It’s hard to imagine a non-war movie capturing the American zeitgeist as clearly as Up in the Air has. Since we appear to be in a time of endless armed conflict, you can shoot a Middle East-based war movie anytime in the next several years and bank on being au courant. But to have a film about a man who makes his living by taking other people’s jobs away from them appear in 2009 calls for simply uncanny timing. I guess if it had come out last spring it would’ve been even more pointedly dead on, but still…
But Up in the Air has much more going for it than timeliness. The very sharp cast, led by George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, the traveling executioner, and brilliantly seconded by Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, takes the film into bumpy (i.e. emotionally complicated) air space—you’ll want to keep your seat belts fastened.
For starters, Clooney’s Bingham is far from the heartless bastard you’d expect. If you personally are looking for a film that will allow you to vent against the bastard who fired you, you’ll have to wait a little longer. Bingham respects his victims’ dignity, and their pain, to the fullest possible extent. He probably isn’t even lying when he tells them that this termination could be the opportunity of a lifetime. Unencumbered by a job, now they can go out and do what they really want.
Bingham’s pitch is sincere because he sees the encumbrance-free life as a Holy Grail—one that he has himself attained. He lives his life as a free man, “on the road 322 days a year,” and sees no need for personal entanglements.
It’s the job of Farmiga’s character, Alex, herself a beautiful but strangely available road warrior, to eventually crack Bingham’s emotional shell. But in Bingham’s case, “cracking shells” turns out to be as painful as it sounds. He allows himself to become humanized, or “grounded” in every sense of the word, but he isn’t careful to check that none of his miles have expired.
Clooney’s performance is a triumph. He’s had plenty of fun with his pretty-boy image, but for him his impeccable cool has always been a tool, and not his reason for being. This time he shows how that image, which he shares with his character, comes up short as an adult way of life. He lives his life in the not-so-great indoors and his good looks are starting to be a memory. He looks physically bruised, even slightly beaten—but his pain comes from the inside.
This is the story of a man who gets the point, who understands that he’s been terribly mistaken, but that realization comes too late. He’s still wracking up the miles when the final credits roll.
The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.
Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.
After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.
It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.
One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.
Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.
Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.
Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.
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The Bride! is now playing in theaters.
