MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN
A film review by Jon A. Webb
Copyright 1994 Jon A. Webb
MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN demonstrates that the combination of a great story, a great producer, a great director, and great actors can still produce a lousy film.
Kenneth Branagh directed and plays Dr. Frankenstein. De Niro plays the monster. Coppola produced, and he showed he can produce horror films in DRACULA. So what went wrong?
I think it's the attempt to treat an inferior, basically low-brow story with a great deal of artistic respect. All the scenes are dark and brooding. Even attempt is made to replicate the feel of the semi-industrial technology from the book. The monster is played with great sensitivity and understanding by De Niro, who brings his past experience playing despised outsiders to the role.
But the story can just not sustain this kind of dramatic intensity. Mary Shelley's book is really just a horror story, not just more, and its flavor was much better captured by earlier, far inferior in terms of production values, versions of this film. The monster is created in a fit of dark obsession; he rips up a bunch of people; and he dies with his creator in the frozen North. That's it--not all this nonsense about obsession with responsibility of the creator to society, or respect for life. That's our modern world reinterpreting her work.
I did like the one bit where De Niro delivers lines straight from Shelley's work, "And if I cannot quench one I will indulge the other." He made me see the monster in the larger context of DeNiro's other outsiders, no small feat. But most of the time DeNiro himself showed through; you get the feeling that you're watching Jake LaMotta on a really bad day, or something like that. DeNiro has just too strong a screen history to portray anything like this so seriously.
Kenneth Branagh withdraws a good deal of the credit he obtained for the brilliant HENRY V with this film. I just hope he got paid well. He doesn't have the chest of Alec Baldwin, nor enough physical presence to bring life to a role like this one.
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