Mary Shelley

Of all the moments in history to be fairly thoroughly scrutinized through the lens of film, I’m probably mostly struck by the fact that we’ve focused so heavily on the early summer night that gave birth to the literary classic Frankenstein.  (No, not the night Mary Shelley fell in love with William Shakespeare while Edgar Allan Poe declared everyone was gonna die.  That was a weird night, though.)  Indeed, back in the late 80s, there were three different interpretations of this event, debuting within a span of three years, and we’ve just recently been gifted a fourth in the form of Mary Shelley.

The story goes roughly as follows:  The Romantic poet Percy BYYYYYSSHE Shelley (don’t worry, it’s an inside joke, you wouldn’t get it, and it’s not all that funny anyhow) began a relationship with the sixteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1814, though he was still officially married to his estranged wife, the mother of their child.  Barely a year later, if that, Mary would give birth to a daughter, two months premature; the child would die soon after.  Mary fell into a great depression, but was able to recover within a few months, and a son would be born to the couple in January 1816.  That summer, Mary’s step-sister Claire, who had initiated a sexual tryst with fellow poet Lord Byron beforehand, joined the couple and their son on a trip across Europe, eventually landing with Byron in a settlement near Lake Geneva, Switzerland.  During their sojourn there, where they were also joined by Byron’s lover and physician, Dr. John William Polidori, the group undertook a writing contest to see who could fashion the best ghost story.  After a bit of writer’s block, Mary was inspired by the science of galvanism (which Polidori discussed with Percy one evening) and some dark imaginings to craft the beginnings of what would eventually form into Frankenstein.

As benign as this description sounds, much has apparently been made of that contest, and I can’t help but admit that I am genuinely in awe that four different films have covered the subject.  I can’t think of any singular bit of literary inspiration that has spawned such an outpouring of cinematic art.  As such, I figured we’d tackle all of them, culminating in the most recent.

This means we begin with 1986’s Gothic.

Gothic is the only film of the foursome to focus pretty much entirely on the contest (which is usually truncated into a single night of debauchery), and it is drenched in the characteristic feel of its director, one Ken Russell.  Russell’s known for his out there, expressionistic, and button-pushing films, most notably The Devils and Altered States, though I mostly remember him for the outlandish adaptation of The Who’s rock opera Tommy (I can never look at beans the same way again…).  Here, he is at the pinnacle of his madness, warping the artists’ night into a nightmarish descent into drug-induced insanity, replete with wild imagery and plenty of sensuality.  Basically, we watch as the wild people take copious amounts of drugs, get into plenty of sexual escapades with each other, and maybe sorta/kinda summon a demon.  It’s tough to say for sure, given the wanton craziness and the expansive imaginations involved.

In terms of characterization, we’ve got plenty of nutballs at our visual disposal.  Gabriel Byrne plays Byron as your usual egotistical libertine, making advances at actually everybody in attendance and emotionally (and occasionally physically) abusing poor Claire.  Myriam Cyr’s Claire starts off as a trainwreck of extroverted mania and only goes further into the stratosphere with her convulsions and shrieks.  I’m worried about her.  Julian Sands’s Shelley tries to match Byron, but can’t quite live up to the prototype, though his attempts are valiant; he still comes across as a hedonistic Romantic, but he’s more naive and almost childlike than Byron.  Tim Spall comes in as Polidori and plays him as a libidinous queen with some nasty fetishes and a penchant for self-harm.  Only Natasha Richardson’s Mary comes off as halfway normal, the character imbued with Richardson’s lithe style and a healthy dose of almost shy demureness; she’s definitely on an island of near-sanity (sorry, love, but you’re not gonna stay dry this e’en) in this sea of madness, but only speaking relatively.  It’s odd that such a strong-willed woman is so low-key here, but, then again, nothing’s all that normal or expected when Uncle Ken’s in control.

The sets (constructed within Gaddesden Place in Hertfordshire, which doesn’t look all that similar to the actual Swiss villa) remind me of a combination of early-90s porn sets, the settings of Derek Jarman films (I’m thinking Jubilee here, mostly), and the estate at which Prospero’s Books was filmed: it’s a mysterious amalgam of class and sleaze, the perfect milieu for a dream-like deluge of wackiness.  Plenty of just plain weird shit (cue clips from The Spirit) populates the estate, including a clockwork belly-dancing stripper, Polidori’s room’s decor (consisting of sheet-draped furniture and stuff floating in jars), and a second clockwork woman, this one able to play the keyboard (I think it’s a harpsichord, but I can’t be sure).  Throughout everything, Tom Dolby’s score creates a darkly whimsical atmosphere with the sounds you’d expect from the man arranged into a bombastic, transition-free piece of manic electronica.  The film twists and writhes through the debauched night just as obliquely and strangely as the revelers, audacious editing and angles and images and all.

Every performance gets at least one scene of rabid, over-the-top scenery devouring, and this makes the already strained narrative all the more difficult to take wholly seriously.  Indeed, I’m pretty sure that Russell didn’t want the film to be taken too seriously, opting for a harshly expressionistic take on the subject matter.  The impact of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare is palpable, not just in the film’s promotional artwork (is that meant to be Byrne’s face on the incubus…?) and in the painting’s inclusion at Byron’s villa, but also in how the visuals evoke that painting’s style and feel.  I can’t find any evidence that the painting was actually housed at this villa at that time, but, curiously, it’s included in nearly all of these films.  Sure, Mary was familiar with the artist, who infatuated her mother to the point where she tried to take her life at one point, but that tenuous connection is constantly blended with Mary’s slightly delicate psyche during this period to create a link between the phantasm on the canvas and the inspiration that would strike her.

Meanwhile, the historical narrative is twisted a bit, not just in the artists’ characterizations (I can’t find anything to support the performances of Cyr and Spall, in particular) but in the compression of time and the omission of certain “details”:  Remember how I said the Shelleys brought their son along?  Yeah, nowhere to be found, another trend line running through all of the films, and Gothic goes so far as to make the death of Mary’s premature daughter the primary motivator of her Frankenstein-spawning mental state, a clear embellishment on the part of the filmmakers.

The film is just a madcap fever dream in and of itself.  Just as with Tommy, I can’t exactly recommend it to anyone, but I also can’t straight-out warn people away from it, either.  It’s certainly something to behold, but whether or not you would actually wanna do that is up to you and your own constitution.

Two years after Gothic went mad all over audiences, an adaptation was made of Anne Edwards’s 1972 novel Haunted Summer.

I knew I was in for a treat with this one from the get-go, as the opening credits were preceded by the Cannon logo.  You mean to tell me that Golan and Globus made a costume drama biopic?  Oh, let’s go!  Even better, the cast became apparent to me:  We are gifted the worst possible choice for Percy Shelley in the form of Eric “I Almost Ruined Back to the Future by Nearly Being Cast as Marty McFly” Stoltz, whose British accent here is absolutely atrocious, and whose understated extroversion doesn’t quite fit the Shelley we know and love; then we have a young Laura Dern, hot off of Blue Velvet, but her talents are not aimed at Mary, but rather at Claire, who continues her wild and libidinous ways here; and, best of all, our Dr. Polidori is played by none other than Alex Winter, more famous for his role as the young William S. Preston in the seminal Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and looking very much that part, just with a fancy coat and a top hat on that curly blonde ‘fro.  What is even going on?  Alex Krige and Philip Anglim are fine as Mary and Byron, respectively, but they at least feel at home here, unlike the rest of this motley crew (so tempted to use umlauts and such there…).

The production values here seem slightly higher than Gothic‘s, quite the feat for a Cannon flick, but it still comes off as kinda cheap.  The Italian countryside (masquerading as Switzerland) is indeed quite lovely, but Giuseppe Rotunno’s cinematography is captured so lackadaisically and on such cheap film stock that it renders the beauty just as lame and banal as the melodrama unfolding amidst it.  Aside from the return of Fuseli’s painting, the main thing this version shares with Gothic is the insistence on the primacy of sex and madness amongst the crew.  Indeed, the filmmakers (or possibly Anne Edwards) took a lewd rumor from Gothic, namely that Percy, Mary, and Claire not only lived and traveled together but also engaged in a passionate semi-incestuous threesome, very seriously, depicting the insanely apocryphal-at-best act in the film’s second scene (though the following scene, where Percy bids them both bathe with him in a stream, did actually happen).  Sure, Percy and Claire were indeed lovers, no stretch for Percy and his free-love philosophies, but this only made Mary all the more jealous and indignant, as, although she shared Percy’s libertine beliefs in theory, in practice she only had eyes for him.  Yet the film still somehow has more balls than Russell, simultaneously both literally and figuratively, in that it’s brave enough to show us full-frontal male nudity, whereas Russell held back and only really gave us some bare breasts (and a fake vagina, but I don’t count that one), but all this really results in is my being able to say that I’ve seen Eric Stoltz’s junk.  Hooray.

Meanwhile, apart from Claire, the characters are all much more down-to-Earth, with Anglim’s Byron and Winter’s Polidori looking downright placid compared to Byrne and Spall.  Mary remains the quiet, reserved character, once again renouncing much of the drive and agency she’s famous for in favor of painting her as the dark, brooding loner who actually accomplishes something.  The hallucinations she experiences are relatively mild, lacking in any style whatsoever and containing some truly lazy and uninspired makeup effects.  Moreover, the hallucinations are attributed here more to inherent madness than the drug use, both repudiating and continuing Gothic‘s messages, even if the madness and depression alluded to in both films is likely an overstatement of Mary’s mental state at the time.

Haunted Summer feels cheaper and less involved than Gothic, even if it looks at a broader picture, encompassing both the crazy contest night (yeah, I’m just gonna say the contest comprised the one night, rather than the actual several, if for no other reason than to make it easier to talk about it as a singular event) as well as some surrounding bits to give it some extra context.  It just lacks any oomph whatsoever, and the only fun to be had with it is in the sheer audacity of the casting.

The same cannot be said of the other film tackling the subject that very same year, the Spanish production known Stateside as Rowing with the Wind.

We’re in more traditional art-house territory here (sorta), unlike the more avant-garde area Ken Russell called home.  The transfer I watched is pretty rough, plenty of film scratches and blights throughout, but beneath the beleaguered surface is some very lovely cinematography from Carlos Suárez (whom I mostly know from his work on the misguided Dagon).  Turns out the director and editor also liked his photography, ’cause we’re treated to a whole heckuva lot of it at the beginning, for five long minutes as the opening credits roll.  A good amount of sea-borne ice and whatnot, but little in the way of interest.  Once things get going, we get a high-class soap opera version our now-familiar story, with Lizzy McInnerny as our new Mary Godwin/Shelley, Valentine Pelka as our new Percy, Hugh Grant as our new Byron, José Luis Gómez as our new Polidori, and a young Liz Hurley as our new Claire in only her second film role.  In all honesty, Grant probably looks the most like Byron from some of the portraits I’ve seen (I think Richardson was the most representative Mary and Sands mostly resembled the historical Percy (if we’re being really kind to the poet), for the record), and his typical Hugh Grant bundle of affectations definitely grounds the character in reality and believability more than the other actors thus far.

Here, the villa scene in all its frivolity and circumstance is a smaller part of the larger narrative of Mary’s life and career, but it remains a central plot point.  Indeed, the film makes that night the moment when a curse fell upon the clique, not unlike the “possession” featured in Gothic, that eventually led to the untimely deaths of most of the members and several other people in their lives.  This contest night is pretty damn sedate, albeit with a bit of drinking and whatnot, but nothing too salacious at all.  The rest of the film plays out straightforwardly and mildly melodramatically, presenting pretty much any death close to the characters as tragic and potentially cursed, regardless of pre-existing mental conditions or, y’know, the damn war for Greek independence (in which Byron would eventually fall).

The monster here, before starring in her debut novel, appears to Mary as a deformed version of Percy (it’s basically Pelka made up to look like the monster, not looking all that dissimilar to de Niro in Branagh’s 1994 adaptation), but otherwise lacking any other stylistic flourish.  Once again, the monster represents, to a degree at least, a manifestation of Mary’s inner turmoil and madness, something she clearly would have to be brimming with in order to write something as out there as Frankenstein, these films would have you believe.  Can’t just like ghost stories and be interested in galvanist reanimation, I guess.

What stands out about Rowing, aside from the lush photography, is the fact that Mary, for once, is not outshone by her fellow artistes.  McInnerny finally gives the character a measure of her drive and agency sorely missing from the previous two films, even if it’s a restrained version of how I picture the historical Mrs. Shelley.  Also noteworthy was the decision to clothe Hurley in a man’s waistcoat and breeches, a decision I wholeheartedly support.  More than that, Hurley’s Claire actually seems sane here, if a bit on the flamboyant and exuberant side, and her relationship with Byron doesn’t seem nearly as abusive and manipulative as it was in Gothic and Haunted Summer, though it’s still certainly nowhere near normal.  (Fun side note: it was during the production of this film that Hurley and Grant first met, beginning a thirteen-year relationship.)

In the end, though, as good as it looks and as solid as the characterizations are, the production is just kinda flat for me.  There’s not much in the way of style, everyone acts fairly normally, and there’s a distinctive lack of overall drive to narrative, as though everything is done just to do it, to get the story told, not wanting to do anything more.  It’s a fine flick, but nothing to go searching for unless you really wanna see Grant’s full filmography (or catch a glimpse of Hurley absolutely rocking that coat!).

And, funnily enough, I have similar criticisms for our newest offering, the simply-titled Mary Shelley.

This time out, we’ve got Elle Fanning as Mary, Douglas Booth as Percy, Tom Sturridge as Byron, Bel Powley as Claire, and Ben Hardy as Polidori.  What sets this film apart from the other three is the scope: not only do we get more backstory here than anywhere, we’re actually allowed to see the creation of Frankenstein through to its publication, even mentioning the second edition that finally credited Mary as the author (the novel was originally published anonymously, FYI).  The focus, though, isn’t really on the novel or the night that inspired it, but rather the burgeoning love and slightly tempestuous relationship between Mary and Percy, something to which the filmmakers attribute much more of the novel’s true inspiration.

Indeed, we start out with the young Mary at home, increasingly coming to verbal (and even physical) blows with her stepmother, a nice bit of history added in; this film’s treatment of history is gonna be very uneven, though, fair warning.  We then follow her to Scotland, where she stays with friends of the Godwin family and ultimately meets Percy.  We’re introduced to the young poet (reminder: he’s twenty-one here, she’s sixteen, and it was a different time) in a literal blazon of low sunlight, a hero sauntering toward his unknown destiny.  For what it’s worth, the cinematography of David Ungaro (I’ve only seen his work in the non-musical adaptation of Les Miserables before this, and he’s definitely stepped it up here) is very nice, with some lovingly soft edges and vaguely moody feel (both reminiscent of Philippe le Sourd’s work in the recent remake of The Beguiled), though the overall color scheme is somehow more overcast than the stereotypical depiction of the UK in the States.  More palpable, though, is the influence of supervising art director Nigel Pollock, whose work on ’71, Free Fire, and The Lost City of Z made those films really pop and feel both alive and lived-in, and those descriptors apply here as well.  Fuseli’s Nightmare is back, if anyone cares anymore, though we’re finally treated to the explanation of the painting’s connection to Mary and her family.  And, like the strange, uncalled-for Jethro Tull hate in Gilmore Girls, the film straight out defames Coleridge, something I cannot abide by, kids, I just can’t, especially from that hack Percy Shelley.

Ahem.

So we see Percy sweep Mary off her feet, leading to a confrontation with her father, who doesn’t approve of the pair’s living situation – what with Percy still being married and neglecting his child – and basically kicks Mary out of the house, Claire following for the seeming rush of it.  They live together, a baby is born, it dies, they head to Switzerland with Byron, the contest goes on, Mary comes up with a great idea, she and Percy fight a bit, and Mary’s left dejected and feeling alone, which propels her to finally fully put pen to paper and write her novel.  Then we get a bit of her being rejected by many publishers due to the outrageous nature of the novel’s subject material and the evanescent nature of Percy’s input (I’m not sure how much of the former is historically accurate, but the latter certainly was, the mystery of the book’s authorship buoyed both by Percy’s fame and the inclusion of a preface written in his hand), before she finally gets the credit she deserves.  Throughout, Mary is given the boldness bequeathed her from her strong-willed mother, and she often goes off on tirades about gender and philosophy and whatnot, providing all of the characterization mostly missing from the previous three films.  She’s often downright savage with her wit, especially in times of pain and anger, landing harsh one-liners on any who dare step to her.

Another welcome addition is the character of Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a man who in real life became one of Mary’s closest friends and confidants, especially after Percy’s untimely death, but who has yet to show up on film.  He’s introduced in much the same way he was in reality, as a potential lover for Mary – a sort of balance for Percy taking Claire as a side piece – who gets shot down, but he sadly doesn’t come back, the friend role being filled later on by Polidori, of all people.  Indeed, this is the Polidori we see everywhere but Gothic, learned, capable, and noble, but even more so than ever before, really standing as a foil for the more boisterous Byron.  Sturridge’s Byron is also more restrained than usual, much like Grant’s, but he does let himself give into the fun of the role, breaking out in exuberant display on occasion, in case we forgot he’s a little off his rocker.  Similarly, Powley, fresh off her work in Wildling, does well with Claire, bringing her out of the clouds and showing off her manipulative and attention-seeking ways without overdoing anything.  And while Fanning does some damn solid work, and it was insanely welcome to have her in a role that didn’t involve every other character telling me she’s the most beautiful woman on Earth (it happens more than you think, believe you me), her strained accent grows tiresome, especially with her unique affectation.

Though director Haifaa Al-Mansour (who also contributed to Emma Jensen’s solid script) does some great work here, crafting the most ideologically coherent film of the bunch, there are some major issues.  Most glaring is the twisting of the historical timeline.  Just like the other three films we’ve discussed here, the Shelleys’ infant son is nowhere to be found, an omission I find to be more of a matter of convenience than anything, though it’s odd that no one’s included the tyke.  Further, the film attributes their first daughter’s death to one of the couple’s occasional retreats from creditors, this time in the rain, but this dramatic version of events never happened: the child merely died one night without major provocation.  Worse, though, before the group disbands from Lake Geneva, Percy gets word that his wife has committed suicide by drowning, spurring some drama between the young lovers that spirals into something deep and affecting.  Thing is, this news didn’t reach them until months later.  For once, the mangling of the timeline has a purpose, though, in that everything is funneled into the thesis that the couple’s emotionally-rankling love affair was more of an inspiration and impetus for Frankenstein‘s creation than any sort of inner demons or depression over the death of her daughter.  This is an interesting idea, one that places agency square into her hands and makes the novel more of a repudiation of emptiness and loneliness and abandonment than anything else.  I’m not sure I buy this interpretation, especially with the fact that history played out differently, but it’s certainly more intriguing and involved than the surface-level armchair psychoanalysis of the other films.

The ultimate downfall of Mary Shelley, though, is the overly dramatic tone and general sense of dullness pervading the film.  Every event is imbued with a sense of enhanced gravitas, regardless of whether or not it deserves it, yet the stakes are so individualized and interpretive that the plot fails on its own merits, relying on the philosophical questions raised to carry things along.  Again, it’s interesting, but still mostly dull and lifeless.  It’s worth a watch, but it’s nothing to get excited about.

So, yeah, despite the fact that four whole films have been made about the genesis of Frankenstein, none of them are all that great.  Each brings something to the table, and we get some interesting depictions of historical literati, but nothing stands out as excellent.  In fact, the only real common threads are the behavior of Byron, the inaccurate lack of a son at the villa, and the presence of The Nightmare.  Oh, and the cast and concept, I guess.  It’s just really strange to me that this event sparked a handful of mediocre films, all with different takes on the subject and different styles.  Gotta hand it to today’s artists, they’re just as active as those in the Romantic Period, and just as beholden to odd grasps of history.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, I s’pose.

Bon nuit, kids, bon nuit to you all.