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The Bride!(2025)
Director:Maggie Gyllenhaal
It’s playing:Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Penelope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal
In the grand scheme of things, this wouldn’t rise particularly high on the injustice scale, but whenever a movie star turns director, there’s often a lot of pressure to analyze the thinking behind his creative choices simply because people think they know the minds of their movie stars better than the average movie director. After all,The Bride!director Maggie Gyllenhaal has not only been staring at our screens for several decades, reinforcing our ideas of who she is as a person through the characters she chose to play, but she has been holding magazine covers and giving interviews about her views and life for that long, much more than the average film director. So there’s a lot of emphasis on the director as auteur and more of a sense of “Why did he do THAT?” in reviews of films directed by the actor. Funny thing aboutThe Bride!that the question of the director’s choices can probably be effectively answered with “Because he thought it looked cool.”
That’s not to say Gyllenhaal had nothing to say about the film, but we had to grapple with his choices and accept how they failed to make his point. “Confusion” would be a word we would use when someone asked us to review a single wordThe Bride!
Gyllenhaal is an energetic director with a great vision and interesting ideas, who previously directed the 2021 thriller exploration of motherhood and depression.The Prodigal Daughterbut we are inclined to think that he is still a little baked in this area and needs some time to develop his skills and find out what he wants to say in his work. Last month, just after joining BKMCBabette’s Festival,Gyllenhaal was brought in to introduce the film on TCM and said a few things about it that were so wrong-headed that host Ben Mankiewicz had to back off a few times. She seemed to have an opinion about the film (mostly feminist in nature) that seemed clearly at odds with what the film actually is. We point this out not to suggest that he is dumb or unintelligent, but to note that the same problem is not seeing the film for what it is.The Bride!It’s fun, thought-provoking, and sometimes silly, but its biggest flaw is that it doesn’t seem to follow through on any of the points it’s trying to make or the clues it wants you to engage with.
Gyllenhaal apparently wants to give the previously silent bride (Elsa Lanchester didn’t utter a single word and only screamedBride of Frankenstein) word for word, but he never gives him anything to say. Ida spends the entire movie trying to figure out her name and identity and when she finds out that Frank has been lying to her the whole time,… she loves him so much and risks everything to save him? The film ends with the two undead lovers holding hands, but frankly, it would have made a lot more sense for Ida to give up and go off on her own, continuing to inspire bands of loyal women to throw off their chains. Yes, Gyllenhaal makes a point about tough women being unstoppable and how society tends to attack them violently, but her character is not only high or tough, she’s brain damaged and possessed by a ghost, which tends to undercut any message about her being tough.
We laughed when the crowd broke into “Puttin’ on the Ritz” probably a reference to the noseYoung Frankenstein? That’s right, yes. A little bit. But did we also complain because this honor seemed to come out of nowhere? And yes. This is the issue we haveThe Bride!It’s full of interesting and fun ideas and never feels like it’s fully developed. The timing of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was very much related to the tone of the film as “M0nster Mash” played over the end credits. Gyllenhaal wanted to use some of the pop culture monster references, but he didn’t seem to have anything to say about them. And it seems strange to have a Bride of Frankenstein movie set in the same decade that the first one was released, but it doesn’t refer to that movie at all. Sure, Ida’s wild mop is sort of a response to Elsa Lanchester’s high coif, but for all the fairy-tale winks beyond Frankenstein, it’s noticeable how much smaller the original Bride is in this remake.
There are more than a few instances where it feels like Gyllenhaal wanted to hang out with his friends and family while making this film, and while brother Jake and husband Peter are part of the plot, we wouldn’t call any of their characters interesting or well-characterized. Penelope Cruz looks amazing, and Maggie Gyllenhaal clearly wanted her to oppose the senseless crime of Ida, but there are very few parts with male actors to stand out and she was not a strong enough character to overcome the inevitable questions of why and why a Spanish woman could not run during the 1930s working as an American police detective. He was smart enough to give the story of Frankenstein a mad female scientist and a female police officer who wants to pursue it, but the story and Gyllenhaal’s passion for extremes get in the way of the film being the feminist statement it was designed to be. Annette Bening simply disappears from the film until she is needed at the end and Penelope Cruz seems oddly cut out of the story. Finally, the Bride! it should be seen as an interesting experiment by its filmmaker, but one that failed to live up to its original potential, and which is admittedly a good idea. More thoughts on today’s BKMC pod:
What did you guys think? Has Gyllenhaal made an effective and relevant statement for feminism?
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