Few films try as hard to be disastrous as Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride!

In the opening scene of Richard Linklater's Blue Moon, the writer Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), nearing his artistic decline, melancholic and a little drunk, harshly criticizes punctuation marks in titles. He says that no work with a question mark in the title is worth our time and considers the use of an emphatic exclamation mark so disqualifying that it already says everything there is to say about the work. How many times have I thought of that exact scene while watching The Bride!, so much so that I found myself nodding in the dark of the theater: not because I agreed with any of Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial choices in her second film as a director (quite the opposite), but because with her disastrous film, she somehow made Linklater's protagonist more brilliant and ingenious.

The Ghost of Mary Shelley and Her Bride

It's challenging even to explain in words how wrong The Bride! is, also because it's rare to see a film start with such a wrong tone, be spectacularly off-key from the beginning, and then head with great conviction in the opposite direction of what could save it. First of all, because, however fascinating, the plot of The Bride! makes no sense whatsoever. Jessie Buckley is Mary Shelley, a writer trapped in a black and white limbo, like a ghost, made caustic and fierce by this inexplicable (and unexplained) captivity.

 
Somehow she realizes she can possess the body of Ida (also Jessie Buckley), an escort stuck in a boring dinner among tipsy and excited men making bad jokes in 1930s Chicago (why that specific moment, that city, and that woman? It's not explained). The possession of Ida is already a half-disaster in itself: Shelley proceeds with little grace and carelessness to get her killed, essentially, by making her loudly speak burning truths about the most powerful local mob boss, Lupino, all seasoned with long litanies of literary adjectives about the condition of women. From a revolutionary feminist trapped in a limbo, one would at least expect her not to endanger a sister in struggle.

A (Bad) Family Affair

And instead, of course, exactly this happens, even if the film doesn't even have the courage to let Ida be killed, who dies in a sort of ruinous fall down the stairs. A convenient death, because sitting in the theater we know that Christian Bale's Monster will arrive, afflicted by loneliness and determined to ask an eccentric scientist to reanimate a female corpse for him. Poor Annette Bening, stuck in this senseless role (she's a female character, so she makes a stupid and poorly explained choice with conviction rather than being labeled “bad”), brings Ida back to life, but she doesn't remember her past.
Her Frank(enstein) tells her she was his bride, and the two begin to wander the East Coast of the United States, while the press incites panic about the murders committed by the Monster and his bride.

In the background, there are other stories, which will serve to give some meaning to Ida's story and the director's relatives: the Monster has a fixation on the actor Ronnie Reed (entrusted by Maggie to her brother Jake Gyllenhaal, who perhaps fares better than all the others), Ida is pursued by a corrupt policeman (entrusted to Maggie's husband, Peter Sarsgaard), who is “assisted” by a brilliant and elegant detective played by Penelope Cruz (so charming and convincing that the film simply doesn't deserve her). It's extraordinary how a film that has access — through family ties or money — to such important names still manages to be heavy and incredibly boring. In fact: if the exodus from the theater isn't total, it's because Jessie Buckley succeeds in the remarkable feat of holding her own against her director's terrible choices.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! Delivers a Cinematic Disaster Without Redemption

The Italian viewer, moreover, due to dubbing, will lose part of the linguistic play at the heart of the film, which claims not only in its plot but also in its lexicon a deep connection with the MeToo movement. It embraces (excuse the pun) the vision of a reality in which women's existence is constantly endangered by men who want them dead, who want them submissive, who love them, yes, but in a possessive and destructive way. There's a scene where the women of New York rebel, inspired by the bride, unleashing their anger, destroying shop windows and cars, shouting “Me Too! Me too! Me too!” Because yes, The Bride! wields its messages like blunt objects to bludgeon the viewer.

In essence, the film is right, but it makes such a shouted, fragmented, empty discourse beyond its anger and revolutionary pose that it gives a powerful weapon to the misogynists out there who think women are inferior to men even behind a camera. Unfortunately, Maggie Gyllenhaal gives them an extraordinary argument, because it had been years since such a spectacularly derailed adaptation of a great novel was seen: Del Toro with his Frankenstein, by comparison, seems like a luminary. Perhaps to find such a catastrophically unsuccessful film, one has to go back to The Mummy with Tom Cruise, which had different ambitions and, at least, was entertaining. The Bride!, on the other hand, wallows in its wordplay that the Italian audience watching the dubbed version will not perceive (in this case being spared the insistent use of “revolted” as a double meaning: disgusted but also rebellious).

However, the disjointed and clumsy flight of the two monstrous protagonists will remain, screaming like mad for no specific reason, because Gyllenhaal wants to give us radical, rule-breaking characters, but she completely misunderstands what makes an outcast a loose cannon, an anarchic idea: her bride is a bad copy of Todd Phillips' already bad Joker and rivals its second chapter for the worst final result: another Folie à Deux that, as viewers used as guinea pigs, we did not deserve.