply there,
a part of the Frankenstein household from her early youth; a good
friend to both Victor and Elizabeth, a mother-figure to the orphaned
William, and (couldn’t resist, could you, Ken?) unrequitedly in love
with Victor. We are allowed to know her before tragedy strikes. In the
novel, the Creature strangles the young William after the boy is
unwise enough to utter the fatal word “Frankenstein”; it then
finds Justine, who has been searching for the boy, asleep in a barn,
and plants on her evidence linking her to the murder. Critically,
however, the novel’s Victor becomes aware of his Creature’s guilt before Justine is accused and arrested. Nevertheless, he does not
speak, first arguing to himself that since Justine is innocent, she
will be found innocent; then
that the character testimony of himself and Elizabeth will free her;
then that her appeal will succeed; and then – as Justine goes to the
scaffold – that no-one would believe his story anyway. The most
shocking scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the summary execution of Justine,
who is snatched from her prison cell by a howling mob of townspeople
and hurled off a high building with a rope around her neck. And it is
only after this that the
film’s Victor becomes aware that the Reanimant is responsible for
William’s murder – and for Justine’s. This manoeuvring of the
story to exculpate Victor is unforgivable.
(Of
course, if Justine had really been hanged as shown here, her head
would have been ripped clean off her body – which may or may not
have facilitated later events in the film. The impact of this hanging
scene is tempered only by the unfortunate use of the expression “a
lynching party”, which is by no means the only anachronism to be
found in the screenplay. Earlier, a highly prescient Victor performs
CPR on Waldman after the scientist is stabbed; and – speaking of
Waldman – I don’t think the word “vaccination” was in common
usage in the late 18th century, either.)
Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein is, in essence, a story of relationships – natural and otherwise.
Early on, the screenplay sets up a strict division between the demands
of Victor’s work, and the intrusion upon that work represented by
domestic ties. This dichotomy is made perfectly explicit when
near-consecutive scenes have first Victor’s mother, then Elizabeth,
breaking in upon his studies and dragging him away from them. Later,
the opposing forces at work become still more evident. It must be
conceded that, in dealing with these themes, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ventures into some distinctly worrying
territory. In both novel and film, Victor becomes engaged to his
adopted sister, Elizabeth. This passes in the book because the
character of Elizabeth is such a nonentity; she contributes nothing,
but exists purely so that the Creature can murder her on her
wedding-night. This happens here, too, but only after we’ve seen a
great deal more of Elizabeth than is necessary. It is clear that
Branagh has tried to give us a “modern”, “independent”
Elizabeth; Helena Bonham Carter spends much of the film rushing about
on horseback and making stands and generally giving the impression
that she is a young woman in charge of her own destiny. Yet for all
that, she contributes nothing extra to the story. (Shall I confess?
Bonham Carter’s Elizabeth irritates me hugely; and quite frankly, I
find the moment when the Reanimant slams its hand through her chest
and rips out her heart a strangely satisfying one….) Victor and
Elizabeth are duly married, in spite of the Reanimant’s threat to
Victor, “I will be with you on your wedding-night” (another of the
novel’s painful lapses, and one that the screenwriters were stuck
with), which brings into focus the fact that this expansion of the
character of Elizabeth must inevitably give us Victor saddled with
even more pathological motives for his behaviour than Mary Shelley
intended. Victor proposes to Elizabeth by asking whether she is indeed
his sister? They agree that they are no longer “brother and
sister”, yet continue to call each other by those titles with
unnerving frequency – even on their wedding-night!
As for Victor, no sooner has he become engaged to his “sister”
than he sets out to create a Being to whom he will be both
“father” and “mother”. This Being in time wants a wife for
itself and, when Victor denies this to it, retaliates by murdering Victor’s
wife – that is, his former sister. The film’s most misjudged
sequence follows – one that is part Hammer, part The
Bride, part Roger Corman, and all
wrong – as a clearly crazed Victor brings his murdered wife back to
life after attaching her head and hands to the dead body of Justine
Moritz, only to have her show a preference for her fellow Reanimant.
Soon, Victor and the Reanimant are in the middle of a violent
“father-son” conflict as they fight for the loyalty and affection
of the re-born Elizabeth – Victor’s “sister-wife” and the
Reanimant’s “step-mother-sister-bride”. And I think my brain is
about to explode….
(There
should be a third layer to these misplaced relationships: Victor’s
father, a magistrate in the novel, is a doctor here, presumably to
underscore the theme of father-son rivalry. However, this never
ultimately amounts to much. The only moment when anything of what
might initially have been intended by this alteration is apparent
comes with the death of Victor’s mother, when Victor rushes up to
her room, passing unheeded his devastated, blood-soaked father.)
One
of the real joys of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein is its production design. Victor’s
laboratory (which is bigger than my house;
no dingy one-room attic here!)
is a masterpiece, into which a great deal of thought and planning was
obviously put. This is also true of the film’s centrepiece, the
“birth” of the Reanimant. The major challenge confronting any
adaptor of Shelley’s story is, of course, deciding how the creation
scene should be handled. Shelley herself was extremely vague, being
less concerned with the fact
of Victor’s actions than she was with their morality.
The definitive cinematic birth sequence is undoubtedly that found in
the original Frankenstein
itself, all bolts of lightning and showers of sparks. Almost every
other version of the story filmed since has a laboratory scene
modelled upon James Whale’s seminal effort. To their credit, Kenneth
Branagh and his team set out to do something a bit different. Clearly,
a huge effort was made to provide Victor with credible equipment and
procedures; although the Reanimant is brought to life by electricity,
the source of that power is not lightning, but a tank of enraged
electric eels! – while the artificial man is submerged in a solution
consisting of, among other things, human amniotic fluid obtained via
the co-operation of a compliant mid-wife. As power slams through the
body of the Reanimant, which is encased in a huge metal tank, Victor
climbs up on top of that tank, in a posture that – were you the kind
of person given to seeing sexual symbolism – might possibly
be construed as sexually symbolic. The “birth” follows, with the
tank tipping over and spilling its contents out onto the floor of the
laboratory. What happens next is one of the most daring, the most
bizarre, the most downright disturbing scenes to be found in any
adaptation of Frankenstein.
Throughout this sequence, Victor is stripped to the waist; the
Reanimant, when born, is completely naked. Creator and creation end up
grappling together in a slippery tide of amniotic fluid. There is
something singularly unnerving about having the film’s central birth
scene turned into something so unmistakably homoerotic.
But
then, the film’s attitude to birth and reproduction is worrying
throughout – as is its overall, rather reactionary tone. Of course,
this can in part be blamed upon the very faithfulness of the
adaptation. It is hypocritical of me, I suppose, to complain about
unfaithful adaptations of novels – and then to complain, too, about
something in the film that is there because it has been carried over from the novel. But there it is.
Shelley’s novel is a cautionary tale, the story of a man who both
perverts nature and challenges God. It ends with Victor warning Robert
Walton not to succumb to the same “madness” that has destroyed his
own life, and with Walton obediently abandoning his expedition and
turning back, his dreams and ambitions forgotten. This attitude, this
sense that any attempt at progress is unavoidably dangerous and wrong,
is present in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well; yet consider the world that
Victor inhabits. It is one where there is no such thing as
anaesthesia; where childbirth is an endless nightmare of blood and
pain; where at any moment, a woman can meet the fate of Victor’s
mother. (Her labour gone wrong, she demands of her husband, “Cut
me!” He complies; she dies.) It is a place where disease is
rampant, and epidemics common; where the dead are taken away by the
cartload. It is, in short, a world that could stand a little progress.
Yet there is no real acknowledgement of this, either in the novel or
the film. Like far too many science fiction films, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein takes place in a universe of absolutes;
everything is either yes or no, black or white, right or wrong; there
are no shades of grey, no room for advancement via slow, careful
steps. As is so often the case, the film’s ultimate message is “Go
back! You are going the wrong way!”, rather than, as it should
be – “Proceed with caution.”
Footnote:
This review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is my offering in Part 4 of That
Was Then, This Is Now. For this entry in the series, I am more
than pleased to announce that Chad Denton of The
Good, The Bad, The Ugly and myself have again been joined by
Zack Handlen of The Duck Speaks. Chad himself will be reviewing
the oxymoronic Bram Stoker’s
Dracula; while Zack – displaying far more courage than sense –
will not only be tackling both of these films, but taking a look at
the novels upon which they were allegedly based. Finally, the three of
us sit down to discuss the rights and wrongs of these films and their
novels. Follow the links below to join us.
Click here for Zack’s review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Click here for Zack’s review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Click here for Chad’s review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Click here for The Conversation.
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