GODS AND MONSTERS (Lions Gate) Starring: Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave. Screenplay: Bill Condon, based on the book "Father of Frankenstein" by Christopher Pram. Producers: Paul Colichman, Gregg Fienberg and Mark R. Harris. Director: Bill Condon. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, nudity, adult themes, sexual situations) Running Time: 105 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Ian McKellen -- who has already won two year-end critics' awards as of this writing -- has a sinfully great time in GODS AND MONSTERS. He stars as James Whale, the director of 1930s horror classics like FRANKENSTEIN and THE INVISIBLE MAN. When we meet him in the film, however, it is the late 1950s, a tough time to be an openly gay man even in Hollywood. Twenty years removed from his film-making peak and suffering the after-effects of a stroke, Whale has been left to putter in his Los Angeles home, accompanied by his memories and housekeeper Hannah (Lynn Redgrave). That doesn't mean he won't try to seduce the occasional film student who comes to interview him, or even new gardener Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser). Growling innuendo and wrapping his lips around a cigar that's not just a cigar, McKellen fashions Whale early on as a dirty old man with little left to embrace but his own lasciviousness.
There's no question that McKellen's work is a great time...great acting, not necessarily. It is McKellen's misfortune that GODS AND MONSTERS is the second film of 1998 in which an older gay man tries to woo a young heterosexual. The first was called LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND, and starred John Hurt as the older man. In every other way the characters are completely dissimilar -- Hurt played a timid professor who had lived his entire life as a straight husband, while McKellen takes on a flamboyant artist utterly at ease with his lifestyle. Hurt's was the more difficult role, one in which a small man confronted upheaval and potential humiliation; McKellen got a part full of punch lines and haunted recollections, the stuff actors turn into audition monologues. James Whale isn't a role that requires a great performance. It's a role that requires an _entertaining_ performance.
And entertaining it is, particularly in service of Whale's intriguing biography. That biography comes both in spoken recollections and scattered flashbacks, revealing Whale's rise from impoverished youth to soldier to stage designer to film director. Writer/director Bill Condon makes it evident that Whale's affinity for creating screen monsters was born of sympathy, one outcast giving voice and soul to other outcasts. He even makes the sly suggestion that Whale was also the father of camp, creating intentionally humorous films from horror stories as a sop to his own amused sensibilities. McKellen makes Whale far too inventive to be pathetic, yet also shows him fighting with the shadow of his former self. As Whale's mind deteriorates, he becomes an ever-sadder figure, a living relic who has begun thinking of himself in the same past tense others think of him.
But there's another character gobbling up chunks of screen time, and that's Brendan Fraser as the wrong-side-of-the-tracks gardener. Clay is set up as a kindred spirit to Whale, another outcast from a disapproving family who turns to sex when he needs to define himself. It's a solid enough performance by Fraser, but there's something trite about the entire structure of Clay's friendship with Whale, nearly as trite as Lynn Redgrave's fussy German housekeeper. It reaches the point where the story actually appears to be about Clay, which is a big mistake. McKellen's performance may not be perfect, but it's still the best thing about GODS AND MONSTERS. It's not incredibly touching, and it's not incredibly profound. It is, however, quite a lot of fun for a while. There are worse places to cast your lot than with the year's second best performance as an older gay man trying to woo a young heterosexual.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 killer Whales: 6.
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