CINEMA: Digby Ricci
WITH all due respect to devotees of horror fiction and over-ingenious theorists, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an intermittently profound potboiler, not a literary masterpiece. It staggers beneath the weight of tedious digressions (most notably, the absurd saga of the ”sweet Arabian”, Safie), ponderous moralising, and a host of improbabilities excessive even for the Gothic genre (one cannot refrain from chuckling over the newly literate monster’s pontificating about Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and The Sorrows of Werther).
The novel’s lasting power and appeal reside, of course, in two remarkable creations: the Faustian ”modern Prometheus”, Victor Frankenstein, who, like Milton’s Satan, aspires to omnipotence, only to be ”chained in an eternal hell” of guilt and despair, and the ”uncouth and distorted” monster, who cherishes ”transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness”, only to be driven by persecution to commit deeds of degraded savagery.
Any adaptation of such familiar and uneven material risks inspiring guffaws instead of the required pity and terror. Director/star Kenneth Branagh was wise to rejoice in the novel’s flamboyance, and to insist that his version have an epic quality, offering the ”sort of extremes that a gripping fairy tale can have”.
Branagh and his production designer, Tim Harvey, achieve some astonishing pictorial contrasts, ideal for their hyperbolic material. The Frankenstein mansion’s imposing ochre facade suggests the beauty and order of an Age of Reason, but it contains an immense, precipitous staircase, site of tragedy and confrontation.
Empty, Frankenstein’s attic is spacious and sun- streaked, filled with his ”materials” — which innclude a copper sarcophagus, lightning rods, and human remains — it becomes a labyrinthine, nightmarish symbol of scientific inquiry turned demented.
Far less successful are the attempts by scriptwriters, Steph Lady and Frank Darabont, to invest Gothic excesses with psychological ”plausibility”. Explaining Frankenstein’s ”mad enthusiasm” in terms of grief over his mother’s agonising death in childbirth (in the novel, she expires ”calmly” of scarlet fever) seems clodhoppingly Freudian, and to turn the ”celestial” Elizabeth into a bosom-heaving hoyden is simply ludicrous. The fact that Helena Bonham Carter plays Elizabeth as a marmoset in hoopskirts simply increases the catastrophe. Indeed, laden with jarring Americanisms (”Must we lay down on the ice and die?”) and Mills and Boon declarations (”I want you so much!”), Lady and Darabont’s screenplay is a noisome albatross around the neck of a potentially excellent film.
Frankenstein’s performances also vary considerably. Tom Hulce is unusually touching and restrained as Clerval, and Richard Briers is wrenchingly good as the compassionate, blind old cottager. Robert de Niro’s monster, more scarred, embittered martyr than lurching creature, is effectively pitiful, but not at all menacing — a mistaken simplification.
Authentically fanatical and distraught, Branagh is an impressive Victor, but his engaging blend of Cagneyesque strength and Olivier-like mellifluousness seem rather wasted on a poorly written role. In comparison with Branagh’s incomparable Shakespearean adaptations, Frankenstein must be classified as a disappointment.
Always entertaining, occasionally affecting, it somehow never achieves the grandeur that such bizarrely captivating material sorely needs.