Review: 'The Bride!' nearly falls to pieces, but Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley create monsters with beating hearts

After proving her directing skills with the tricky material of Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter,” writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal takes on one of the classics of literature and film — the bride of Frankenstein — in “The Bride!”, and the results are never boring.

They are a lot of things — brash, striking, perplexing, emotionally intense, often ill-conceived and narratively all over the damn place — but “boring” is not one of Gyllenhaal’s attributes.

Gyllenhaal reimagines the classic monster story as part tragic romance, part gangster drama and part, I don’t know, “Moulin Rouge” spectacle. Set in the 1930s, the story starts in Chicago with Ida (Jessie Buckley), a bar-hopping party animal who mouths off about a local gangster’s dirty dealings. So it’s no surprise that two of the gangster’s underlings (John Magaro and Matthew Maher) rough Ida up, and end up sending her tumbling to her death down some stairs.

Meanwhile, the creature sometimes called Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) has also arrived in Chicago, seeking help from Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), an acolyte of the monster’s deceased creator. Frank wants Doc to help him achieve a dream: Building a female counterpart of himself, to be his mate. Doc takes some convincing, but soon Doc and Frank are digging up a potters’ field for a corpse to reanimate — and they find what’s left of Ida.

Here, Buckley — who’s just over a week from getting an Oscar for “Hamnet” (I don’t think this movie will cause Academy voters to have a “Norbit”-style reconsideration) — plays both the bride but also Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein.” That’s meant as a cheeky nod to director James Whale’s 1935 “The Bride of Frankenstein,” where Elsa Lanchester was credited for playing Mary Shelley in the prologue, and was uncredited as the bride in her Hostess cupcake hairdo. Alas, it’s more obvious and less thought-provoking than Gyllenhaal likely intended.

The movie is littered with similar references, and you’re invited either to groove with or groan at the attempts — which include, and I kid you not, Bale and Buckley leading a musical number to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” evoking the holy memory of Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein.”

Gyllenhaal also calls in some favors. She casts her brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, as a ‘30s Hollywood movie idol who’s Frank’s idol. And she casts her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, alongside Penelope Cruz as a pair of detectives following Frank and his amnesiac Bride on a cross-country killing spree that Bonnie & Clyde would have envied.

So “The Bride!”, with its porto-feminist narrative and gimmicky pacing, throws a lot of spaghetti at the screen, and only some of it comes together as anything coherent or compelling. Thankfully, two of the most arresting parts are Bale and Buckley, who put a lot of conviction in their renditions of screendom’s most enduring monsters. For all the mismatched parts of Gyllenhaal’s fever dream, the leads are the beating heart that keep the movie alive.

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‘The Bride’

★★1/2

Opens Friday. March 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong/bloody violent content, sexual content/nudity and language. Running time: 126 minutes.