A lot of people are missing the point of The Bride! because they don’t want to consider the price paid for our entertainment. This is possibly because, in service to its original concept, this barnstorming horror movie contains only two original ideas not directly lifted from other films. The first is the make-up design for the bride (Jessie Buckley), who has permanent black stains across her fingers, her tongue, most of her lips and the side of the face. The other is the presence of Pénelope Cruz, as the unheralded policewoman who quietly does all her partner’s work. This is not a complaint, because The Bride! is not actually about being a monster. It’s about being an actress, living inside a body animated by the desires of others with words not your own coming out of your mouth. Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal has gotten a big-budget revenge on Hollywood and it’s a dish very deliciously served. There are a few spoilers so be warned.
The fact that this movie is a direct attack on the whole of the movie-industrial complex is made clear in the huge dance sequence at a fancy New York party, when Frank (Christian Bale, more on whom later) and the bride somehow possess the partygoers and lead them in a wild dance. There are billions of songs to choose from, but the one selected is “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” aka the song used in the funny dance number by Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle in Mel Brooks’Young Frankenstein. The movie’s knowledge of cinematic history is also obvious from the prominent use of the surname Lupino, as in Ida Lupino, the British actress turned American director who was one of the very few women to direct movies in Hollywood in the 1950s. But the metaphor of actress-as-reinvigorated monster is obvious from the very beginning, when the spectre of Mary Shelley (also Ms. Buckley) decides to return to earth by possessing someone’s body. The body she chooses is the one belonging to the woman known as the bride, whose inability to remember her own name is a major plot point.
It’s 1936 in Chicago and the bride is at a wild dinner with some dangerous men when the possession takes place. She ends up writhing on the table with Shelley’s words, including threats to crime lord Lupino (Zlatko Burić), spewing uncontrollably out of her mouth. She is clearly not responsible for the things she is saying, but that makes no difference to the gangsters (Matthew Maher and John Magaro) who silence her by shoving her down a flight of stairs. Her death is gruesome and shown in great detail. After the fall and under the title she lies there with her body broken. What an astonishing metaphor! But the true horrors are to come.
Frankenstein, aka Frank, has come to Chicago for assistance in curing his loneliness from mad scientist Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening with a terrific performance). It so happens this murdered body is the one they choose at random for his companion. When she is revived her hair has been shocked frizzy white, but more importantly, her own memory is gone, though Shelley’s hasn’t. But that’s a problem easily solved: the mad scientist and the monster tell the bride a series of lies. The bride has no choice to believe them, because otherwise she has nothing but the orange satin dress on her back, the green tights on her legs and the red boots on her feet. (Red shoes: another metaphor and another movie about the things men do to the women they love in the name of their own glory.)
After a brace is built to enable her to walk on her broken leg, the bride and Frank sneak out to the movies. Frank is a big fan of not-Fred-Astaire Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), and after the picture allows himself to be talked into going dancing at a nearby gay bar. (Back in those days existing in public in gender-nonconforming clothing was grounds for immediate arrest or worse, so Ms. Gyllenhaal should have figured out some way other than queers in drag smoking on the street for the place to be found). But thanks to the bride’s sexuality and Frank’s ugly face a couple of men attack them, so Frank beats them to death with his bare hands in front of hundreds of witnesses, including one with a camera. It’s ugly indeed. They go on the run, stealing coins from fountains and cars wherever they can get them, but pursued across state lines by detective Jack Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his ‘secretary’ Myrna Malloy (Ms. Cruz). While the chase is on the bride also has to figure out her own voice, and what she is beyond just being a body. She cannot control what men do to her, of course. But she can control what she prefers to do about it.
The movie is ugly, with a soiled production design by Karen Murphy that teeters very closely to disgust, but this is deliberate. If this was sanitized or beautiful in any real way, or if the gore was toned down, we might focus on glamour instead of the bride’s predicament. Frank is in a predicament too of course, and Lawrence Sher’s camera also doesn’t shy away from his foul body, but here he is the mad scientist as well as the monster. Mr. Bale really was the only choice for the role; no other actor has designed his career around horrifying transformations of the body, and demonstrating how our shape controls how we’re perceived. The score by Hildur Guðnadóttir used guitars for the bride and the violins for Frank to show how they are vibrating on slightly different frequencies, and the choice of Swedish singer Fever Ray, whose musical style sounds like atonal humming electricity (complimentary), as a club singer contributes to the off-kilter vibe. Ms Buckley does jazz-hands, capital-letter ACTING as she pivots between Shelley’s manic wordplay in a British accent, and the bride’s foul, frantic frustration in a Midwestern one. It’s quite a performance that does go over the top, but Ms. Buckley needed to hold nothing back in face of the pure horror of what has been done to her. She didn’t ask for any of this rotten treatment, and deserved none of it, but whoever ever does.
The pacing isn’t great as the beats are allowed to linger a little too long, but that sense of discomfort may also well be by design. Sandy Powell’s costume designs are also things of vile beauty, and we’ll see a lot of brides at Halloween from now on. You don’t become an actress to be a conduit for people’s fantasies or self-loathing. More importantly nobody wants to be stalked, molested or worse just because they’re good-looking and good at their job. And yet these things happen, and you have to deal with them without them distorting who you are. The Bride! is too gory and sour to be much fun, but it also takes careful aim at a variety of powerful targets and hits the bullseye every time. Ms. Gyllenhaal has stood her ground and stood up for all women, in the public eye or not, who’ve had their lives and bodies stolen. It’s an incredible testament to what the movies give us, and what they cost the people who make them.
Finally, the reference to female violence through a newspaper headline saying VIOLENT FEMMES will land hard with music-appreciating viewers of a certain age.
The Bride! is now available to purchase or rent.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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