Day 20: I Am Done With Man

MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (1994)

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Starring: Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter, Ian Holm, Aidan Quinn, John Cleese

If I had to choose one word to describe this movie, it would be “big.”  Everything in this movie is big; the acting, the writing, the direction (I think this is the first movie I’ve ever seen with a love scene shot entirely with a Steadicam).  The problem is, it’s too big.  In fact, Branagh seems so preoccupied with making everything as big as possible, that he forgets the important little things, such as subtlety, nuance and most importantly, logic.  Actually, now that I think about it, “overblown” is probably a better word.

In the first ten minutes, a ship bound for the North Pole hits an iceberg.  Already, the logic is faulty, because instead of sinking like a rock, the ship simply sits there as if it’s run aground.  On this ice flow, the captain (Quinn) comes across a nearly frozen Victor Frankenstein (Branagh).  Victor starts to tell his rather unbelievable story and we flash back to Geneva, many years earlier.  As a boy, his father (Holm) takes in an orphaned girl, Elizabeth.  There is an instant connection between them, and as they grow, they fall in love.  Which is odd, considering they’re technically brother and sister.  They’re step-siblings, yes, but it’s still a bit upsetting.  After the death of his mother, Victor vows to overcome death my medical and scientific means.

All of this I just described could be a movie in itself, and yet it takes up just about ten minutes of screen time.  I give them points for moving the plot forward at a brisk pace, but there isn’t much in the way of character development.  It’s as if Branagh simply read the Cliffs Notes for the novel and decided to make a movie about it.

After Victor meets the mysterious Professor Waldman (Cleese), he begins his quest to build a man from the body parts of dead criminals and wanderers.  And we all know where this goes from here.  He reanimates the corpse, it goes crazy, kills a bunch of people, demands a mate, doesn’t get it and vows to pursue Victor to the ends of the earth.  Which is how he and the Creature end up in the frozen North Sea.

Robert De Niro plays the Creature this time out and, considering the ridiculous script, he does a pretty decent job of making it believable.  Unlike other Frankenstein films, this creature, as in the novel, is extremely verbose and well-read.  This has advantages and disadvantages.  The advantage is that there is one scene (probably the best one in the film) where the Creature confronts Victor.  He is the embodiment of Victor’s madness, and as such, has many questions that Victor simply cannot answer.  The disadvantage is that we sometimes here a distinct New York accent coming out of this supposedly European zombie.   

Everything in this movie is overdone.  The camera never sits still – there are several scenes that play out in 360-degree Steadicam, and the actors perform as if they’re on the stage.  Stage acting is a completely different animal than screen acting.  On stage, the closest person to you is about thirty feet away, so projection and movement have to be big in order to be seen.  In a film, the camera is right there so there’s no need for any stage theatrics.  It makes you look like you’re over-acting.  And everyone (except De Niro) is overacting here. 

Kenneth Branagh is a much better director than this.  His adaptations of Shakespeare are among the best ever made (his four-hour production of Hamlet is especially amazing).  But Frankenstein is a blotch on his otherwise brilliant record.  It’s campy, overdone and unbelievable.  It belongs dead.