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Gods and Monsters
***1/2
Cinema
Releases - March 26, 1999
Rated on a 4-star
scale. USA. Written and directed by Bill Condon; based upon the novel "Father
of Frankenstein" by Christopher Bram. Starring Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser,
Lynn Redgrave, Lolita Davidovich.
It's 1957, and Mister Jimmy Whale is dying in
body and mind. Solitude expedites the deterioration, until he strikes up
a conversation with the yardman, and soon has a listener for his stories.
Nothing could be more comforting for the old man, who can talk about his
life before it ends, and maybe even make sense of it.
This is like the blind man finding the creature
in "Bride of Frankenstein", who noted "It's been a long time since anyone
came in here -- we shall be friends!" The analogy is not my own, but one
made by Bill Condon's "Gods and Monsters", a speculation on
Whale's last days, from a novel by Christopher Bram. Whale was the director
of the aforementioned horror flick, and had quite a few hits in his day,
including the first two "Frankenstein" pictures, as well as "Show Boat" and
"The Invisible Man".
When we meet up with him, though, he's a Hollywood
nobody. He had a box-office flop, you see, and that, as he tells his friend,
simply wasn't allowed. Whale is played by Sir Ian McKellen, and his young
gardener pal is named Clayton Boone, in Brendan Fraser's best performance
since the underrated "School Ties"(1992).
After being in a lonely shell for years, with
nobody but devout Catholic maid Hanna (Lynn Redgrave) to talk to, Whale sees
something in Boone which he can't quite explain, but makes him want to confide.
Perhaps he reminds the ageing homosexual of an object of desire from his
Great War days, who he never got to know well enough. Perhaps the shape of
his head, strangely similar to Whale's beloved "Frankenstein" creature, makes
Boone seem like a son figure. Perhaps he's attracted to him, or simply sees
a goodness in his eyes... whatever it is, Whale needs to tell his life story,
and Boone, who feels like his thwarted attempt at becoming a marine made
a full life impossible, needs to listen.
So Whale reminisces -- on making movies, on the
inhumanity of the trenches, on working class life back in his native Blighty
and on heavenly gay pool-parties. The film is edited like a stream of
consciousness, and it's about how life flashes before our eyes before we
die.
I went along with this style, because it's hypnotic
-- the commanding McKellen performance involves us, and then the technical
method sweeps us away inside his character's head, the thoughts of which,
he laments, are "going off in a hundred different directions". The different
directions, in memory form, explore the different facets of life -- tragedy
and success, regret and pride, passion and misery -- all wrapped up in
devastatingly wry wit.
The screenwriting and directing of Condon, who
just won an Oscar for the film, capture this balance strikingly well. The
textures and shapes of the past are created with the accuracy of a history
book, and yet the film is photographed in fresh, new, gloriously colourful
images. The performances of Condon's three leads -- McKellen, Fraser and
Redgrave -- also show skilful understanding of the delicate
tone.
My only problem with the film is that the realistic
scenes and the moments of fantasy are all edited with the same dream-like
flow. We cut away to moments of Boone and his buddies in a bar, or in his
trailer, and even when Whale isn't in the scene, it's all still put together
like the thoughts of a confused man. The result is that when we're not supposed
to feel dazzled, we still do, and an oddly incomplete feel sullies the whole
enterprise, as if scenes were smudging each other.
Still, I came close to forgiving the movie in
a beautiful final scene, where there's a nice attempt to wrap things up,
in a humorously moving way. "Gods and Monsters" is a very good film about
Tinseltown, and about people -- it may not be ready for its close-up, but
as Dr Frankenstein might say... it's alive.
COPYRIGHT© 1999 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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