Dead
on the Table:
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Interview with the Vampire |
DIRECTOR
Kenneth
Branagh
SCREENWRITERS
Steph
Lady
Frank Darabont
based
on the novel by
Mary
Shelley
PRODUCERS
Francis Ford Coppola
James V. Hart
John Veitch
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Roger Pratt
MUSIC
Patrick Doyle
EDITOR
Andrew Marcus
CAST
Robert De Niro (The Creature)
Kenneth Branagh (Victor Frankenstein)
Tom Hulce (Henry Clerval)
Helena Bonham Carter (Elizabeth)
Aidan Quinn (Ship Captain Walton)
Ian Holm (Baron Frankenstein)
Richard Briers (Grandfather)
John Cleese (Dr. Waldeman)
Robert Hardy (Professor Krempe)
Cherie Lunghi (Victor's Mother)
Trevyn McDowell (Justine)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 123m
U.S. release: November 4, 1994
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Kenneth
Branagh films
reviewed on this website:
- Hamlet
(1996)
DIRECTOR
Neil
Jordan
SCREENWRITER
Anne
Rice
based
on her novel
PRODUCERS
David Geffen
Stephen Woolley
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Philippe Rousselot
MUSIC
Elliot Goldenthal
EDITORS
Mick Audsley
Joke van Wijk
CAST
Tom Cruise (Lestat)
Brad Pitt (Louis)
Kirsten Dunst (Claudia)
Stephen Rea (Santiago)
Antonio Banderas (Armand)
Christian Slater (Daniel Malloy)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 123m
U.S. release: November 11, 1994
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Neil
Jordan films
reviewed on this website:
- The
Butcher Boy
- In
Dreams
- Michael
Collins
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The brash young actor-director
Kenneth Branagh came to us steeped in the finely calibrated traditions
of Shakespeare and the BBC, but he smuggled something else in
with him: a hearty vibrancy that told us he wasn't about to be
a stuffy bore. He would entertain us, try on different hats,
open up the great plays to the masses. Not yet thirty when his
debut film, Henry V, was released, Branagh already revealed
a puppyish appetite for melodramatic excess. Like Henry, Branagh
was a whippersnapper whose enthusiasm and confidence made up
for his perceived callowness. Well, nothing succeeds like excess,
and Branagh followed it up with the enjoyably ludicrous (or ludicrously
enjoyable) Dead Again, and now he has followed Much
Ado About Nothing with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
which is only ludicrous.
The same virus that infected Lawrence Kasdan (Wyatt Earp),
Gus Van Sant (Even
Cowgirls Get the Blues), and Rob Reiner (North)
now appears to have struck Kenneth Branagh, the latest in a long
line of gifted directors this year who have stepped with both
feet into cow flop. This Frankenstein is hollowly energetic,
a frantic aria of off-key notes. Branagh pumps up the material
and lays on the cheesy mad-lab electricity; he encourages the
sort of aggressive overacting that wouldn't be offensive if the
director didn't encourage himself above all. He plays Victor
Frankenstein, and he's always fervent about something; you fear
that if you leave your seat to hit the bathroom, his eyes will
burn resentful dime-sized holes in your back. Fashionably long-haired,
Branagh goes shirtless during the key monster-making sequence,
a detail Mary Shelley somehow overlooked. This is far from a
class act, despite the credentials and hard labor of its international
cast. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is largely awful, and
in this case I'm reasonably sure the box office will bear me
out: The storytelling is simply too fractured and thin to involve
an audience.
This Frankenstein supposedly sticks closer to the novel
than did previous screen versions. But just as Bram
Stoker's Dracula was really Francis Coppola's Dracula,
so Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is really Kenneth Branagh's
Frankenstein. Its overwrought penny-dreadfulness violates
the tone of Shelley's work, a stately meditation on death and
rebirth that's a bit of a chore to get through (I've tried several
times). The original story is rich in melodrama, and Branagh
latches onto the anecdotes that most film versions have ignored,
such as the housekeeper Justine's being hanged for the murder
of Victor's little half-brother. Branagh stages it as a raging
Tale of Two Cities mob scene, complete with the poor woman's
body plummeting and then being jerked back up on the rope.
I will give Branagh credit for having the sense to include the
novel's most horrifying line -- "I will be with you on your
wedding night." But generally he flails so hard to keep
us interested in the story that he never lets it breathe (and
loses our interest that way). Trying for fidelity to Shelley's
epistolary narrative and structure, Branagh spreads out a lifeless
first half hour -- the movie takes forever and a day to get going
-- and frames the story aboard a landlocked ship, with the dying
Victor telling his tragic tale to Captain Walton (Aidan Quinn).
This captain, like Victor, is afflicted with hubris; he thinks
he can chart a new route to the North Pole, or something along
those lines. The framing sequence is actually an excuse for Branagh
to outdo Moby Dick and The Bounty and every other
movie featuring masts crashing to the deck.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is destined to be a camp classic,
right down to the daffy finale, a Re-Animator swipe in
which Victor finds another use for his dead wife/half-sister
Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter, who's done so many period movies
that her forehead should be stamped "Property of Merchant
Ivory"). This climax certainly doesn't come from Shelley,
but by then who cares? The movie is already bad; it might as
well get worse in a big way. Adding to the unintentional fun
is Robert De Niro, who manages a sometimes affecting performance
as the Creature despite being utterly miscast. The Creature (or
monster, or whatever you want to call him) isn't as flexible
an archetype as, say, Dracula, who has been successfully interpreted
by such wildly disparate actors as Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee,
Jack Palance, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman, and (oh, what the
hell) George Hamilton. After Boris Karloff (whose monosyllabic
reading of the monster has endured even though it's the polar
opposite of Shelley's eloquent Creature) and perhaps Peter Boyle's
comic riff on Karloff, what other actor has made the Creature
his own? If you're going to do it by the book, you need a physically
imposing man who yet can take off, convincingly, into florid
philosophical soliloquies on the injustice of his existence.
The Creature is Man, roughly assembled and plopped down naked
into a chaotic world, railing against God the Creator. For all
his talent, De Niro is more comfortable handling a gun than handling
Miltonian pronouncements. He's best in his quiet, yearning moments,
when he has the pathos of a roadkill Chaplin (the make-up whizzes
on this movie kept busy). But when he attempts to fit his GoodFella
accent around such lines as "Who are these people of whom
I am composed?" you just cringe. He's like Harvey Keitel's
Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ yelling "Yer
no better than da Romans! Yer woise than dem!"
Like Victor, Kenneth Branagh puts a lot of sweat and energy into
animating this stitched-up creation, but on just about every
level the movie is deeply foolish. Surprisingly, the one actor
who doesn't succumb to the general histrionics is John Cleese,
who, as Victor's twisted mentor, gives what I believe is his
first serious movie performance. You look at his wormy face and
gaunt Victorian body and you wonder what Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
would have been like if Cleese had played the Creature. Or directed
the film, or done the whole thing as an absurdist Monty Python
sketch -- whatever. For a few minutes, though, Cleese breaks
through the static and ego to gift us with the cracked decorum
and restrained madness -- and above all, the spookiness
-- that the rest of this overamped movie sorely lacks.
Branagh's
competition this season, Interview with the Vampire, is
much more successful (and for once, its box-office returns bear
out its superiority). Anne Rice's novel (she also did the script)
was a three-way cult item -- a book that appealed to horror fans,
women, and gay men (each group sees something different in the
story) -- and the movie should satisfy all three. Director Neil
Jordan, who has a flair for dark enchantment (particularly in
The Company of Wolves), perfectly captures the threatening
beauty of New Orleans after midnight. The movie draws you in
and enfolds you in a thick fog of menace. Jordan is a master
of poetic, deceptive atmosphere. At the same time, he isn't afraid
to break the spell with a shocking image or a dash of morbid
slapstick.
You're probably sick of hearing about the Tom Cruise two-step:
Everyone, including Rice, questioned his ability to play Lestat,
the sardonic, sadistic, sophisticated vampire; then everyone,
including Rice, did an about-face and said, Hey, he ain't too
shabby. I'd go further. This is perhaps Cruise's best work since
Born on the Fourth of July, and not just because he plays
a villain. The qualities that Cruise's detractors most resent
-- his air of self-satisfaction, his chiselled physical perfection
-- are just right for Lestat. He's an American Lestat,
just as the other major role is filled by an American, and I
hardly think this should be the movie that turns us into
purists demanding that French characters be played by French
actors. This is not, after all, Napoleon -- he's a fictional
character in a vampire movie. It's an enormously entertaining
performance, even if Cruise sounds dubbed some of the time. He's
such an evil sprite that the movie inevitably loses steam when
he's not around. But Jordan keeps the images coming.
Rice's idea was to tell the story through the eyes of a more
"innocent" vampire -- Louis (Brad Pitt), a depressed
young man who can't accept the bottom line of vampirism. (Killing
people is in the job description.) Louis forms a fatherly bond
with Claudia (Kirsten Dunst in a chilling performance), the little
girl he initiates into vampirism. Together, they flee to Paris,
the setting for the film's widely ridiculed but, I think, most
upsetting sequence. The two stumble upon some sort of vampire
theater group -- Rice's metaphor, maybe, for gays in the arts:
hounded, misunderstood people of the night, who transform their
skill at hiding their identities into the art of performance.
(Of course, the vampires-as-gays metaphor probably isn't meant
to be pushed too far; readers will plug into what's emotionally
relevant to them, and disregard literal-minded details.) The
vampire performers stage a show in which they murder and drain
a nude, terrified woman before a sickened audience (which thinks
it's all fake, part of the show). Throughout the movie, Jordan
has toyed with our expectations: He knows we want to see blood
sucked -- that's been the appeal of vampire movies since Murnau
-- but he brings out the cruelty of the act, the horror of a
woman looking down to see a crimson stain spreading across her
breast where Lestat has chomped her. In the theater sequence,
Jordan forces us to question what we've been enjoying as bloody
entertainment. The woman is sacrificed for our voyeuristic sins.
Interview with the Vampire could be a little tighter.
The seemingly indestructible Lestat keeps popping up in various
stages of decay, and Jordan doesn't do enough with the vampiric
code that states Thou Shalt Not Kill Fellow Vampires: Why are
Louis and Claudia punished for killing Lestat, who never stays
dead anyway? We spend most of our time with Louis, which is unfortunate,
since Brad Pitt plays him as a sullen party-pooper. (Maybe that's
the trap of the character. One can't help noticing that Rice's
subsequent books in the Vampire Chronicles focus on Lestat, not
Louis.) And I hated the end-titles music: Guns 'n' Roses covering
"Sympathy for the Devil." If any rock star is a soulmate
to Lestat, it's Mick Jagger, and Jordan should have stuck with
the Stones original. Otherwise, Interview is a rarity:
an elegant, truly unsettling horror film in a mostly toothless
period for American movies.
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