Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
The early 90s saw quite the revival in old school horror movie monsters being dredged back up by Hollywood for what was at the time fresh new versions of popular old stories and character types. We got to see Tom Cruise play a vampire (Lestat), Jack Nicholson play a werewolf (Wolf) and Arnold Vosloo give us a respectable version of The Mummy. And yes, the two greatest, most revered horror stories of them all would also get a dusting off and redo from their original classic (yet dated) adaptations from the 1930s by Universal. The first was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a lavish yet suitably terrifying version with a top notch, top line cast and directed by Francis Ford Coppola with all of the hype that his name brought to such a high profile project. But most importantly, Gary Oldman took on a character that had already been redefined multiple times by Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and (to a lesser degree) Frank Langella and made it his own, creating a no less iconic portrayal with his hair buns and suave, Eastern European romantic posturings. The second adaptation of the OTHER revered above all horror stories would turn out to be a bit more problematic to some upon its release in 1994. At the age of 19, young Mary Shelley had attended a vacation getaway with her husband and several other members of British Victorian high society, a weekend that in and of itself would become the stuff of legend and even on its own inspire a number of other (highly fictionalized) film versions of just that one weekend alone. The gist of it was that their gracious host (legendary poet Lord Byron) had challenged all of the other guests to spend the weekend coming up with their own original horror stories to tell each other before their time together was done. Most of the other guests would descend into drunken debauchery, but young Mary would take the challenge seriously, so seriously in fact that she came up with Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus, a story that not only horrified the other guests with its outre themes, but upon publication became so influential and renowned that they couldn’t invent a movie camera fast enough 90 years later to start cranking out film adaptations starting with Thomas Edison’s 1910 silent version and rolling onto 1931 with Boris Karloff’s unforgettable performance as directed by James Whale (with left out elements from the book also making it into the equally legendary sequel) and on and on with Christopher Lee all the way up to a couple of years before this version, a TV movie that saw Randy Quaid take on the Monster role. But in 1994 when everything was set in place with Coppola again attached, he decided to produce instead while deferring the director’s chair over to Kenneth Branagh who had made and starred in several compelling Shakespeare screen adaptations and who here was also taking on the key lead role of Dr. Victor Frankenstein himself. Sadly, Coppola would later chalk this up as being one of the biggest mistakes of his filmmaking career, reportedly disagreeing constantly with Branagh on just about every aspect of the production. Branagh himself would not help matters any by later talking about the whole thing as if it were just another assignment, a paycheck job to pay the bills but that might have been more out of disdain for Coppola’s attitude than anything else, successfully keeping his creative control of the project even when Coppola tried to wrest it away from him in postproduction ostensibly wanting to do his own cut. But the biggest controversy (and selling point) of the whole thing still came down to the casting of The Creature itself (referred to as The Frankenstein Monster when played by Karloff whom unlike Lugosi’s Dracula had very few legitimate pretenders to his throne) and the almost audacious decision to go with Robert DeNiro was coupled with the pre release gimmick that no photos or footage of DeNiro in makeup would be released or seen publicly prior to the movie actually coming out, a ploy that largely worked as many flocked to the theatres just to see what DeNiro would actually LOOK like (never mind his acting) and the surprise in many ways is in seeing just how (comparatively) minimalist DeNiro was made up to look at least in comparison to Oldman as Dracula a couple of years earlier, sporting a shaved head that would evolve into a crewcut as the story went on and a intricate series of stitches and scars all over his head, face and body with the most notable part being his upper lip which comes to resemble a really funky looking cleft palette. And as for his acting? Well, while opinions may vary, this revewer is of the mind that DeNiro does remarkably well, selling both the makeup and also disappearing into the misshapen creature so much so that he succeeds in eliciting large measures of sympathy from the viewer, always remembering that The Creature (whom it can be argued doesn’t even have a soul) is not so much evil as it is more along the lines of a THING who never asked to be born, arguably the only living being who is NOT a creation of God but rather made from the insane vanity of a brilliant yet normal man and human being whom upon discovering that his creation was deformed and hideous UNLIKE what he had hoped for, just decided to turn his back on it and relegate it to the scrapheap of failed, better luck next time attempted experiments. As Branagh’s Victor heads back home to be with his wealthy family on their lavish estate filled with servants, comfort and happiness, DeNiro Creature’s agony over being rejected so harshly soon turns to rage against what is basically his literal father, coming out to the estate itself to exact a revenge against all of them that will not be pretty. A lot of screentime is devoted to showing us Victor’s family, upbringing and much of his medical school education (where he clashes early and often with his professors when it comes to his radical views on overcoming death) and it is from these scenes that much of the other big name cast members get a chance to make their mark on the proceedings. They include Ian Holm as Victor’s father, Cherie Lunghi as his mother (whose own death is the catalyst that triggers Victor’s obsession with putting an end to death once and for all, an obsession that seems to immediately end once the callow young man sees how his creation in DeNiro turned out), Tom Hulce as his medical school buddy and best friend, Aidan Quinn as the North Pole bound ship’s captain who picks up Victor in the film’s beginning which serves as the wraparound for the story being told in flashback (a character from Shelley’s book that has rarely if ever been portrayed onscreen which works well since Quinn takes charge of the film early on with his acting and his own obsessions of being the first man to reach the North Pole for the good of mankind but at the possible expense of his own crew which makes for a nice contrast with Victor’s own madness), and perhaps best of all John Cleese playing totally against type and scoring big as Victor’s medical school mentor who himself had dabbled in experiments involving bringing the dead back to life as it is obvious that Cleese took this role quite seriously and is responsible for some of the best acting scenes in the first half of the film. Then there is Helena Bonham Carter in the classically known role of Victor’s love interest and bride in Elizabeth, first meeting Victor when she as an orphaned child is adopted into the Frankenstein home (making them adopted brother and sister!) which then blossoms into full blown romance and a potential marriage into a perfect life which only pisses off DeNiro’s abandoned Creature even more (and anybody who is a fan of her work in some of Tim Burton’s more insane pieces will be happy to know that this more than fits in with the spirit of those films). Still, it is DeNiro’s dark presence that commands the screen here, whether it be through befriending and helping a poor farm family through which he only communicates with the blind grandfather (the basis for the blind man scene in Karloff’s version) or in stalking Victor’s family including one death scene almost too painful for words, the film remembers to bring on the horror in spite of Branagh’s preening or Hulce’s blubberingly over the top ass kissing routine, succeeding on that level even as some downplaying of the film’s rightful prominence (as compared to Oldman’s Dracula) has put it into a slightly more obscure position today than it probably deserves…
8/10